Sociopathic corporate malfeasance and gangster banks are easily the biggest evils and the worst predators around. But the second- and third-worst factors are (a) the butt-plug teabaggers who think that slapping constraints on corporations is un-American and (b) cultural hee-haws who allow themselves to be played by corporate rightwing tricksters who feed them what they want to hear and get them to vote against their economic interests by persuading them that a Presidential election is about supporting heartland values (i.e., no abortion or gay marriage).
Get rid of the rightwing heartland element and you’d have a lot less support for corporate evils and a political climate that would be a whole lot healthier and more progressive.
I’ve offered mock solutions like green concentration camps and hypotheticals like clapping your hands three times and making all the yokels disappear. But there’s a realistic solution that I honestly think would work, and that both sides would be happy with. Seriously.
Break the country into two nations like Czechoslovakia did. A red Slovakia and a blue Czech Republic. Most of the economic vitality and enlightenment are concentrated in the blue states (I think), and a lot more could get done if the blues could run things in a reasonable, less-crazy fashion. Let the reds have their retrograde, anti-healthcare, let’s-preserve-our-white-heritage attitudes with their higher divorce rates and fatty foods and worship of old-school, fossil fuel lifestyles and “drill, baby, drill.”
Everyone could still travel around and visit the other sector any time they want. Nothing would change access-wise. Northerners could still drive down to see relatives and visit Texas any time. Manhattan hipsters could still visit Austin during South by Southwest. They could still go down to Louisiana and get drunk and buzz around on the bayou on flatboats. Everything would be the same except that most of the foul people would be running their own red nation, and would have a lot less to say about the progressive shape of things as far as the serious money and real power centers are concerned.
Abraham Lincoln said that a nation divided against itself — a Northern United States vs. a Confederacy — cannot stand. He may have been right in the early 1860s, but today geographical unity isn’t what it used to be. And a nation like ours, paralyzed by the refusalism of the corporate-fellating loony-tune right, is pretty much a stagnant and ungovernable thing. Cut out the fungus, let the cultural conservatives have their own Dogpatch Nation and things will be better. And we could still enjoy each other’s company when we feel like it. Hell, I had a great time when I was in Shreveport two or three years ago.
