THE CYNIC THE TWO NATIONS

It's been twenty years since then. state senator Obama assured us there was not a liberal America and a conservative America. In that time, a new country has been building with fearful momentum. Can anything be donc to stop it?

- Charles P. Pierce

THERE ARE MORNINGS WHEN THE CYNIC arises and believes with his first blinking half-thought that the righteous already have lost. That the forces of apathy, stupidity, and anesthetic comfort, enabled and armed for battle by the forces of radical religion and corporate oligarchy, have broken through all the barricades. That they've worn down any who were still hoarding a stubborn and invulnerable hope. The Cynic remembers what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Yes, Jefferson goes on with all that "It is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government" business. But he did not reckon with all the ways that human beings can convince themselves that actual evils are actually sufferable.

One of the ways they do that is by creating a puppet universe of evil, a wax museum of artificial villains. Mask requirements become a bigger threat to liberty than unchecked greed and authoritarian Bible-banging. Dr. Anthony Fauci becomes Karl Marx in a lab coat. Voters trust the ranting of radio hustlers more than they do medical science. The country of Jonas Salk and Walter Reed now takes its diagnoses from Alex Jones and Lauren Boebert.

Meanwhile, as people are battling counterfeit banditti of their own creation, the Cynic sees the real thieves slipping out the back door with all the real valuables, perhaps never to return. The Cynic feels sour and prescient. The Cynic feels like giving up.