The Attack of the Killer Clowns

It could be a script for the next Dark Knight graphic novel.

The nation is enveloped in a gray fog of intellectual confusion. The populace is on the edge of ominous social and economic crisis.

The preceding era of deliberate skullduggery by an administration, whose policies have made serious dents in citizens’ civil rights, has created a climate of fear and cynicism that encourages unprincipled men to seek fortune and fame as court jesters to a pride of testy corporate privateers and a small cohort of hidebound senior statesmen — the conservative prone “Unmovables”: zombies with an ideologues’ all-consuming appetite for the status quo.

Those jesters, these garrulous bald-faced mountebanks, profess only to be “entertainers” (I’ll-huff-and-I’ll-puff-and-I’ll-blow-your-house-down Limbaugh, Off-with-their-heads! O’Reilly, “Liar-liar-pants-on-fire Beck and other lesser personalities of that ilk, ego driven humbugs — EDHs.); entertainers who secretly envision themselves as “Killer Clowns,” the zealot assassins targeting the new administration. They saw an untested president as a new kid on the playground of public opinion. So with the bravado of the school bully they launched a barrage of innuendo, half-truths and outright lies. Their audience stood on the broad middle ground of national politics; men and women who were fearful of what lay ahead, worried about new taxes, reluctant to embrace radical change, and opposed to any legislation that might be tainted by socialist sentiment. The Killer Clowns, these minions of the unshrivin, bared their daggers and schemed to bring reason to its knees and their victim to ultimate failure.

If this were a Dark Knight tale it would be time to call in the Caped Crusader.

But this is no comic book fantasy, it’s the state of the nation.

This is the United States of America at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. It is a time when sincere and clear-eyed bipartisan leadership is critical to the nation’s survival. There are voices of reason on both sides. Yet we have one political party leading a hell-bent-for-leather charge toward a utopian tomorrow on Don Quixote’s horse; and another party acting as if its members were truculent children refusing to put away their favorite toys, intractably frozen in opposition to every progressive thought, even to the most basic of human needs — universal health care.

The Killer Clowns and their EDH counterparts having poisoned the well of mutual trust, triumphed. They gleefully sacrificed the bright promise of tomorrow to the gods of chaos, while standing on the trash heap of venality. It is betrayal of civility during a gathering meltdown; it is infamy writ large across the cherished ideals of a democratic people.

So what lies ahead?

A mobilization of the extreme ends of the political spectrum in angry response to the prodding of advertising revenue hungry mass media?

Disaffected socialist radicals and ultra conservative secessionists egged on by autocrats who are eager to exploit every failed nuance of government policy for the sake of increasing their political supremacy?

There are lemmings of various stripes on each side who follow only megaphones and TV cameras. Every corsair has his crew of sycophants. Multinational corporations are stateless wielders of economic power with self-serving interests and deep, deep treasure chests. Because of a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court, corporate buccaneers have a strategic opportunity to lob salvos of money into the political arena from their offshore flagships. That’s equivalent to throwing gasoline onto already kindled fires of public outrage.

When governments fail, want-a-be despots with an obsession for absolute power and wealth aspire. We are standing on dangerous ground under a threatening sky. Insurgents hoist tea bags and red flags into the darkness to test the wind. In Jeffersonian prose the surly wind whispers, “revolution.”