The more you learn about Trump and Russia and the Koch Brothers, and the ultra right wing effort to populate the justice system with its own kind, the more people like me (who have the happy alternative) decide it's time to pack up and go home. I can't join in America bewailing its lost democracy, because it has been an oligarchy-sliding-into-autocracy for a very long time. The right wing has slowly been occupying territory until a full 40% of the American populace is living on what John Stewart calls "Bullshit Mountain."
People from back home in the old country ask me where the moderate conservatives in this country are, and I have no answer, because they are doing a very good job of camouflaging themselves against the wallpaper of the Grand Old Party. I have never been a supporter of the GOP, but it is apparent even to me that its founders, or even only going as far back as Reagan (who was president when I first put foot on these shores) must be rolling in their graves.
This apparition calling itself the Republican Party today is a collection of greedy and corrupt white Ol' Boys making a grab at the only thing they consider to have any worth - certainly not country, or moral ground, just the accumulation of filthy lucre. The corruption runs so deep, that unless our friend Mr. Robert Mueller has a magic wand in his bag of tricks, the indictments of the key players is not going to make a particle of difference. The Supreme Court, which is supposed to be the level-headed and wise tier of government is stacked to the point that it would give Vladimir Putin a free pass if he asked Trump to get him one.
I was hopeful until I began to understand just how wide this network of greed and power-grab has spread, and now I think there is no hope, and better to go back to Scotland where there is at least the chance that we might have a society in which justice has some meaning. Of course, Scotland, living in the shadow of the British Empire, isn't there yet, and really I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Brexit disaster, fueled and fed by another arm of this worldwide coup of greedy white guys, might in the end overwhelm our hope just as it has done the better angels of this country.
From time to time, I pull up videos of Barack Obama, like an orphan who is stuck with the evil aunt might conjure images of its mother. This displacement from value has come at us so forcefully that the deranged individual currently occupying the White House has over time even taken on a sort of normality. This is the new but deeply pathologicl normal, with an entire political party and a whole Christian faction enabling it.
I don't hold out much hope for America. I was hoping the constitution would win out, but these nefarious money-grabbers are weaseling into even that: the Koch brothers, while everyone is busy being outraged by the behavour of the Clown-in-chief, is quietly working towards rescinding the 17th amendment, which handed the power to elect state representatives to the people. And they'll probably get it. Because nothing speaks louder in this country than the dollar bill.
Authoritarian USA married to authoritarian Russia and in alliance with any number of smaller authoritarian countries will change the complexion of our world. The notion of a Free World will just be a memory we take out and brush off from time to time, like pictures of a dead mother. Like videos of Barack Obama.
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