Your Legacy

Dear George,

You are our lightening rod, our scapegoat and our canary in the coal mine who is being blamed for everything from the Iraq debacle to our economic meltdown. The drones are convinced that once you leave office, your successor will fix everything and America will return to the golden age that never was.

The fools!

You had nothing to do with it. You did not corrupt the system; you were simply the purest expression of a corruption that has existed since Columbus first set foot on our shores. Like the tide, it ebbs and flows, depending upon the degree of public outrage or apathy.

When the public gets its knickers in a knot over the greed and venality that emanates from our financial and political centers, corruptions recedes and bides its time until the public to the apathy that is its norm. Then like roaches, when the lights are clicked off, corruption emerges from its hole and continues to devour capital and resources.

You will be blamed for our current meltdown and a supine Congress will pass tepid reform measures that will be little more than window dressing, and enforcement will be lax for fear that it might endanger our prosperity that hasn’t been since the seventies, and the drones will accept this because they have been conditions to believe that they are living the good life even thought their standard of living has been in decline for three decades.

This time around, there will be no CBS documentaries to shine a spotlight on poverty in America, as there were in the sixties. There can be no poverty in the richest country in the world.

And if a critic should be bold enough to pen screeds against our inherently corrupt system, he will be dismissed as being “angry” because our social norms of good citizenship have taught the oppressed that that the polite response to their exploitation is to bow and scrape as they attach an American flag to their pickup trucks.

They are made to feel ashamed over their demand that they be paid a living wage, or that their employers provide health benefits and pension plans. When these are eliminated or cut, they are told there is no alternative (TINA) because they must sacrifice so America can remain prosperous and free.

Your legacy, Big Guy, has been to divert the public’s attention away from the fact that our ills are systemic and will remain so until the very structure of our corporate government is overturned.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones