[Click here to skip my diatribe and proceed directly to the WSJ article: "Can We Rescue the Republic Before the Dark Politics Take Over?" which inspired this post.]

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- W.B. Yeats

I surely hope Yeats was merely feeling down in the dumps when he wrote that, and wasn't working from a hellishly true glimpse of the future. Yet, more and more these days I get the sense that "the blood-dimmed tide" is in fact "loosed," and that everywhere indeed "the ceremony of innocence" is drowning, and just reading that "the worst are full of passionate intensity" sends chills up my spine.

I say this because there sure as hell is a lot of passionate intensity being hurled about, and I include myself among the hurlers, as now and again something pisses me off so egregiously that my choice of words in general discourse deteriorates to that found in basic military training regimens.

It's beginning to look to me as if trust in the very framework of our noble experiment, i.e. the constitutionally defined democratic republic that offers us a balance of powers to ensure that the will of the majority shall prevail without squashing the rights of the minority, is virtually kaput, and that the framework itself is becoming, if it hasn't already become to those who should know, a quaint idea that's been hopelessly outmoded by a technology that enables those with the most power to do whatever the hell they please regardless of what anybody else thinks, including their own mothers.

So where does this leave us little people if it's true? We can fight, and die quickly, gloriously and insignificantly, or we can hide in denial and pretend it ain't so and imagine we're enjoying the drugs and cheap entertainment tossed our way to keep whatever discontent we discover from rising any higher than a whine as we focus on the thrill of our ride in the bucket that's taking us straight to hell, or we can form tribes of like-minded folks willing to do whatever it takes for the tribe to prevail against the predators that virtually everyone outside the tribe then becomes.

 I've a sense that this last is already underway. The only catch I see with the idea is the like-mindedness part. To accomplish this, presumably  tribe members would have to subscribe to some fundamental principles and rules.

Any ideas? Oh, I don't know. Perhaps something along the lines of, "We the members of the Weain'tbuyinyershit Nation, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish these principles and rules for our tribe, to wit..."

It's a thought.