It’s been twenty years, but I’ve finally taken to heart all the criticisms of my political pessimism. It clearly does no good to be a “downer,” or “too negative” anyway. So, as the keystone to this year’s New Year’s resolutions, I’m presenting a more optimistic, less-cynical, more trusting face to the world.
After all, there can surely never be another dictator like Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler to spoil humanity’s natural and historically obvious state of liberty and justice for all. How could our inherently sweet-natured humanity ever again produce somebody like Pol Pot, Talaat Pasha, Tojo, Jorge Videla, Francisco Franco, Leopold II or Augusto Pinochet? The various Robert Mugabe, Somoza, Noriega, Ceaucescu, Mubarak, Batista, al-Bashir, Chavez, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il types are just a rare aberrance from the human norm of wise and benevolent rulers like…
Well, that’s not important now.
Sure, there may have been a time when sick and brutal tyrants like Nero, Vlad III, Herod, Caligula and Genghis Khan were more the rule than the exception. But certainly, now that people like Ho Chi Minh, Slobodan Milosevic, Kagame, Duvalier, Erdoğan, Calderón, and Khomeini are so rare, it’s understandable and even reasonable, that most of us are lackadaisical about politics, and fully trust that our ruling class is properly and selflessly taking care of our needs. The hundreds of millions killed in just the past century alone were just a statistical anomaly, you know. Really, what are the odds that we will get another Chiang Kai-Shek, Enver Pasha, Hirohito, Abdul Hamid II or Yahya Khan to order inhuman terror?
While it may seem that our government is so much more secretive, deceptive, powerful, corrupt and invasive than in those simpler, gentler days of America’s peaceful and humanitarian past (setting aside, of course, transient errors like slavery, Jim Crow, experiments on soldiers, prisoners and children, and the genocide of millions of Native Americans), I’m sure there is no cause for concern here in the Land of The Free, where we choose our own rulers in fair and open elections!
So, no more finger-pointing warnings from me anymore. No more tilting at windmills or charging headlong into the Electoral Brick Wall. No sir. My message for the New Year is … just relax! Your nation is competently, rationally, impartially and sustainably operated by people who care about you as an individual of dignity, in liberty and justice…for all!
…Just as I’ve personally learned my lessons about overly grave sobriety, general humanity has learned its lessons about corruption and violence. Humankind’s awful, cliquish/ clannish/ classist/ tribalist, thieving and brutish history is behind us now.
In fact, let’s erase it! Burn the old books! Tear down the monuments! Quit talking about all the mean people and brutal actions of the past!
All that’s left for modern Americans to do is spend our money, pay our taxes, and enjoy the peace, prosperity, justice and equality under law we all so richly deserve.
Yes, indeed, it is time we finally get what we deserve! Happy New Year!
We Declare 