Tuesday, the Wonder Dog, is ten years old, which makes her seventy, in dog years. So I worry about the impending inevitability, even though she’s still very fit, and only a little more prone to sleeping than she was. Why do I upset myself with these thoughts? They don’t accomplish anything, they just make me unsettled.

How I do love to borrow trouble. Still, the global economy is close to a meltdown and it can all be directly attributed to the stupidity of our House of Representatives. Let me re-phrase. The Congress is about to destroy our national credit-rating (having already badly damaged the rest of the globe’s faith in our overall stability) and the GOP have no reason for doing that, outside of the rankest stupidity.

Our economy is just returning to ‘sound’, much improved from the Bush-depression and with our deficit cut in half from that time when Democrats and Obama took leadership of the car-wreck they were bequeathed by the GOP. Only fundamentalist demagoguery and white-supremacy bigotry are behind the incredible obstacles the GOP has thrown in Obama’s path since his first election. But, being ignorant, they have now backed themselves into a corner of shame and they’re doing their level best to take all of us down with them, while blaming their failure on Obama.

Yes, I know it’s hard to believe—but then, we have been soft on ignorance for a very long time, soft on fundamentalist extremism, and soft on corporations—for decades now. We have forgotten how to laugh the morons and hucksters off of our national stage—and now we are used to the idiocy that passes for Republican discourse. We have forgotten what bulls**t tastes like, and we are now on a heavy diet of same—with ‘the Donald’ for dessert.

I think it started with the Cold War, an entirely specious exercise in paranoia that was used to create divisions and controversy—in the absence of any real threat that the ‘Commies’ ever wanted to ‘invade the USA’, much less start a ‘nuclear exchange’. Then there was Viet Nam, a mistake that the politicians of the day were too proud to admit to making—at the cost of tens of thousands of soldiers and a near-civil-war at home.

Then there was the Evangelical movement, bringing the middle ages back to 20th century America! Then the ‘War on Drugs’, which has wasted many billions of dollars and not a few lives without stopping a single drug deal over the last forty years. Then there were the AIDS-deniers, with President Reagan chief among them. And the anti-abortion cultists. And the anti-biology cultists—and the generally anti-science-of any-kind cultists.

Plus we had that episode of arming the Afghan extremists who were resisting the Soviet invasion—without any thought of their future once they had done what we wanted, i.e. beat the Soviets. We lost two very impressive buildings to that failure of understanding—and much, much more, and it hasn't stopped since.

Then there’s the Tea Party. They have already taken up far too much of our time and effort, so I will simply say that they are ignorant, knee-jerk reactionaries with no basic tenets other than a fervent desire for small arms and a hatred for our first non-white president.

And now it’s defunding Obama-care, government shut-down and debt-ceiling threats—a frontal attack on all that America truly stands for. These entitled, elitist bigots have no place in an intelligent 21st-century society and the sooner the GOP realizes that, the better for everyone. They were bad (and stupid) enough when they were simply Republicans—there was no need to super-size their ignorance.

I think the basic problem is that reasonable people never make nearly as much noise and fuss as fringe fanatics do—even when that minority is truly quite small, they can still have more influence than the other 90% of the country that doesn't have some blind adherence to one ideology, the true silent majority of sensible, law-abiding, ungrasping, unexcitable citizens. As one of those, I can only say that perhaps the time has come for us to get upset enough to take the reins away from these people—even if that means getting our hands dirty in politics, both local and national.

Having said that, I must confess I’d rather have root canal surgery than have to spend my days conferring with a bunch of slimy pols. Or knocking on doors to support a candidate. Hell, I thought I was making a big concession when I actually began to vote, about twenty years ago! But I am old and sick and easily confused—you young, healthy people out there have got to ask yourselves if this wonderful state, and this wonderful country, is worth putting yourselves to the trouble of helping to govern. Without that willingness, we don’t have a real democracy—we only have a machinery for power-hungry megalomaniacs to drive willy-nilly.