Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Minions of Turds

Minions of Turds

Anyone following this blog knows that a big oak tree fell in my yard a couple weeks ago and I have been hard at work to get it blocked, split and hauled away. Concurrently I have two other fire wood jobs to complete before the snow comes. As I was working on the oak this morning I got on a philosophical bent and began to ponder if there was an analogy between what happened to the Oak and what is happening to our Republic.

It is a normal reaction to attribute the final outcome of an event to the last link in the chain of causation. For example if on the last play of a football game a defenseman makes a mistake that decides the game he is credited the next morning with having lost the game. Never mind the hundred failures that proceeded it, the one that happens last is the one that gets the red rose pinned to the nose.

The same is true regarding the oak. Someone driving by would say…."that big oak in Percy’s yard fell last night in the storm…must have been the high winds that blew it down." Now this oak was at least 125 years old. This was not the first storm it experienced. It had survived droughts, floods, lightening, tornados and a thousand storms. While the wind had been intense it was nothing the mighty old oak hadn’t experienced before. So why then did it fall?

As I began to section the trunk into salami slices the reason became self evident. At some point in it's life a limb had broken off and moisture seeped in. This attracted insects that burrowed inside. Then a woodpecker came along and ate the insects but in the process opened the fissure a little more. Then a squirrel gnawed out an opening following the soft punk down into the trunk. For fifty generations that squirrel’s family lived there and as their poop accumulated it settled and began to rot deep into the trunk until it reached the inner core. Then the feces proceeded downward and the inside began to deteriorate. It was a long term, chronic and slow erosion as the tree slowly began to rot from the inside out.

Inside the tightly packed texture of turds left by the tree rodents, huge silver grubs bored sucking the decay and draining the vitality. These luminous blind worms, who never saw the light of day, acerbated the decay process and little by little the great tree weakened until finally a crisis came along that was just too much to bear any longer.

As I worked cutting it up I began to see the anology between this tree and our country. It grew strong and then from within the rot started until it finally came crashing down.

Politically I am a moderate. I dislike the socialists as much as I dislike the capitalists. That is the label I give the Democrats and Republicans.

When the capitalists are in power the common man gets sold out to corporate greed, yet it is a competitive and free market system they champion that fosters an entrepreneurial spirit that has helped make us great. But the capitalists exploited the workers and unions came along to restore the balance of power…If the industrialists hadn’t screwed the workers there would have been no need for the unions.

Opposing the capitalists are the socialists aka democrats, aka progressives, aka liberals aka communists. This is one clueless bunch of bozos. None of their political beliefs holds water and whenever they hold power they drive the economy and government to ruin. If the capitalists don’t steal it from the people the socialists squander it, everybody looks for a handout, and nobody wants to do the work but the Mexicans.

The unions were overtaken by organized crime, retirement funds plundered and protection given to those who did shoddy work and produced inferior products. To get back at them management moved this country’s production capability abroad. As the auto industry struggles to survive we see workers boozing it up and blowing pot…is it any wonder the American consumer buys foreign made autos? Who wants a car build by drunks and pot heads… Even though 95 percent of the auto workers no doubt work hard and take pride in their work its bad apples like these that ruin it for everyone else. Meanwhile the Progressives spend, spend, spend…

I wish I could say the Republicans are any better. It’s the capitalists that gave us Bernie Maddoff, and the raft of moron CEOs that plundered their companies dying as a consequence of their own poor management decisions. It was the cumulative effect or all their shenegans and abuse that set the recession rolling...not that socialist democrats and their insistance on providing homes to people who couldn't afford them didn't play a huge part.

The good news is that unlike the oak our system sometimes gets the rot exposed by the light of day. The media likes to turn the spotlight on government corruption and wastefulness...it sells. Whoever it was that insisted upon a free press when our constitution was written was really on the ball. We get to see some of what some of these grubby little worms are doing to us, catch a glimpse of the idiocy and corruption that is taking place and the ire of public disgust can be brought to bear, at least enough to scare some of those rascals who put self interest before the public good. If I hear anything these days its "Vote the Bums out." The longer a politician stays in office the more they shed their sense of responsibility for honest service for the good of self interest. There should be term limits…Idealism with some inexperience is much better than cynicism with the knowledge of how to cover your tracks and play the system.

Let me end this rant on a positive note. The Greeks who invented Democracy said it was a lousy form of government…but they added a caveat. It's ten times better than the second runner up.