Let’s call it a ninety-day bloodless coup d’etat. Well, nearly bloodless. Close enough to bloodless. All power to the executive! Isn’t this something Presidents dream? Or maybe not just Presidents. What do wannabe Presidents dream? Does the common person dream of such power? I doubt it. The common person has better things to dream about, like the job, the mortgage, the food on the table, and the kids’ education. So the common person dreams about common things and the President dreams about power over the common person. That is old news, very old news.
I wonder, as a common person, why we permit the executive to rule us willy-nilly and why we pay for it? They have given us a lot of excuses to permit them the power over the years. Once there were the Nazi Party and the Communist Party threats for us to fight with our own lives and our own money, but those threats petered out. Then there was Poverty to Fight and, Good Lord, Drugs! Certainly the parents who grew up smoking dope cannot tolerate their children growing up smoking dope! Certainly not! And the executive must prosecute these wars against something or other because the common person lacks the will or the power or the brains to do it personally. We all know that. That these executive wars have been total failures is not to be mentioned in public. It’s a state secret.
I won’t mention the Iran-Contra scandal, I doubt if anybody remembers it anyway, but the fact remains that the turf wars over drugs, guns, and oil are still on the executive agenda and we, the common people, are still paying to wage these wars. Now that the executive has assumed all power, we the common people, can expect to be snuffed out for complaining about their wars and about the extortion enacted against us. The executive tells us, shut up, or we will shut you up.
A similar thing happened in Athens long ago. A similar thing happened in Rome a few centuries later. Now it’s happening to us. It’s old news.
