The American Circus

It really doesn’t matter if you care or not, every day we are all inundated with news and a lot of it has to do with the circus that Washington politics has become.

It’s true that Washington has always been something of a sideshow, but over the last few years, the craziness has really been ratcheted up with the arrival of the current regime. Now it’s all crazy all the time.

To me, at least, it seems to be very much a reflection of the overall state of affairs in a country that feels like it’s running on fumes these days.

They are carrying a staggering debt that is inching its way to $25 trillion.

Republican politicians, who control both houses, are doing nothing but:

• Passing tax cuts to support the rich,

• Cutting essential services to punish the poor,

• Feeding the military industrial complex to sell weapons to the world and keep the endless war going which punishes people everywhere and encourages the terrorist movement be more and more destructive,

• De-regulating heavily polluting industries that will cause even more environmental damage,

• Ignoring the threat of climate change while millions of their own people have their lives ruined by it,

• Sitting idly by while their country’s infrastructure crumbles,

• Taking in all kinds of money from the old school industries they continue to support,

• Allowing a certifiably narcissistic president to do or say whatever he wants to the American people and the world, mostly lies and fabrications.

• Refusing to support the development of job creating renewable energy industries, while other countries forge ahead and make them look like they are moving backwards,

• Ignoring the rights of women, which will probably turn out to be the bullet to the head for them,

• Inhumanely separating immigrant parents from their children,

• Supporting tariffs that are creating a trade war in the world and causing thousands of job losses in their own country,

• Marginalizing African Americans, Muslims, gays, lesbians and trans-gender people,

• Using the bible as a weapon to appease religious fundamentalists and support ultra conservatism,

• Doing nothing to attempt to narrow the ideological gap between conservative and liberal thinking

If I have missed anything I’m sure it will be pointed out to me by my trolls.

Usually, when a country starts acting the way America is acting, it tends to be an indicator of something very wrong within the country itself.

In any sort of normal world, someone like Donald Trump, with no political allegiance, diplomatic skills or empathy for his countrymen, would never have been elected president.

But this is not a normal world. Trump played on hatred, racism, fear of immigrants stealing jobs, fear of Islamic people all being terrorists, fear of the media having an anti-government agenda, and fear of other countries stealing American jobs. All of which have, time and again, been proven to be false claims.

But somewhere in between the dancing bears and the trapeze artists, Trump found the hot buttons and pressed them over and over again, and managed to bring out the pissed-off maniac in millions of Americans, who were more than willing to fall in the hate line behind him and along with a little help from his Russian creditors, and a lot of skillful Republican gerrymandering, propel him into a job that he was probably the least qualified candidate to fill.

And then the circus began. Every day, seven days a week some new craziness would appear in the centre ring and command our attention.

Every day the country started moving in reverse and is still doing it. Every day, all the deregulation continued to artificially inflate the market, and the rich got richer. Every day some new brush fire started and sucked up all the air so the congress could do its destructive work with basically nobody looking or caring.

And now…here you are, America, a year and a half into a presidency that has done virtually nothing for the country except further isolate it from the world, make it less trustworthy to anyone who wishes to trade with them, add about 4 trillion to the national debt, and basically widen the gap between the rich and the rest.

And all you have to show for it is a world that has downgraded you from a democracy, the largest debt of any country on the planet, a crippling loss of respect and power in the world, and a government that that is corrupt beyond belief.

Believe it or not, this all has very little to do with Trump, who really is only a symptom of the malaise. It has much more to do with the leadership of both parties, who have been taking money from corporate interests, ever since the nation was formed.

The only difference is that back in the day these industries were what was needed to grow the country. Now they have outlived their usefulness and need to either diversify or give way to the new, neither of which the old white men who run them are willing to do.

But the writing is on the wall, and believe it or not Trump is the wake-up call the country needs. Because he embodies everything that is wrong with America today.

But on the flip side, these are the lessons that show America exactly what needs to be changed to turn their old Barnum & Bailey Circus into a new world Cirque de Soleil.

Let’s hope that they can do this starting with flipping the houses in November, then following up with getting rid of Trump, and his sickening egotistic rhetoric, in 2020 or sooner.