Downfall: What Goes Around, Comes Around

I'm re-reading "Downfall" by Richard B. Frank, a great rundown of the last couple of months of the war with Japan that focuses on the decision to drop the big one. It's a great book, I couldn't recommend it highly enough. And tonight I finally watched "Downfall," the great German movie about the last week or so of the war against Germany. Yes, the same "Downfall" that provided raw material all of those great Internet parodies. I'd recommend the movie too.

And I'm busy watching the real-time downfall of my own miserable country. People slipping out of the middle class but still voting for the Republicans who knocked them out; people cheering for capitol punishment and death from non-insurance; people complaining about taxes that are already too low because someone told them that it was a problem; our civil rights being degraded day by day; people whose grandparents immigrated to America complaining that immigrants are ruining America; a financial establishment that is obviously beyond control and firmly in the driver's seat; prisons full to bursting with inmates guilty of non-violent life-style crimes; labor unions in danger of total extinction; a national security state that has become the de-facto government of America, transcending electoral politics. I never thought I'd live to see the day.

This downfall shit is hard, when it comes. And remember, the Germans voted those guys in too, and we saw how that worked out.