Lemme Be Honest With You
        It’s not like we didn’t tell lies before D. Trump came along. Consider the following national fabulations:
    We live in the only country in which the candidate with most votes doesn’t necessarily win the election and one in which laws are enacted to prevent certain racial and ethnic groups from voting at all. Still we call ourselves a democracy.
    We live in a country that imprisons more people, by magnitudes, than any other in the world, including China a dictatorship with five times our population. And yet we call ourselves free.
    We live in a nation forever at war or preparing for war, typically with countries that have done us no harm, present no threat, and that most of us have never heard of. No matter, we call ourselves peaceful.
    We live in a country dominated by ever engorging monopolies and oligopolies but nevertheless call ours a free market economy.
    We live in a country with an astounding imbalance of wealth in which the fruits of our labor go to a tiny and select few (less than one percent) to whom we grant immunity from our laws and veto power over any public initiative that does not make them the main beneficiary. Despite that, we call ours a land of opportunity.
    And then there’s the most fabulous fabulation of all, that we live in the greatest country on earth. This we endlessly repeat even though it would only take a moment to ask ourselves the names and accomplishments of the second and third greatest nations and thus  reveal the fatuousness of our braggadocio. 
    Maybe it’s time to select more accurate terms to replace democracy, freedom, peaceful, free market, opportunity and greatness to define our polity.  Instead of democracy, how’s about being honest about our cupidity and call our system a buckocracy?  With our millions of jailbirds we should be talking about a pen state.  Given our wars, it would be fair to change the name of the Pentagon to bellicocity. We should be calling our economy The Grab and our claims to opportunity Fat Chance. As for our greatestness, how about Hat Trick?