Living our daily lives in the carnage of ignorance that is trumpeted, applauded, and in fact actually revered by some of the media, dealing with the daily consequences of the thirty year mind-fuck that has been accomplished on the American Public, I have to ask a simple question:
Does 50% of this Country really believe the rest of the world even exists?
And no, I don't mean on some vague level where they heard about this place called "somewhere else", but I mean in the sense that they would bet their house, their car, the family jewels, and their daughter's virginity...against a small sack of dirt...that the rest of the world is a real place and then sleep comfortably on the outcome of the wager.
Because I can not escape the conclusion that to explain our current state of national discourse, 50% of my countrymen must not really believe the rest of the world even exists.
Because I am confused. We actually have real live media pundits and political leaders shitting kittens because someone from the Government had the temerity to suggest that we might toss a few carrots on their little pudge-ball's school lunch plate, and they are now screaming that this is the equivalent of Maoist re-education camps.
I mean, I guess having the free market decide what children should eat at school is one point of view, and probably has merit if you are comfortable with the good people at Hostess Snack Cakes determining your kid's ideal weight: "Why a strapping young 5' 2" buck like little Jimmy could go 275-280 easy. The lad obviously has big bones...have another Twinkie, son"
But how can you have this point of view when the rest of the industrialized world actually feeds their children healthy food at school? And as a result Social Democracies elsewhere raise children whose shadows don't cross time zones.
Maybe that is why we suck at soccer: The fucking ball just can't escape the gravitational pull of our little plumpers.
But then...does soccer really exist?
So the first question for the xenophobes is: How can you reject the notion that government should provide the healthiest possible choices for school lunches...unless you thought the rest of the world and the obvious success of such plans elsewhere did not exist?
Education: We are about to get slaughtered by a generation of svelte, soccer playing Social Democrats whose educational system is just flat better than ours.
They actually know calculus, physics, and chemistry. None of them think the earth is 6,000 years old and that fossil records are, in fact, just a "test of our faith"
These Social Democratic high school students are demonstrably better educated then ours, and these same Maoist Nightmares Social Democracies both educate and graduate a far higher percentage of their population with university degrees than we do. And their university degrees actually mean something.
"Ah, but our graduate schools are the envy of all" you say. That may be, but there are now more skinny foreigners studying math, computer science, and physics in those American graduate schools than there are Americans. And these brainy Social Democratic graduate students don't shriek like little girls if a carrot falls on their lunch-plate.
And all of this was brought you by not one, not three, but dozens of Social Democracies with State run educational systems.
So the next question is: How can you reject the notion that Social Democracies, you know, Governments, provide the best possible education in science and math, and instead scream hysterically about "vouchers" so we can keep studying Noah's Flood as a recent fucking historical event...unless you thought the rest of the world did not exist?
Healthcare? Fuck me. Why even bother to list it all here. Throw a dart at a fucking world map. If it hits an industrialized Social Democracy they have a better healthcare system than we do. And it costs less. A lot less.
So the final question for the xenophobes is: How the fuck did we manage to debate a watered-down version of Bob Dole's healthcare plan for two years and at the end still have half the population think it was a Kenyan Maoist Plot to destroy the USA...whthout completely ignoring the existence of the rest of the world?
Because if the rest of the world does exist...then the only conclusion is that the Industrialized Social Democracies are doing a better job of feeding children school lunches, educating their people in the areas of math and science that are needed to maintain a modern societies' economic vigor, and keeping them healthier quantitatively, healthier longer, and for one fuck of a lot less money than we are.
So how are all these arguments against carrots and smarts and affordable medical treatment...that are seemingly predicated on the rest of the world being nothing but a vague rumor and a sharp and painful drop off the earth if you are foolish enough to go looking for it...getting all this traction?
"Foolish Liberals...we warned them. Now class, open your intelligent design books to page 43...what?...no Jedediah, no physical exercise until you finish those Twinkies. Both of them. And drink your gravy"
"What now, Jedediah?...chest pains? Well,how much do you have on you? That's all? Well, try praying, because that is all the healthcare you can afford Jesus wants you to have"
PS - You know plutocrats do not give two shits about any of this, right? In fact, there is nothing a plutocrat likes better than to throw sand in the umpire's eyes. Because they are not Americans, they are Citizens of the World who sail under no flag on an ocean of capital.
They don't give a fuck if your kid is fat and stupid and has heart problems at 16. They made good money getting him fat. They will be damned if they will give any of that back to now make him healthy.
Because if they want healthy, the world has plenty of it for them to go buy and sell. Europe has bags of it. The Scandinavian Countries are fairly bursting at the seams with "healthy". So why should they give a fuck if an entire American generation wheezes like a leaky steam engine waddling from their Wii's to the fridge and back? Hell, they have all the slack-jawed morons here convinced that, by God, children wheezing is the sound of freedom. It almost brings a tear to a real patriot's eye to hear it.
They don't care if your kid is a functional moron who thinks long division is a form of witchcraft. If they want brains, they can buy all they want overseas. I mean, Jesus, what would the Country think if we held up a major Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, funding for 9/11 First Responders, in fact funding for the entire fucking Government until 1/2% of the population got even more tax breaks...if that Country's Citizens were really good at math and reading? Things might take an ugly turn, and we can't have that. Besides, just think of the lost Heritage Seeds and Gold French Subway Token sales if anything as vulgar as math replaced blind patriotism and rabid xenophobia in the national discourse. The horror.
And if the plutocrats want cheap, well, the world is full of hungry people that will do damn near anything for less than a dollar a day. And they will convince you the problem is American Unions...which works as long as you do not accept the success of worker-management-government cooperation in Social Democracies. But that is easy to do as obviously successful Social Democracies do not exist, or if they do they are actually full of dour unhappy people driving 65 year old Marshal Plan Studebaker's, eating beet-roots three meals a day, waiting 36 months for an aspirin and a used bandaid, and dreaming only of coming to America, especially South Carolina and Mississippi. If only they could escape the complete hell that is Finland
It is the golden age of plutocracy. Make money everywhere, and convince the American Right to stay fat, stupid, and xenophobic enough to make sure you don't have to pay for what works so well elsewhere.
And the Plutocrats are laughing at the Fox News Viewers and the Tea Party Faithful so hard they are pissing themselves. And very often doing so from a very nice place in the Socialist Democratic world that obviously doesn't exist. Like Provence or Lake Como or a frozen shit-hole like Gstaad.
Cheers...and try not to fall off the earth looking for better ways of doing things. And remember, when children eat healthy, they are eating with Karl Marx
PPS - I am not even going to break out the Big Guns: The indisputable higher quality of Social Democratic Beer and Motorcycles