Let's get it on. Since the Reagan era there have been pretenders and poseurs and highly placed liars and thieves who haven't even had the grace to pretend that they weren't interested in rolling back the calendar to 1750. Reagan's greatest sorrow was that since the adoption of the US Constitution, knighthoods and peerages have been hard to come by, even for the privileged corporate power elite. Article One, Section 9, Clause Eight states:No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. The Reagan knighthood had to follow his term of office. His Veep, GHW Bush followed in his footsteps and received a knighthood in 1993.
Can you imagine Dennis Kucinich skulking around the afterdeck of the Britannia trying to find out who he has to blow to win a knighthood?
The class war, put to rest by progressive legislation and egalitarian reforms from the FDR era through the Johnson administration, emerged again during the Reagan era as the reactionary right-wing sought to roll back reforms and restore power and privilege to an aristocratic elite. They've been fighting from positions of cover and concealment, but the excesses of Bush the Younger have revealed the extent of the danger to the country and the citizenry.
Do I hear the Madame Defarge orchestra tuning up in the pit? The curtain's going up...
The Means to Flee
Can you imagine a scenario in which a people's own government, leading up to an election, unleashes WMDs on their own people? I'm not talking about Goddam Husein, or anyplace else in the Middle East. No. Not at all. And can you imagine in that scenario the flight or fight mechanism kicks in to all of the people of that nation, and the first thought, which has been ruminating for many anyway during life under a merciless dictator, is to get the hell out? My God, the country is melting. Attacts of bio warfare unleashed to the east, the west, and the middle. Media pumps up the almigty machine reinforcing terror, panic.
Who have the means to flee, for a time? Who have the means to seek safety at a hotel in a distant state or country? Not the poor. Not the poor. Not the lower class. Not the underclass. Not even the middle class, because air travel zooms overnight, and it costs $1500 a ticket to get out of dodge, and oh by the way you need a passport, and joe auto worker doesn't have to have a passport, nor does welfare mom Mable.
So the rich go. For a time. Here or there, Europe or Asia. They go. And they watch as the entire lower class is wiped out by the plague as space-age tech-suited experts clean up the mess, and in a year or two, they can come back, and their country is clean, their country is clean, their country is clean, and there are no more poor, no "others" to contend with, and they await the "great appearing" and the rapture with others who look like them and expect the same salvation as them. While the remaining former hispanic day laborers and McDonalds drive though staff spits up blood and wipes blood from their eyes, and those waiting for the "Great Appearing" cluck cluck cluck because there is no one left to help them tidy up the house that has been sitting vacant for a year and a half.
It could happen.
Posted by: jeneane | May 18, 2004 at 10:46 PM