Diving Into the Third World

I'm thinking about turning into a Marxist. Ol' Karl used to talk about these irresistible currents of history that just swept you along and you couldn't do anything about'em, like the current that swept communism mostly out of existence. (He may have had some other currents in mind.) I'm looking at what's happening in the US. It's gotta be an irresistible current. It couldn't be on purpose. Little while back, I found a story about how Toyota decided to put a factory in Toronto because Americans were too hard to train when they weren't actually illiterate. Isn't that why companies don't have factories in Zimbabwe? 'Look, Ma, we're almost a third-world country. Can I have a spear?' After decades of trying to make every kid as dumb as the dumbest kid, I guess we did it. America is hollowing out, I tell you. Fast. It's societal apoptosis, cultural gangrene by national choice. It hasn't quite gotten bad enough for people in Texas to notice it, as they drive their Subarus to Wal-Mart to buy Chinese merchandise, but give it five years. Maybe ten. The Soviet Union collapsed from sheer bumbling foolishness. We're working on it. I figure it must be a current. Or maybe sometimes history has a sense of humor. They that say brevity is the soul of wit. We've had a couple of hundred years. Looks like brevity to me. Lots of the mess comes from the feddle gummint, the employer of only resort for officious and intrusive muddle-headed affirmative-action dullards. Do you know how stupid these people really are? Used to be to get a feddle job you took the Federal Service Entrance Exam, which was actually hard. Now it's reflectometer readings and estrogen counts, which is why everything Washington touches turns to mud. And it touches everything, like a prospective shoplifter in a jewelry store. Ever ten minutes a study appears saying that kids can barely read. Yes! In America, the richest most hooptee-whatever, leader of nations, etc. How is this possible? How hard is it to teach kids to read? Not very. It's hard to keep most of them from doing it. We've managed it, though. The schools are feminized, ideologized, psychologized, amphetamized, egalitized and therapeuted'and run by the government. They do everything they can to keep anyone else from opening a school that might work. We're not illiterate despite the government, but because of it. Then there's the War on Drugs. Uncle Sugar spends billions for decades on eliminating drugs, and what do we have? Every rec drug you've ever heard of is available at prices you can't afford to turn down, delivered by an efficient system of distribution that reaches conveniently into every town in the country. Want half a key of grass? Your friendly local connection will bring it to your door. Suppose Washington tried to distribute drugs that well. Prices would soar. Everyone would go into withdrawal. How about illegal immigration? The feds really did well on that one, no te parece? Washington tells poor Mexicans, 'Look, it's illegal to cross this border, see? But if you make it we'll give you welfare, medical care, jobs, driver's licenses, and schools of a sort for your kids. If you don't make it, we'll send you back and you can try again. Now, don't cross it, you hear?' The best way to get rid of immigration would be to have Washington encourage it. No Mexican would live long enough to finish the paperwork. Then there's Iraq, a minor dirtball country with no military. After four years of trying the US government can't conquer it. The State Department didn't know enough about the world to stay out. The whole clownish exercise is run by martial milquetoasts and pantywaist gunslingers at National Review. If Iraq wins, does that make it the World's Only Remaining Superpower? Maybe societies just wear out, or get all clogged up on rules and regulations, or maybe it's just somebody else's turn to be number one. I reckon it's like atherosclerosis. The wretched gummint grows like a clot, gums up everything, and then nothing works. You get rules saying you can't do anything and you have to do everything else. Pretty soon you can't swing a cat without going to jail. You have to hire who Washington wants, can't teach your own kids, or tell the truth, anything. I don't think too many folk in the US have figured out that America isn't the power that it was. Manufacturing has gone overseas, along with more and more brain work like programming. I was in China a short while back and a Chinese businessman sort of fellow said as how the Chinese had just sent their first load of cars to the US to sell. The quality wasn't up to world standards, he said their engineers said. They knew that. But they thought that in three years it would be. Meanwhile Ford and GM totter on the edge of bankruptcy. The social situation is just as balled up as everything else. The country doesn't have cities any longer. It has enclaves of inassimilable third-worlders who make up more than a quarter of the population and growing. California is going back to Mexico. Miami might as well issue passports. Lots of cities have already gone back to Africa. What proves that all of this is an irresistible current is that the white population is trying to become third-world. I mean, the reasonable thing would be to try to make the best of a losing situation'save money, learn to compete, teach everybody's kids, keep standards up, at least maintain a little self-respect. Nah. That would make sense. It looks like irresistible currents don't do sense. Here's an eddy in the irresistible current, from Wired Online: 'But there's hope for Huey, Dewey and the rest, not to mention the Dark Knight and the Green Lantern. In conjunction with Disney, several Maryland elementary schools are launching a comic-based reading program. Meanwhile, high-school teachers and librarians are also pushing comics and graphic novels, saying they're helpful in getting struggling kids motivated to read.'

If the current isn't irresistible, the eddy is. The policy is more comic than the books. I mean, this is the world's leading technological power? Hey, step right up, get your ticket to Bangla Desh. Or stay where you are. It's coming to you, by popular demand.