America's current situation is just chickens from the '80s coming home to roost

[hatrack]

7. I think of the 80s as "The Great Abdication" . . .

We abandoned what we should have learned in Vietnam. We could have learned that there are situations when other people and nations will fight to the bitter end rather than do what we ordain, and that no amount of money or firepower will change that. Instead, we invaded a tiny island portrayed as a veritable Barad-Dur of horrific Communist power, and paraded that mole-scalp of a victory as "proof" that America was "back" (whatever that meant, while ignoring the deaths of more than 200 Marines in a fumbled intervention in the Mideast - and of course ignoring the deaths of tens of thousands at the hands of our "allies" in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East).

We abandoned what we should have learned from Watergate. Instead, those at the very highest levels of power walked away largely unscathed for multiple, major violations of federal law. Oh, and the traitorous cocksucker at the center of it all became a national hero, thanks to his ability to peer moistly into the camera during televised hearings.

We abandoned even the pretension that we should try to be decent to one another. Instead, we began the decade with a successful presidential campaign kickoff at a murder scene with ear-splittingly loud dog sirens to every inbred, resentful, racist fuck in America, and ended the decade with hushed, horrified "discussions" about "super-predators" spawned in urban jungles of crime and depravity.

We began to abandon any sense of reality at the fall of the Warsaw Pact, and not long afterwards completed the process after the collapse of the USSR. America, triumphant by God's divine plan, with assists from Adam Smith and William F. Buckley, was the culmination of all human thought and desire, and the End Of History was at hand! We got to do anything we wanted, because there was only one way of doing things, and that was OUR way. And we all know how well that turned out.

At every point when we could have learned, we abdicated our collective responsibilities as adults. Instead, we chose the emotional buzz, the flag-waving fix, the quick, satisfying hit of bullshit over the lessons of science, history and reality. And here we are.

Oh, and the hairstyles SUCKED.