History's
a Duel of Fencers
It's the version of
Robin Hood in the bizarro world. The tax bill the GOP is rushing past
houses of congress will steal from the poor and give to the rich.
What would Reagan say? What would Friar Tuck say? The bill is being
paraded by senate at break-neck speed because each eyeful shows
something worse about it. How can McConnell, Ryan do this as, like
the health care bill, Trump sits with pen ready to scrawl his
EKG-like signature. I don't even think this one has any intention to
ever trickle down to anyone. The bill would do nothing to ever lower
the national debt. It will in fact raise it by 1.4 trillion dollars.
Now, with the cost of fighting what is, as far as I can see, another
Vietnam situation in Afghanistan the bill will add insult to injury.
A generation in 2085 will be talking about what their ancestors left
for them. And then there is the embryo of another war, a bit further
east, with not far to go. It's on the brink, the provocation of a
poorly worded or timed tweet, an ill-candor emoji or schoolyard
taunt.
Maybe this is the
dawning of the true America. Maybe this is the fight we have been
fighting since the end of slavery. Should Senator Sanders and Warren
concede? Take a dive? Elizabeth Warren once compared the middle class
to a fighter being on the ropes. Trump is here to deliver the
knock-out punch. I read once that those Puritans who came to these
shores in 1620 were not escaping religious persecution at all. They
wanted to build a system similar to the one they had left in
England. Well, most of them did. The other 2% wanted show stoppers,
impediments to the plan to the stuffy wig fluffers had. Things they
objected to like taxation without representation, all of which led to
acts of civil disobedience like dumping tea in Boston Harbor. Some
estimates today, based on John Adams and other journals, suggest that
as many as 55% of the colonists were patriots, supported total
independence from England. I am guessing that these were who would be
your Warren and Sanders, the founders who really saw a future America
as not just a knock-off monarchy, a Democracy in wolves' clothing
with everyone cow-towing and afraid to say the emperor has no
clothes. The colonists who remained loyal to England, did not want
anything to change, would never think of thinking out of any box,
numbered between 15 and 25%. It is the uncommitted, as with voters in
elections, that warrant watching. These comprised 30 to 45% of those
fourth generation puritans. I surmise that these were the ones that
wanted it both ways. They were on the fence. They wanted, for
instance, in regards to health care, the best leech bleeding
services. But the lower and middle classes would have to work harder
so they could have it. In addition, the access to affordable health
care would be taken away from the lower classes.
In nearly three
centuries only the methodology has changed, the leeches still
apparently suck blood from the pale, the insulted injured Americans.
If the GOP get the only significant legislation they achieved with
control of both houses they will throw 13 million Americans off heath
care by 2027, according to the CBO. Still, it is an amazing time.
There is never a dull moment in America. I once, for shits and
giggles, looked up what was the dullest day in history, the 24-hour
period when the news was the least eventful. It was April 11, 1954.
It had to do with the birth of a scientist who went on to invent a
very obscure and ineffective search engine. Funny thing about
computer searches, what they lead to, the answers found, the way your
question is rarely answered with acuteness. Google could tell me the
most boring day in history. It also told be the worst days in
history. There was a top ten, including things like the Black Death,
Crusades (#1), or fanatical terrorism. As far as a chain of
causation, a day in June of 1914 kept coming back like groundhogs do.
WWI began, escalated hostilities to the point of a gun pulled at an
arch duke. Historians map out the chain of belligerents. How for a
few reasons in the aftermath of WWI the fuses for II were exposed. In
1945, after V-J day, hostilities remained in the Pacific theater.
China threatened French colonies. The US policed Korea to fight back
the Chinese, North Koreans, and Soviets from 1950 to 1953. The French
were fighting in Indochina to stop the Chinese communists from ruling
Vietnam. The French eventually left, conceded, in 1956 and the US
embarked on its own mission to save South Vietnam from Communism in
the second Indochina war, what became the Vietnam War in which we
were technically involved until 1975.
December 2017 could
be nearly as costly in US history as June of 1914 was. Consider, if
tyrant Trump's bill passes it would 1) raise the debt for generations
to pay off 2) make health care unaffordable to 13 million 3) give him
that one piece of legislation that could garner support for him,
thereby laying a base for 2020 and a....second term. Passing this
bill will have negative repercussions touching, probably sooner than
later, the very rubes that voted for him, many of whom now in focus
groups admit that he is an embarrassment. It will kill the middle and
lower class. If Republicans object to programs like SNAP now, what
do they think will happen when those people are taxed, made to pay
more so they don't? No one, as far as I can see, as long as I've been
around, has learned from history. Are they doomed to repeat it? Maybe
they're adament on repeating it until it comes out right. Or are
they just the descendants of those Mayflower waifarers who chose a
spot on the fence?
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