I am an expatriate in reverse. I left America to find America. When I returned, I found America a writhing, swollen, tumor infested beast, wriggling in the throes of death.
That was nearly 20 years ago. It takes a long time for a bloated bureaucracy to die.
Now I sit on my front porch and monitor the decay from an iPhone, like some detached scientist, keeping data, talking notes, bookmarking doom, plotting charts that prove my hypothesis: We're all going to die.
I am a prognosticator, a Nostradamus, ready to flip to the last page of the Mayan calendar. A false prophet.
Of course we're all going to die; humans weren't meant to be immortal. Thank God for that. The problem is we are all dying of loss, a loss of self, a loss of responsibility, a loss of personal dignity. Premature rigor mortis. We still live and breathe and pump cholesterol clogged blood through our veins. But outside we die a nanosecond at a time as the world passes by, microscopic oblivion ex utero.
When nearly 50 percent of the taxpayers pay no tax at all and demand that the 10% of the highest earners who already suffer 70% of the tax burden pay more, when we give up basic freedoms for the "comfort" and "security" of government "protection," when we eschew freedom for "safety," only death is inevitable. The death of individuality. The death of rational thought. The death of a way of life we couldn't possibly have had anywhere else. The death of a country.
So I sit here on my porch, watching it all, trapping the images in these words, photographing in hi definition the end.
It's a God-damned comedy of horrors.
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The news is filled with cannibalism. A man takes synthetic bath salts and chews off the face of another man in broad daylight on a Miami causeway. Both are naked. No one knows why. A gay porn star mails pieces of human flesh to political offices. He sends videos to fans. He blames Hollywood.
The paranoid fear the zombie apocalypse is nigh. It's been here for decades, if not a century. We just never noticed.
Zombie politicians began devouring our lives, our freedoms, our human-ness long before the images of freaked out psychopaths scrolled across our 50-inch TV screens, the very ones on which we watched Jeopardy and American Idol and Jersey Shore, while zombie cannibals in our local municipalities and state capitols and the District of Criminals gutted us from within. And it wasn't even surreptitious. The gutting occurred before our very eyes. We were just too blind to see. Now we live on life support: HDTV, Xbox, takeout Chinese. We get fat from Big Gulps and digital over-stimulation, as we bleed our insides out into government coffers, knowingly.
We are not sheep: we are slaves.
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When I lived in Germany in the early 90s, a soldier "fighting for my country" in a guard shack, I'd walk around the villages and cities of my adopted country and meet people who were in denial. When you start two world wars and eviscerate the population of a continent, you no longer have a sense of self. Socialism was rampant. Kids graduated from high school expecting the government to cradle them. Government assistance checks were a badge of honor. If you were a young woman and uncomfortable with your bra size, a government boob job magically transformed your confidence. A good day was drinking your way through breakfast and lunch and dinner and collapsing on a bench at a bus stop. Four years in the pit of a cradle to grave society taught me there was no better place on earth than America.
But what I came back to wasn't what I had left. I've seen federal government agents kill American citizens for no reason at all. I've seen young people no longer embrace the values my parents taught me: work hard, be your own man, expect nothing but what you earn by the sweat of your own brow. It's as if I came back only to find I was still living in the apathetic society I'd left behind in Germany. I returned to participation trophies for being born and people spending $100,000 to earn sociology degrees so they can never earn more than $50,000 a year.
I came back to madness.
It's accelerated beyond belief these past four years. My iPhone wants to replace "people" with "proletariat" as i type. Free has now replaced freedom as the fundamental purpose of life in America. Satire is now reality; we're living a Ray Bradbury novel, an Ayn Rand prophecy, a George Orwell realization.
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Aphorisms for our times race through my head. Weird scenes inside the dumb mind. Something wicked has already come. What rough beast slouches toward Washington to make you bow down.
We've been living in strange times for as long as I can remember. I was born during Vietnam; I now write during Americanam. The yoke of government is so locked around our necks I fear we may never break free.
The days ahead are dangerous. When a sitting president who has accomplished nothing but corruption and anguish and doled out more than your fair share of abuse has a chance to win re-election, we may already be over the cliff.
In these spend times we are nearing end times. The center cannot hold. It's already beyond being off axis.
In the coming 5 months we have a decision to make. Do we let our country die? Do we let our way of life die? Do we let ourselves die?
Choosing Mitt Romney over Barack Obama is infinitely more palatable than continuing on this path of destruction we follow. We have great sacrifices to make. We will have to retire later than we planned. We will have to expect less government entitlements than we were "promised" when we were forced to give the government our money to fund them. Then more money. And still more money. (Hell, every year we vote to tax ourselves locally for infrastructure projects many of us never see come to life, because often that money is diverted to other expenditures, just like the entitlement taxes we pay.) We will have to make the biggest gut check of our lives. We will have to hold the limbs of the people we elect to take over this monstrosity to more than just a fire; we will have to tie them to a rack and torture them, if necessary, to right this sinking ship.
I don't know if we have the stomach for it. I don't know if we are brave enough. I don't know if we can disconnect from the shroud of unreality we create for ourselves to get through every second and minute and hour of every day.
But we must. If we don't, it's all over. And the death throes our country has been experiencing for longer than I've been alive will accelerate.
And it will entirely be our own fault.
We'll have to live with that, until we don't. Live, that is.
Cross-posted at Pat Dollard.
UPDATE: Thanks iOwnTheWorld, The Conservatory, KingShamus, An Ol' Broad's Ramblings, Always on Watch and Doug Ross!
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