[Vision2020] A Lost Civilization

[Art Deco]

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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December 8, 2012
A Lost Civilization By MAUREEN
DOWD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html>

WASHINGTON

MY college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The only
food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn.

My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why
the Incas are extinct?”

Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a
civilization that was obliviously engaging in behavior that would lead to
its extinction.

Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes.
Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first
civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and
Mayans.

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would
end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of arrogant,
uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides
of history.

Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel
Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was,
where it came from, and what happened to it. The experts will sift through
the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun
casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by
Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair,
and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long
forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 percent of moochers and the
“gifts” they got.

Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican
decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor
people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people
and gay people count.

As the historian Will Durant observed, “A great civilization is not
conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

President Obama’s victory margin is expanding, as more votes are counted.
He didn’t just beat Romney; he’s still beating him. But another sign of the
old guard’s denial came on Friday, a month after the election, when the
Romney campaign ebulliently announced that it raised $85.9 million in the
final weeks of the campaign, making its fund-raising effort “the most
successful in Republican Party history.”

Why is the Romney campaign still boasting? You can’t celebrate at a
funeral. Go away and learn how to crunch data on the Internet.

Outside the Republican walled kingdom of denial and delusion, everyone else
could see that the once clever and ruthless party was behaving in an obtuse
and outmoded way that spelled doom.

The G.O.P. put up a candidate that no one liked or understood and ran a
campaign that no one liked or understood — a campaign animated by the idea
that indolent, grasping serfs must be kept down, even if it meant creating
barriers to letting them vote.

Although Stuart Stevens, the Romney strategist, now claims that Mitt
“captured the imagination of millions” and ran “with a natural grace,”
there was very little chance that the awkward gazillionaire was ever going
to be president. Yet strangely, Republicans are still gobsmacked by their
loss, grasping at straws like Sandy as an excuse.

Some G.O.P. House members continue to try to wrestle the president over the
fiscal cliff. Romney wanders in a daze, his hair not perfectly gelled. And
his campaign advisers continue to express astonishment that a disastrous
campaign, convention and candidate, as well as a lack of familiarity with
what Stevens dismissively calls “whiz-bang turnout technologies,” could
possibly lead to defeat.

Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first
black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from the
party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would work
against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who would have
ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored science and
hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought Latinos would scorn
a party that expected them to finish up their chores and self-deport?

Republicans know they’re in trouble when W. emerges as the moral voice of
the party. The former president lectured the G.O.P. on Tuesday about being
more “benevolent” toward immigrants.

As Eva Longoria supersedes Karl Rove as a power player, Republicans act as
shellshocked as the Southern gentry overrun by Yankee carpetbaggers in
“Gone with the Wind.” As the movie eulogized: “Here was the last ever to be
seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it
only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization
gone with the wind.”

Gun sales have burgeoned since the president’s re-election, with Black
Friday weapons purchases setting records as the dead-enders rush to arm
themselves.

But history will no doubt record that withering Republicans were finally
wiped from the earth in 2016 when the relentless (and rested) Conquistadora
Hillary marched in, General Bill on a horse behind her, and finished them
off.



-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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