[And I'm just getting started. This is just a little foretaste of what I would tell my Children about what America really IS these days. It's a horrible, dying, fetid, nasty place, full of people who have no common purpose and who actively hate each other. It's a dead Republic.]

Looking back at the past year and the two years before that, this New Year’s I wanted to think what I would tell my children (if I had any) about the Real state of the country they live in, and have to try to grow up in and thrive in. Barack Obama is rumored to be hosting a gala in the halls of Congress called the “State of the Union” message, and I’d just like to preempt him by telling ordinary Americans what things are really like here in America now that he has been the President for two years.

It’s a depressing story, and it’s getting worse, as I’m sure he knows. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Most of the Republicans we’ve just elected to Congress will not do anything substantive to stop the slide once their constitutents really weigh in. John Boehner will keep crying, as he did again today.

If I had a chance to tell my children something, the only thing worth conveying to them would be this: “America cannot stop spending money at the Federal, State and Local levels. All of the people who weren’t courageous enough to be real burnouts during the 1960s are currently running those governments, and they are atoning for their lack of courage, they think, by spending the country into the ground in the name of Social Justice. There is no hope for you and your children, it’s a generational thing. America is finished.”

I would tell them that there is no way they will ever earn enough to pay the tax burden that is going to be slapped on them in a few years time, regardless of what business they’re in, unless it is pure drug dealing. That’s right: the people who are going to be in a position to lead this country in 20 years are the drug dealers, corporate and noncorporate. It’s going to be a collection of drug dealers, pornographers, casino operators and tax collectors running the country by 2020, not engineers and scientists, not laborers and machinists, not doctors and lawyers: it’s going to be the thugs running the place. And people like John Kerry will get along with those thugs, because having a nation that has been converted into a Banana Republic is easy to deal with. He decries “cheap seats” politics but he really enjoys it better than anyone else in Congress.

I will tell my children: “I lived through the time of the greatest expansion of electronic technology in the history of human beings. And it was a waste of time. All of the effect of giving people cheap access to technology was designed so that corporations will know what they like, right down to what kinds of sheets they enjoy sleeping on in their beds. And all of the rest of it is a huge time sink. What started off as a way to increase people’s productivity turned out to be a gigantic mutual-masturbation exercise. But because it was the only thing anyone could rely on to keep growing the economy, it was encouraged. It’s useless. Cut the legs off that rabbit for me, please. That’s all America makes now is noise. And nobody listens to it.”

I’ll tell them: “Back when this country was founded, there was almost nobody here except a few rich people and a few poor people, but they were all in the same boat against the Indians and the British. Their ability to crush the savages and expand the country required they rely on each other and a few Frenchmen. Now we’ve grown to the limits of our domain and there are no savages to crush, nothing legal to exploit, the British and the French are whupped, and we have and a ruling caste of people who would prevent us from doing so even if we wanted to, which we do. Let’s make no bones about it: we want to crush and exploit. But we’re being prevented from doing so. China is not, and neither is India. If you really look carefully, you’ll see that the big people in Britain who still want to crush and exploit are all the ones who have homes in Dubai and invest in China and India. They really don’t want to live in Britain, because it takes all their money and makes them suffer through the endless guilt trip, which is why most of them are drunks.”

“Speaking of drunks, there is the whole problem of the Irish. They were doing pretty well up until recently, and then they found out how badly American bankers and investment firms had lied to them. Now they’re all drunks again. That is supposed to be seen in America as some kind of relief.”

“The President’s home state is the most bankrupt of any state in this country. For more than a decade it has listened to people pull the financial strings who shouldn’t have been allowed to piss on the front porch, but they did it. And they’re not dumb people! There is the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, all kinds of brainpower there, but lo and behold — they’re all flat broke and they’ve all screwed themselves! Now what they want to do is build more gambling parlors (always a source of reliable growth and estimable civic mores) and raise taxes and borrow more money to cover the enormous hole they’ve dug. Please, don’t read this, Children. It will tell you exactly what is going to happen to you. You just will not be able to stop.”