soapboxdiner

Just stop feeding him. That's the ticket

I've got it! I know how we can finally get rid of Dubya!

It has been a long road to epiphany but dang it, sometimes the wait is where the fun is at.

It all started about three weekends ago when I was watching a John Edwards interview on CSPAN, right? And he was talking about a former administration's cabinet (Sorry, I have apparently lost all memory of the specifics here. Senility is a bitch.) who charged one of their members with the task of studying how the empires of the past rose. John put forth, "Wouldn't it be better to study who empires have fallen?" Because in a very real sense, we already are an empire who has risen. The trick is, how can we avoid the falling?

And then, by lucky happenstance, I began reading Guns, Germs, and Steel - The Fates of Human Societies, in a book swap with one of the docs at work. In the book is a lovely little paragraph that goes as follows:

Besides sustaining scribes and inventors, (the cultural development of)food production also enabled farmers to support politicians. Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band's own territory and to shifting alliances with neighboring bands. With the rise of dense, sedentary, food-producing populations came the rise of chiefs, kinds, and bureaucrats. Such bureaucracies were essential not only to governing large and populous domains but also to maintaining standing armies, sending out fleets of exploration, and organizing wars and quests.

And then I remembered that it was only after the farmers got sick of paying all the taxes and producing all the food for the city folk of Rome, and therefore moved into the city themselves. With a diminished tax base and a larger percentage of non-production-oriented citizens in the cities (who by that time partook in and demanded quite expensive government assistance as well as government-funded entertainment in the form of gladitorial games and such), the empire did not have the money to pay their armies or go off conquering other people, and so they got smaller and smaller and more corrupt and then the empire died.

In brief.

Which all culminated in the moment of genius! If we all stop feeding Dubya, he will fall and then go away! Hurray!

You think Kerry would take me on as a campaign advisor?

6:27 am - 02.25.04
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