We have just gone through two lovely elections that were won on the carnival principle. Put up a lot of bright lights, some unusual things for the crowds to gawp at, a few scantily clad ladies of the evening, and a lot of smooth patter, and forget taking any of the issues seriously. Tell jokes, juggle balls and deliver applause lines. And most of all promise the sky while taking the suckers for all they have and will ever have.
It nearly didn’t work, but the extra effort was put in and the vans delivered their cargo loads of moral depravity to the polls, where the poll workers showed them how to vote, and then the vans took them to do some food stamp shopping to remind them of how good life is under the scam. And many other people, the ones who don’t return emails from Nigerian princes, didn’t bother to vote, because they don’t believe in any element of the scam. And that just means the chief scammers have an open field.
And so the reign of the scam continues for another four years. The world will burn and the country will slide closer to the economic abyss. But in their dorm rooms, the Julias will pine knowing that their Nigerian prince loves them (doesn’t he sent them daily emails personally addressed to them?) and the vans will go back and forth, and cashiers will run food stamp cards through the machines in neighborhoods which subsist entirely on the scam, and in the hospitals elderly patients will due because health care is free, but treatments are more expensive than ever. And the devil will laugh.
Carnivals have to end sooner or later. And the scam doesn’t look nearly as good in the light of day as it does at night, when everyone has had a few drinks and life seems good and magic can happen. A few of us hopefully thought that daybreak had come, but no it was only the light of the carnival and the drunken laughter of fools spending their last dime to hear their Nigerian prince crack a joke, hum a tune and pledge his undying love to them.
“The fool walks in darkness,” said the Chief Executive of a nation called Israel some 3,000 years ago. And for the fools of Carny Nation, who, as he observed, fold their hands and eat their own flesh, rather than work for a living, it is always the midnight hour, always time for another drink, another laugh, another novelty and another spin of the wheel that goes round and round and never stops until sunlight touches it and it turns to dust.
The fools of Carny Nation fancy themselves wise men. After all they eat without paying for it. They get money without working for it. Every baby they pop out buys them another pair of shoes. When they vote Democrat, the President of Carny Nation sends them a check. And so they put another vote in the machine, get back a few quarters, put another one in the mission, and wait for the day that the redistribution jackpot will give them everything.
Last year in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, the price of three eggs ran to 100 billion dollars. A beer cost 150 billion dollars and a roll of toilet paper, well it was just cheaper to use million dollar bills. We are talking about Zimbabwean dollars here, not American dollars, but eventually there will be no difference. Zimbabwe yesterday. America tomorrow. Money isn’t magic and there comes a point when no amount of words can increase its value. Eventually it becomes cheaper to print out presidential speeches on the bright economic future and use them as toilet paper.
When food stamps start coming in billion dollar quantities, then the sucker bet on Obama, Prince of Kenya, Indonesia and Chicago, may start looking bad. But suckers never realize when a bet is going bad. They double down and begin yammering some more about raising taxes. And why not. We’re sixteen trillion in debt. Why not raise taxes by a few trillion? You have to break a few billion dollar eggs to make a thirty-trillion dollar omelet. And that beer summit, it will cover the entire defense budget.