Shining City on Fire

A team of the world’s most luminary beaconologists today issued its much anticipated report on the example America has been setting for the rest of the world so far in this millennium.

Said the team’s lead beaconologist, Ecuadorian Rolando Garzon, “We have some good news for America and also some bad. The good news is that she will keep her designation as the Shining City on a Hill. The bad news is that America has become the brightly shining example of how a country should not conduct herself.

“So I would say to my so time-honored neighbors to the north—take solace in the knowledge that while it may now be by deplorably immoral counterexample, you continue to clearly point out the way for the rest of us nonetheless.

According to the report, titled “Through the American Looking Glass,” the flipping of America from the best to the worst kind of exceptionalism was caused largely by the dizzy, mind-boggling imbalance created as power and wealth have rushed upward in recent decades in such floods of obvious anti-democratic unfairness posing night and day as its opposite that America has no idea which way is up anymore as she grasps at what she stands for.

Said Norwegian beaconologist Alfhild Folkestad, “In this brave new topsy turvy American world the Makers take. And take. And take. The victims at the bottom of an economy crashed by a breakneck, greed-fueled crime spree by the Makers at the top are the culprits. Watchdogs do nothing but grow into fat cats.

“Terrorism makes the world safe from terrorism. The truth tellers are the felons and the felons they tell the truth on can look forward to America never taking their eyes off the truth tellers long enough to look backwards at the actual felonies. A legally illegal killer drone program that does and does not kill the innocent by the hundreds does and does not officially exist in a Global War to kill all the terrorists a Global War on Terror is bringing to life.

“Whistleblowing is great until the whistles start blowing. Transparency is great so long as the openness doesn’t play out in the open. Post racialism is great until election season or one’s ground in a gated community must be stood. The science that finds the earth-destroying oil is great but the same science that finds the downside of the earth-destroying oil is a hoax.

“Journalists don’t cover government and/or corporate outrages but cover them. He always says up and black, she always says down and white, respectively and vice versa.

“The Jesus lovers are the haters. And in perhaps the most disorienting development of all, the right left their right minds with the left right behind them.”

Said Philippe Trudeau, senior press secretary for the world outside the Shining City on a Hill, “The longstanding debt of gratitude we owe our American torch bearers continues to grow even as she now goes up in flames, her illustrious best and brightest lighting the way off the road to self-immolation.

“The eye-watering, earth-circling miasma of toxic stench emanating from the Potomac will be a constant reminder to the rest of us of what happens when the wealth and power of a sociopathic, unbelievably greedy and self-important overclass are allowed to reach critical mass and reality starts becoming so thoroughly what the powerful say it is that it somehow even becomes the official reality that the powerful would never ever do everything in their unprecedented power to instill in the country a deep, shameful fear of the truth that its people are deeply and shamefully afraid of the truth about what they have become thanks to the catastrophic social climate change America’s hot shots have wrought with their not so human activities.”

In related news, the US Department of Tradeoffs is admitting today that it was a careless decimal error during the Reagan administration that led to the really bad decision to take care of the One Percent at the exorbitant expense of Everybody Else.

“Boy,” said the department’s Molly Albright, “you move the decimal point over to where it belongs and it begins to really look like maybe it should have been the other way around.”