a parallel universe in decline

Supply-side economics. Increased revenue through tax reduction. Fighting economic recession with austerity.

For 32 years our political conversation has been dominated by these and other fantasies, concocted by a cynical and corrupt financial elite, implemented by their faithful political servants (all the Republicans and lots of Democrats), and successfully sold to a gullible and (at first, anyway) trusting public.

And now they've been eclipsed. Reality has caught up with a country demoralized and severely damaged by fantasy as policy. People have finally noticed that there's robbery going on, and that they are the victims. More importantly, most now understand the life of the earth itself depends on our acknowledging reality.

For 32 years I've raged at the people who engineered this series of interconnected scams, but now that their karmic deficit is past due, anger dissipates, since anger always proceeds from fear. But political hacks like Romneh, Boehner, Lindsay "Hucklebery Hound" Graham and his evil twin Old Man McCain, and backwoods Senator Mitch McConnell, rather than inspiring one's fear, are more likely under the present circumstances to arouse pity, along with a certain amount of disgust.

It's not that they're forgiven, for each of these men is a criminal who deserves punishment. I believe an appropriate punishment would be to force each of them for the remainder of his years to wear earphones, through which they would perpetually listen to their old speeches about Saddam's WMD, about the need for tax cuts for "job creators," about how our financial meltdown and ensuing depression were caused by "deficit spending" and/or HUD fair-lending policies, about austerity as necessary to alleviating the "debt crisis," and a host of other things they were totally wrong about, too numerous to reproduce here.

"'Revenge is mine,' saith the Lord, and he, she, or it can have it. But I'll still laugh when the door hits these clowns in the ass on their way out.

Illustration by Saul Steinberg (1914-1999), for the New Yorker.