This will be quick. And not pretty.
It seems that Mark Twain, among his many other gifts, may have been something of a seer.
While perusing a collection titled The Bible According To Mark Twain (a tome primarily devoted to excoriating the god of Abraham), I came across an unpublished piece of Twain's, written in 1901, that seems, at least from a certain bleak perspective, to perfectly encapsulate the state of the nation, as we prepare to ease from the reigns of George I, Clinton I, and George II, into that of Clinton II.
Twain's text below the fold:
(Update: at least one good Kossack, a companero, but currently, apparently, a perhaps-hypersensitive Clinton II devotee, discloses in the comments below that s/he believes that Twain's use of the word "she," in the following text, denotes Clinton II. It does not. Twain had no way of knowing--though seer he may'd be--that such a personage as Clinton II would ever play a part in this nation's history. No, Twain is, below, in using the pronoun "she," referring instead to those words immediately preceding: "the Great Republic." After the fashion, now gone out of fashion, of referring to such entities as ships and nations as feminine.)
But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on, the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket. From showily and sumptuously entertaining neighboring titled aristocracies, and from trading their daughters to them, the plutocrats came in the course of time to hunger for titles and heredities themselves. The drift toward monarchy, in some form or other, began; it was spoken of in whispers at first, later in a bolder voice.
Thoughts?