It takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob. -William F. Buckley Jr.
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Most of the hardest working men in America’s middle lands have spent their lives supporting the Republican Party. They have done so because their parents and their neighbors demanded they do so. Lately it appears they have enjoined themselves as to a cult of sailors that has lost the ability to weave rope. Their entire lives they have feigned to toil before God with their neighborly political conformity. In this regard they have served honorably and with abject loyalty.
Certain of their purpose and trusting of their captains they never paused to set a single moral limit on the quality of mercilessness they would serve. In recent years their labor has only restricted and not once helped speed America’s journey across the ocean of what is morally possible. As a result we are all at peril now.
We are not all at fault.
The Republican party’s self proclaimed ownership of America’s moral destiny has been long fabled but much failed. Their politicized version of the christian religion stands utterly vanquished. They still howl for darkness to come unto the land for political intent far more than they ever pray the darkness away for compassionate intent. Their run is grinding to a silent halt in the heartland as we speak. A gloaming has begun to break like evening’s blooded shadow across the pale autumn chaff which rolls in galant waves over the world’s last, best Arcadia.
The Republicans still look out nightly upon a star filled sky of wonder, of parading scientific discovery and yet only concern themselves with the darkness between the orbs. They are become a footnote in reality’s history that even their own textbooks will soon refuse to publish.
An elephant is loose in the American room. A single point of reality is all that remains in the wreckage. Their party teeters now atop their own drunken pachyderm: The GOP might be fronted by millionaire media operators but it is now dominated in votes only by the least educated political stratigraphy currently operating in the free world. All other Americans have been offensively and effectively discounted from legitimacy by them.
The Watergate veterans are in their last bunker now. They hang together by this single thread of common illiteracy. A strand that falsifies their party’s moral integrity the same way brittled rust keeps the form of a derelict shipwreck intact on the shoals. And now they have called this ominous storm down upon themselves.
And now they have called it down upon us all.
Make no mistake: The dissolution of the Big Red Machine was not caused by chance or by attack. They will falsely cry that they endured some conspiracy of invisible suffrage which forced them back into the wilderness. Nothing could be further from reality. (The only honorable political refugees today are the ones clamoring to escape the results of the GOP’s previous attempt at global executive leadership.) The truth is that they ran out of other people to blame for the outcome of their deliberate witlessness many Octobers ago. Alas, The Republicans have been at war with themselves for a long, long time. Victory is suddenly upon them.
The GOP chained itself before the mast of a ship defined by the absence of higher education and a common hatred for all forms of cultural and scientific cognizance: The only demographic line they still command unchallenged is white men without educations. There is no platform in modern history upon which an objective witness can observe more intense disdain for fundamental sophistication burning from a hotter rage to rule despotically over a highly complex world.
Along the way they have hurt America profoundly.
Still, no one expects any prominent Christiano-Republicans to ask forgiveness for the damage their cabal has done to America’s actual greatness in the world. Not a single apology will be forthcoming. The entire planet can plainly see that the first casualty of their collapse has been their faux-christian ethos.
That is ok.
The rest of America already understands how it must pain the Republican king makers to wake up mortal, fallible, imperfect, flawed and ungifted. Unchosen. The rest of us have lived under that banner our entire lives. In the end we are, all of us, still just a fleet of drunken sailors sharing the same port. We are by rights their Fellow Americans. So we don’t need an apology from the GOP.
But now really is the time for them to get their busted, flaming vessel out of our harbor.
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Ride for the High Country