Rock Me Nostradamus

I was just thinking about the world that my two teenage sons will be living in for the next 60 or 70 years and I imagine that they will not be needing those metaphorical shades, since the future doesn't look all that bright. I am constantly reminding them that they need to eat their vegetables and study hard because they will not have it easy like the old man did, but they don't listen. I have been accused from time to time of being something of a pessimist, but history seldom fails to meet my low expectations, so, just in case you were interested, here are my TOP TEN REASONS AMERICA IS COMPLETELY DOOMED, in the order I thought them up:

1) MASSIVE DEBT

Our government owes so much money that if you took it in one dollar bills and laid them end to end it would stretch to the edge of the known Universe and back 237,782 times. This is a scientific fact. Thanks to the cowardice, stupidity and corruption of our two party system, every man, woman and child in this country already owes for a brand new 2010 Jaguar 2-door XKR Coupe which they will never see, but for which they will have to make payments for the next 30 years. As a matter of full disclosure, I am making these facts up as I go, but they are nonetheless completely accurate. Anyway, the Republican Party, in addition to being venal and bigoted, is also paranoid and full of idiots. They won't cut defense spending, even though our biggest enemies have defense budgets about one-tenth of our own, and they love socialized medical programs like Medicare which pay extraordinary amounts of our money to keep dying old ladies alive an additional 4.7 days at the tune of about $25,000 a day; they also love to give tax breaks to corporations for sending our jobs to Laos and investing in new ways to despoil our environment. On the other hand, the Democratic Party, in addition to being venal and stoned, is also clueless and can't count. As a life-long Democrat, I love the Party's laid back tolerance and gentle affection for the downtrodden, but as a high school graduate, I also know that if you take two apples from the public and give three apples to the poor, then you better be able to shit apples because you're an apple short. The Democratic Party's economic platform can best be summed up as "we can't be broke, we still have printing presses." Between the Republicans and the Democrats, we are truly fucked.

Before we move on, however, let's not forget that the morons who put these jamokes in office in the first place (i.e. us) are carrying another billion trillion dollars worth of personal debt. We use credit cards to buy stuff off the Value Menu at the McDonald's drive-through instead of picking up the loose change from between the seats. We have to have Hello-Kitty and Blue-Ray DVD this very minute or we will literally explode. We change cell phones more often than we change our undergarments and we don't realize that the two year contract which got us the "free" phone is a form of financial liability, or, as we call it in Georgia, debt. We have no self-control, and that, combined with an unrealistic sense of entitlement, fuels our addiction to credit, and this addiction will only be cured by an extensive series of beatings or a protracted economic depression or the Chinese cutting us off. Doom, doom and more well-deserved, self-created doom.

2) STUPIDITY

We are a nation of dumbasses. The average American can't divide two, two digit numbers without a calculator with really big buttons on it. Ninety-five percent of Americans don't know who is buried in Grant's Tomb. Physics and chemistry might as well be foreplay and sobriety for as much as they are understood in this country. More Americans believe in ghosts than biological evolution and more Americans can name four of the contestants on this season's The Biggest Loser than can name one person who has EVER won a Nobel Prize. Millions of people watch Jersey Shore because they CAN relate to the characters. We believe in astrology. We think Miley Cyrus is talented. Our quality of life is at the mercy of a scientific elite that we neither trust nor understand and scientific inquiry is being increasingly distorted by political objectives. Many other countries, while putrid in their own unique ways, at least have societies that understand the power of science. Doom for us? I should say so.

3) CORPORATE INFLUENCE IN POLITICS

Money drives the political process in America. You have to have access to tons of cash in order to make stupid campaign commercials to appeal to stupid voters. The United States Supreme Court recently decided that corporations enjoy the same rights of political speech as actual real human people do, so we will now all be able to benefit from the unlimited political messages of business entities which have allegiance only to their own profitability and are owned by who knows, including foreign corporations which have a presence in the U.S. The PR industry, which clearly has no intimate relationship with facts or truth, makes billions of dollars from national, state and local election cycles and the nation's master psychological manipulators are employed by candidates of every stripe to convince you to support their man (or woman). Candidates used to stand on a stump and look you in the eye (or eyes, if you had two) and tell you what they really thought, even if it was medieval or nonsensical; now they stand in front of a blue screen and tell you what their market research says you want to hear, and then they go to Albany or Washington or wherever and do what their financial masters tell them to do. This is what we call democracy. Doom.

4) LACK OF KNOWLEDGE OF, AND RESPECT FOR, THE REST OF THE WORLD

You might argue that ignorance is a component of stupidity, but if it is, I can't get ten things on my list. The average American can't find America on a map, much less the Maldives. We don't know about other cultures or the history of other nations. We don't speak any languages well, not even English. We arrogantly assume that we are smarter, better looking and more moral than every other country on Earth. This is why we can't seem to grasp the reasons about half the world thinks we suck. We have double standards for our behavior compared with the actions of other nations and we are often viewed as hypocrites because of the disconnect between our high ideals and the things we actually do. When we blow up children, it's collateral damage; when somebody else blows up children, it's terrorism or barbarism or family planning. Doom-da-doo-doom.

5) DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN ENERGY SOURCES

We are the crack-whores of the international energy market. We use so much crude oil you would think it was a personal lubricant, and for this privilege we send hundreds of billions of dollars every year to despots and tyrants and people with borderline personality disorders. We get most of our oil from countries that don't like us, like Alaska, and then they use that money to purchase weapons from our allies and scarf up the world's uranium supply, another source of energy which we mostly import. We have no plan to resolve this dependence other than allowing foreign corporations to pump millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and deregulating the use of donkeys in grist mills. Meanwhile, most Americans, including my fat, lazy ass, drive gasoline guzzling monsters 90 miles an hour everywhere they go, charging the $3.00 a gallon gas on their Visa Card. Doom? You betcha'.

6) WILD WEST VIOLENCE

America is the most violent nation in the world that is not currently engaged in a protracted civil war supplied by at least three different industrialized nations and involving seven separate ethnic groups. We kill each other at rates that make every war since World War II look like a church picnic. We have virtually unlimited access to guns and big knives and piano wire, and we are all mad as hell about something. Just wait until things start getting really bad and you will see how quickly a heavily armed civilization can go down the crapper. Doomed? Well, at least the ones without the guns.

7) RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM

The more pressure that people find themselves under, the more easily they turn to emotionally convenient certainties. Does the Pope actually know any more about right and wrong than the average guy? Well, unless he learned it during his Hitler Youth tenure, probably not. I'm sure the Pope is a fine fellow, but people who believe that they have perceived the eternal truth tend to be difficult to deal with when they feel that you haven't. If social and economic conditions worsen in America, we will surely return to our Puritan roots, at least those who don't follow the path of cannibalism, and everybody trying to tell everybody how to live their lives will result in a lot of hurt feelings. Doom? It's at least as likely as salvation.

8) CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE

Somewhere along the way, we decided that the second law of thermodynamics didn't apply to us anymore. Like Ozymandias, we declared our roads and bridges and sewer pipes to be everlasting tributes to our greatness. Our politicians also declared that they were too chickenshit to tell us the truth about what it cost to keep all this stuff working properly and that they would hold off on doing anything long enough to let themselves move on to bigger and better things and let some other poor sucker deal with the ire of the electorate when the shit no longer worked. The electorate, on the other hand, didn't complain much about not paying the true cost of repair and maintenance, so now roads are full of holes, bridges collapse and raw sewerage rains down on the Moleman's head in his subterranean lair. The solution? Stay home and eat cheese. Doom? Without doubt.

9) ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION

The average American throws away more crap in a month than the average Afghan owns in a lifetime. We bury mountains of garbage that decay and invade the water-table; a never ending parade of burrito wrappers is in constant in motion along the streets of our cities; we dump yucky stuff in the lakes and oceans and pump tons of filth into the air and we don't believe in Global Warming because, despite the concurrence of 14 Nobel Laureates, some semi-retarded, washed up meteorologist on Fox News said it ain't true. Mother Nature is going to slap the shit out of us before too much longer. Doomed? Fucking A-plus yes.

10) THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

Many of you may have a little trouble with this one, but it is almost certain that the dead shall rise from their graves to feast upon the flesh of the living before too much longer. This is not too far off from some current situations, like the rich sucking the blood of the poor, or the running-dog lackeys of the rich crushing the middle-class under an oppressive burden of taxation so that the rich may avoid their fair share of supporting the government and contributing to the needs of the society that has given them such unlimited opportunity. Personally, I would not object too strenuously to seas of the living-dead washing over New York's financial district and greedily crunching on the bowels of any hapless stock-brokers that wandered into their path. Nor would it be too sad to see the White House and Capitol overrun by hordes of flesh-eating zombies stripping the fat from legislators and executives alike. In the aftermath of the apocalypse, all the reclusive gun-nuts could gleefully remind us that they told us so and the zombies could form political parties opposing taxation without putrification. There are plenty of weird diseases, dangerous chemicals and silent radiation to get it all started. Would Thomas Jefferson see a zombie apocalypse as a legitimate revolution? Perhaps. Would it doom us all? With any luck.