The American Nosedive
by Jim Goad
Reading the Declaration of Independence 235 years after it was written, it?s kidney-punchingly obvious that the United States government has become precisely the sort of bloodsucking tyrant against which the Founding Fathers revolted.
These days our primary financial and political mechanisms, as well as every jot and tittle of rhetoric that dribbles from our politicians? mouths, all lurch toward centralized global codependency, whereas the Declaration of Independence encourages ?separation,? ?liberty,? and ?dissolving political bands.?
The Declaration bemoans the fact that the King of England had blocked many of the colonies? laws, whereas today the feds? judicial henchmen routinely overrule the American electorate?s will in matters such as immigration, gay marriage, and anything else that obstructs its agenda?s steamrollering path.
The Declaration protests the fact that the King had created a ?multitude of New Offices?to harass our people, and eat out our substance.? Today, America employs more people in government than in manufacturing. It lost a full third of its manufacturing jobs in the last decade alone while adding nearly two million government jobs.
The Declaration endorses such terms as ?common kindred? and ?consanguinity,? whereas today such sentiments are confined to a despised cattle pen of cultural ?extremism,? but only if you?re similarly hued to the Founding Fathers. It?s a ghastly irony that America?s primary modern cultural demons are precisely the sort of people who made America.
The Declaration complains that King George ?excited domestic insurrections amongst us? and encouraged ?merciless Indian Savages,? whereas today the feds file their nails while violently anti-white mobs stalk urban streets. A mere five-minute walk from where the Declaration was signed, here?s what Philadelphia looks like these days. And like King George, today?s feds encourage a culturally antagonistic alien onslaught, this time from our southern border by those who, mistakenly or not, consider themselves the common kin of the aforementioned ?merciless Indian Savages.?
Although one of the Declaration?s main grievances involved taxation without consent, I cannot name one of the hydra-headed taxes I?m forced to pay?under threat of imprisonment?about which I?ve ever been consulted, much less to which I?ve consented. And taxes now are absurdly higher than they were in 1776.
And the modern federal government is obstinately deaf to George Washington?s warnings about foreign entanglements and Thomas Jefferson?s grave distrust of bankers.
If the Founding Fathers were alive today, they?d kick us in the balls. They?d also say we deserve everything we have coming. And believe me, it?s coming.
It?s grimly ironic that the first installment of Edward Gibbon?s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776. The USA originally defined itself as a rebel against the British Empire, gradually became its successor, and now is certain to shrivel and implode.
One of Gibbon?s reasons for Rome?s decline was that it had overreached itself militarily, only to be gradually ground down and pushed back by the Persians. As one modern writer puts it, ?Roman victories in Iraq were transitory and self-defeating.? Sound familiar? Gibbon also said that much of Rome?s military had fallen into the hands of barbarian mercenaries who gradually turned against their employer. Nowadays our insanely self-loathing and suicidal notions of tolerance have allowed our military to be infiltrated with openly hostile Islamic extremists. And our virtually nonexistent southern border is now patrolled by a Hispanic majority rather than an Anglo one.
Gibbon also blamed Rome?s increasingly fragmented demographics for its fall. Fifty years ago, nine of ten Americans were of European descent. In around thirty years, they will constitute a minority. Gibbon pointed out that the Eastern and Western Roman empires split along linguistic lines, with Greek spoken in the East and Latin in the West. A similar trend is emerging in America today with English and Spanish.
Other historians note that Rome suffered from an increasingly devalued currency that led to financial collapse. The American dollar is currently worth only four percent of what it was 100 years ago. This year, Standard & Poor?s downgraded America?s long-term credit outlook from ?stable? to ?negative,? and the IMF predicted that China?s GDP will surpass America?s in a mere five years. We?ve rapidly plummeted from the world?s largest creditor to its biggest debtor. Despite Democratic myths to the contrary, the national debt has been gradually swelling for decades. As with Rome, our unproductive, dole-gobbling masses are temporarily kept fat and complacent with bread and circuses?but only temporarily. Fiat currency never lasts.
We?ve fallen from the top perch in education, wealth, infrastructure, and life expectancy. Every cultural icon and historical conquest that was once deemed a matter of pride is now designated as cause for shame and perpetual self-flogging. Uncle Sam has been recast as a creepy relative who molests you. But to protest any of these ongoing cultural inversions is to invite scorn, to be labeled paranoid and stuck in the past.
Never mind that the past seems far better than the present. My father didn?t graduate from high school but was able to pay off a mortgage and buy a new car every three years by toiling at dirty blue-collar jobs such as plumber and oil-rig foreman. I have a college degree (summa cum laude, thank you very much), have rented all my life, and have never owned a new car. Forgive me, if you can, for noticing that things have changed for the worse. I can only despise a government that risked my father?s neck in WWII and my brother?s in Vietnam yet insists I remain quiet while it downgrades the long-term prognosis for my son.
The upper left signature on the Declaration of Independence is that of Button Gwinnett, a representative from Georgia. Yesterday while driving in wilting heat through the Georgia county named after Gwinnett, my Georgia-born wife and I passed endless short brown herds of Mesoamericans and one Spanish-language sign after the next. ?This feels like another country,? she said. I looked at her and nodded. We are choking to death on our own niceness.
Our second president and cosigner of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, wrote that ?democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.? It appears that American democracy has swallowed a bottleful of sleeping pills, and it?s only a matter of time before they kick in.
And so today, July 4, 2011, I declare my independence from the United States of America. For now my gesture is entirely symbolic, and unlike 1776, there appears to be no frontier to which I can flee, at least not on this planet. But if anyone can suggest a viable exit strategy, I?ll consider it more seriously than I do anything currently being spewed by our unforgivably traitorous government.
http://takimag.com/article/the_american_nosedive
