Empire or ashes?

I try not to write about stuff I don’t understand. For some reason, I always seem to take a lot of flak for it when I do.

Chief among the things I don’t understand is finance. Money.

Math.

Debt.

Taxes!

But I always thought I understood people—as a herd—pretty well. Like, the herd might get spooked by thunder and stampede, but American herds always had a way of not running themselves off a cliff in their blind panic.

For over 200 years now, against the odds, we’ve run our little corner of God’s paradise without self-destructing. That is no mean feat.

Ancient empires ran for thousands of years, but then, they did not have Twitter. In the modern era, a good dictator is lucky to get 30, 40 years tops, before old age takes him in his sleep or the creeps in the street throw him to the wolves, and the empire goes the way of the emperor.

So, 200 years? Good job, America!

Okay, you were a bit of a douchebag the first hundred years or so, granted. Human slavery turned out to be, historically-speaking, more than a bit of an embarrassment. Nor did you do yourself any favors when you continued to keep your former slaves under your thumb with Black Codes and Race Laws and segregation for another hundred years, but you’re finally showing some belated signs of progress.

Kudos.

Oh yeah. And the Native Americans thing. Also pretty uncool, but an empire is not empire if it does not spread to fill up all the adjacent land for which it finds it has a fancy.

Bygones.

But now you’re more than 200 years old. A spring chicken by European standards, but in terms of modern empires?

You’re beginning to show signs of wear and tear. You’re growing old, ill-tempered and insular. If you’re not careful, you’re going to find your estate executors (in this case, China) shipping you off to the Old Empires Home and forgetting abut you except on birthdays and Christmas.

How ill-tempered and insular? You’ve stopped talking to the rest of the family. A common early symptom of encroaching dementia.

You’re ass-deep in financial trouble that, as I have already stated, I don’t actually understand, but instead of hashing out a workable solution, half of you won’t even talk to the other half.

Remember Abraham Lincoln? The man who saved the Union? Our first GOP president? Who said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand?”

When half the country refuses to talk to the other half, that is the textbook definition of a house divided against itself. We’re heading toward the brink of predicted financial calamity—particularly if you’re a soldier or a senior getting by on Social Security, both of which I have in my family—because the Right is so rigid in its orthodoxy to even allow the subject of taxes to be raised.

That’s the crux of everything, taxes. The people who don’t want to pay more have joined with the people who don’t to pay any, and have become a power political force. So powerful that politicians in Washington are doing really smug, stupid things in the face of looming disaster (hello, Eric Cantor, you preening ass!).

Eric Cantor, Number Two Republican in the House of Representatives, is acting like he’s Noah, except it’s raining hard but he won’t let any of the animals board until he’s figured out the seating chart to his satisfaction. Drowned bunnies are floating by his cabin window while he checks his thesaurus for different ways to say “tyranny.”

He’s Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Rome. Another empire that grew too cocky and is no longer with us.

Is it our turn?

The anti-tax base, including newly-elected Tea Party-supported Congressmen, are playing chicken with our geriatric experiment in Democracy.

Even the GOP head of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has devised a work-around that avoids the debt crisis, washes the Republicans’ hands of all responsibility and explicitly leaves Obama holding the bag if things goes even more south… what’s not to love? It’s actually quite brilliant, as a financial quick-fix and a political calculation, but the Tea Partiers won’t touch it, because it does not definitively rule out future tax hikes.

Remember when patriotism used to define our country, like World War Two? Or afterwards, when we were the Rebuilder Of The World, and their unofficial Top Cop? Remember when we kept the USSR in line (until their empire crumbled) with barely a life being lost, James Bond films aside?

We’re not that country right now. Right now we’re the country that is ready, willing and able to risk everything we’ve worked so long to keep together… in order to hang on to more money.

“Wait a minute!” you cry. “This country was founded on a revolt to taxation without representation!”

Indeed, taxation without representation was paramount among the causes of the American Revolution.

But what we have today is not taxation without representation. We have representatives up the kazoo.

No, people are just stingy. Times are tight, so they’re happy to sit on their porch at sunset, drinking their bitters, and watch Sherman’s army march to the sea as long as their mattresses inside are stuffed with dollar bills.

That is not the America of the founders. Or the soldiers on either side of the war between the states. Or the race to the moon, or storming the beach at Normandy…

That is an America in decline.

It is one thing to risk one’s political future on a principled stand. Some of our best statesman have done so, and not coincidentally, have gone on to be remembered as having been the best among us.

Rebelling against taxation without representation is an example of the defense of a principle that was both honorable and necessary.

Rebelling against taxation with abundant representation, however, does not fall within the realm of lofty ideals.

It falls under the category of short-sighted stinginess.

Like I said at the onset, I know nothing about money issues. But I do know quite a bit about empires historically, and America is following the classic journey to oblivion.

We’ve done this once before, and Lincoln was just barely able to hold us together.

I’m not convinced we have a statesman of his caliber to pull our asses out of the fire this time. Lincoln was famous for consulting with, even elevating his opponents to positions of great power within his administration.

Compare that to today’s GOP leaders, especially in the House.

This is not a recipe for success.

You know, I’ll bet better than 50% of the anti-taxation people identify themselves as Christians, ie; people who are trying to follow the example of Christ in their day-to-day lives.

Jesus never went on record about other hot-button issues like abortion or gun control, be He actually expressed an opinion about taxes! Not many, just one, and then only when prompted by a questioner, who asked what he should do about the taxes he was being forced to pay. You can find Christ’s answer in the authorized Good Book, Matthew 22:20-22 KJ. 

So what would Jesus do? He showed the questioner a gold coin and asked, “Whose face do you see on this?” They replied, “Caesar’s.”

And Jesus replied, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”

Jesus said to pay your damn taxes. Do you need a house to drop on you, too? Then your sister will have both broomsticks!

When did the Christian God stop being the God of compassion? Does not a single self-proclaimed “values-voter” remember the Sermon on the Mount? Blessed are the merciful, the peace-makers, the meek—everything they’re not being.

In the end, you got your death, and you got your taxes. It’s perfectly reasonable—sane, even—to take every precaution one can about both. To forestall the former and limit the latter.

But there is a grand American tradition—or so we like to tell ourselves—of America squaring its shoulders and doing the right thing, even when it was hard. Especially in hard times.

The Americans who actually embodied those ideals, now long-since deceased, wouldn’t recognize this current conversation.

It’s beneath us because dammit, we’re suppose to be better than this.

Right now, America is one divided house, teetering on the brink. The debt ceiling embroglio is just the most obvious, critical symptom. How it is resolved will be an important bellwether as to what is to come.