Picture an apple named "America" on a shelf. Most objective observers have declared it rotten. Fewer than one in five citizens trust its integrity. Although it looks OK, it's no longer firm and sweet - more soft and bitter. Everyone is desperately looking for cures to get the apple back to where it used to be - the object of the world's desire - but nobody can put his finger on it. We wonder what's rotting the apple, but since we've been trained not to dig more than skin-deep into anything, we just throw up our hands and try to blame outside forces. Republicans, Democrats, socialists, conservatives, liberals, Tea Party, Greens, the rich, the poor, indifference, El Qaeda, President Obama, the House, the Senate, permisiveness, narrow-mindedness, religion, anti-religion, you name it.
It's a futile search. What's wrong with the apple can't be found on the outside. True, evidence of the problem can be dug up and we may well account for samples of the rot, but to discover the cause, we have to continue past the squiggle:
Inside the apple is a worm. It's been there for over two hundred years, starting out as a tiny little creature with a fine idea. The apple was small and needed to get big and the way to do that was to allow individual initiative and individual ideas to flourish, free from the stifling hand of suppression. New products and technology burst forward and we called it free enterprise. It was the era of the mom-and-pop store where giving quality for money determined success. Of course, as everything got bigger, individual cogs in the industrial machine got smaller. Companies got bigger and bigger and the worm became capitalism. The apple, however. continued to thrive and enlarge. The worm got bigger, too, and the idea of initiative became too big for just one country and the worm became multi-national capitalism and the individual became a corporation. Soon, the worm discovered that no matter how much it grew, it had to get bigger, so the corporations figured out ways to grow. America was told that cocaine ws good for you because energy drinks needed to be sold. Any attempt at regulation was fought against in the name, not of capitalism, but of democracy. So tobacco was advertised as beneficial for health by no less a spokesman than Ronald Reagan. Paint companies told America that lead was harmless and urged us to put it on everything from walls to children's toys. When children went blind, juries ignored evidence that the companies knew all about the damage despite the blind kids because it was more important for the worm to get bigger. The same happened with the fight over unleaded gas. Regulators were vilified and called communists. We hear the echo in West Virginia today.
The worm has enemies, to be sure. Scientists who argued that cigarettes caused cancer, people who fought for seat belts in cars, even those who tried to get people to cut down on cholesterol were vigorously debated and held up in the courts and, since the worm had lots of power, were often defeated. Using its weapon of advertising to advance its cause, the worm hired the most expensive media experts to convince us that whatever made the worm bigger also made America stronger. Television featured violence, sex and "reality" shows to sell products, not improve the welfare of the nation. "Comedians" showed people getting hurt - for laughs. Dead bodies filled the acreens. The worm grew. Television was called "a vast wasteland" and programs became an excuse for commercials. The worm had a motto, "Anything for a Buck" which was easing out the apple's old one.
Finally, the apple's chief judicial branch caved, ruling the worm was really a citizen. The social structure began to collapse. Marriage, one of the last hold-outs of the apple, became a commodity which, like any product, became expendable and should be discarded when something newer was presented. Drug use in competition was defended in the name of winning. The apple began to behave like the worm: the end justified the means.
As the worm became more and more rotten, it was inevitable that the apple didn't also. Looking at the Congress in session, we see that most of the representatives aren't present since they're busy digging for money from the worm's lobbyists. In the name of profit, millions of apple residents go to bed hungry and, because of the money used to finance the media, are told to blame it, not on the worm, but on the apple itself.
And so the worm continued to grow and spread its rot wider and wider. Until finally the apple couldn't live any more and the only thing left were worms.