In the 1930s, the only thing we had to fear was fear, itself.

Today, the main thing we have to fear is us, ourselves.

Looking out over the horizon, I’m starting to wonder just how many shades of dark there are on the palette. Lately, I get the feeling that we’re about to find out.

I wish I could say that this society did our best to fight our demons, but that the odds were simply insurmountable. You know. Like we were just sitting there by ourselves on our remote little Pacific island, a thousand years before telephones and radar when – bang – the tsunami hit, no fault of our own. And we bravely struggled heroically, doing our mightiest to save as many lives as we could.

I mean, if you’ve got to crash and burn, better to go down with a little dignity and honor, eh?

But, no, not for me, apparently. I’m an American. I live in a country – nay, an empire! – that insists on destroying itself. I’m part of the generation of decline. My people are the fools who perfected the fine art of committing suicide by stupidity.

It’s an astonishing act, and one of wide participation.

The nightmare of the right in America edges increasingly close to dragging the country past the point of no return, over the cliff of violent implosion. At this point, there is already little that is missing save the jackboots and broken glass.

The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business outfit, until it was hijacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like bogus overseas threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women at home. Basically, any way that middle class white males could be distracted from their sinking economic status – through the diversion of a sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior status – was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again. It is now transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are angry, but too stupid to know quite why. This explains their endless rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies. It also explains their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction. If they succeed, they fail. If they get their champions elected, they lose their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies. Brilliant.