Look How Far We've Come

My favorite president is Thomas Jefferson. He was a genius in about everything he did (outside of the slave raping). He supported the full funding of education from kindergarten through university level. He wrote his own bible. He provided his personal library to start the Library of Congress. He negotiated the Louisiana Purchase. He was also a fellow dreaded secular progressive.

It always cracks me up to hear the Bill O'Reillys of the nation rant and rave about the nefarious impact people like me have on society with our wacky, liberal beliefs. I hate to break it to these people but we were a nation founded by secular progressives. Actually, we were founded by a group of secular radicals. The great thing about men like Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, et al (and there are many great things about them) is that none of them would be considered great today. They'd be vilified by people like O'Reilly and reduced to some kind of wailing banshee demon like Howard Dean. It's like we started at the top and have just been sliding downhill ever since.

We've just gotten progressively dumber and (coincidentally) more religious over the years, which is completely bizarre and at odds with every other fucking First World country on earth. All those grand cathedrals in Europe may look impressive on postcards but come Sunday, they're as empty as the Federal Reserve. I was thinking about an exchange Bill Maher (my hero) had with Larry King a while back on this same topic. Larry said (I'm paraphrasing): "FDR always said 'I never went wrong relying on the American people.'" To which Bill Maher replied, "Well, people were smarter back then."

Maybe tv's to blame. Maybe the Internet. It just feels like we've devolved to the point where we're so narcissistic (and so very very dumb) that we could go, in just 199 years, from electing a man like Jefferson to electing a totally emotionally retarded, cipher, frat boy whose longest held job title pre-presidency was "alcoholic."

I am happy we elected Obama, because I feel like his victory sort of balanced out the past eight years of madness, but we'll be dealing with the repercussions of Bush's breathtaking ineptitude for years and years to come. And for that, I'd like to give a heartfelt "fuck you" to the red states for allowing this man to ransack America for nearly a decade. Because, really, without you, it wouldn't have been possible.