The nation has stepped back from the fiscal cliff but in doing so, has backed over the insolvency cliff. 

Wheeeeee!  We are now in freefall.  Enjoy the ride.  Newton’s Law of Gravitation has taken over. 

In case you’ve forgotten Newtonian physics, here is the law:

Every particle of stupidity in the nation attracts every other particle of stupidity with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the brainwashing of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between fact and the propaganda spewed by academia, media, Hollywood, and the two political parties.

A corollary:  The more that the masses know about who has impregnated Kim Kardashian, the less they know about how the government has screwed them into insolvency.

The Roman Empire kept the plebes docile with bread, circuses and public baths and toilets.  The American empire is much more sophisticated.  It has Big Macs, Big Gulps, Big Pharma and Big Butts, including Kim Kardashian’s big butt.  It also has the BCS Bowl, the Super Bowl and Tidy Bowl.

Speaking of college football bowls, metro Phoenix is the host of two of them, and a couple of the teams stay at resorts near my home in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale.  The other day, while waiting at a traffic light, a Scottsdale motorcycle cop zoomed into the intersection with lights flashing to stop traffic.  Other motorcycle cops sped by at 60 mph in a 45 mph speed-limit zone to stop traffic at other intersections down the road.  Then came an undercover police SUV with more flashing lights than the Las Vegas Strip.  After that came four swank motor coach buses full of football players from one of the universities competing in one of the bowls. 

The word "university" is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars.”  Now it means tattooed hulks with tiny brains who are treated like potentates.

The motto of my all-male Catholic high school was Esto Vir, or “Be a man.”  Being a man didn’t mean being the size of a motor coach.  Nor did it mean squirting Gatorade in your mouth on the sidelines of a football field after two minutes of physical activity on the field.  Being a man meant being learned and cultured, understanding political and moral philosophy, controlling one’s impulses, having manners, and pursuing a lifetime of reflection and learning.

By that definition, there are very few men left in the United States, none of whom are in Congress.

Or in the White House.

I stopped listening to speeches and news conferences of presidents after becoming sick to my stomach from listening to George W. Bush mangle the English language and America’s reputation.

I never imagined that we would go from awful to worse, but that’s what we did by going from Bush to Obama.  Breaking my one-man boycott of presidential speeches, I listened to Obama’s recent speech about the fiscal cliff.  It was vacuous, insipid, sophomoric, and dishonest.  Yet the handpicked stooges in the audience cheered, joining the cheering of the sycophants in the lapdog media and academia.  I thought I had gone back in time and was watching a Leni Reifenstahl film. 

Despite the fact that over a hundred million people were slaughtered by governments in the 20th century--especially by governments that preached redistribution, fairness and social justice--the masses have not learned the danger of cheering control freaks, ideologues, demagogues and sociopaths. 

Even the Germans, who should know better, turned out in the hundreds of thousands to cheer President Obama after he first took office.  Hegelian philosophy still runs in their Prussian veins.

At least the Germans learned the danger of printing money to paper over deficit spending.  We haven’t even learned that.

Enjoy the ride over the insolvency cliff.  I’ll see you at the bottom. 

____________________

Mencken’s Ghost is the nom de plume of an Arizona writer who can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.