Christmas Wishes

By all accounts it's been a bleak year, at least if you pay attention to the news.

Between the great European refugee migration, Putin's quest for world domination, and ISIS forcing the Nations of Virtue into a death match for the future of civilization, we're led to believe that things only went from bad to worse in 2015.

The think tank here at Falling Downs figures most of this is scaremongering or all-out bullshit.

Take those huddled masses hiking to Europe for example. Sooner or later some of the brighter lights in the Western intellectual firmament are going to connect the dots and realize that most of these folks are coming from countries that we've been bombing to ratshit for the last ten or twenty years.

Hey! Maybe that's why they're refugees! Maybe we should stop bombing them?

Maybe if we stop creating refugees we wouldn't have a refugee crisis on our hands.

This would of course entail some soul-searching in the centres of power in the West, and the most central of centres of power would be Washington. There is hope on the horizon, and though this may be hard to believe, that hope comes in the person of one Donald Trump.

Not that Mr. Trump has any fresh ideas or policy options that would lead to a more peaceful world; I would agree with the critics who claim he is a bigot and a racist who is totally bereft of ideas or policy options, but those critics are missing the point.

Donald Trump is important because he threatens the very foundations of America's toxic, sclerotic, and America-destroying two-party political system. With any luck, Trump could yet create a legacy other than over-priced condos and bankrupt casinos; he could be the catalyst for a long overdue reinvention of politics in the USA.

The business of politics has to be taken away from business interests. Citizens United was the last nail in the coffin of American democracy. Until that is undone, America's downward spiral will continue. Not Donald Trump nor anyone else is going to make America great again until the system itself is wrestled out of the hands of the corporate lobbyists and the super-PACs and the armies of Beltway think-tankers.