Make America Great Again

This one is for you Richard Roskell . Thanks for the idea that turned into a brainfart that turned into this piece.

I always thought MAGA was a promise. A before-and-after-picture. Something we used to be and would claw our way back to, if we were good enough and we worked at it.

Boy… Was I wrong!!

You’ve been reading it all wrong. Not make America great again. America is great. Right now, this very day. And I almost missed the whole thing standing around waiting for it to start.

It has already happened.

I have to sit down. No no no, I can’t sit down. Too excited. America is out there cooking!

Just look at what we’ve done!!

Last time I checked, the debt stood at $39 trillion. The largest sum of money any nation has ever owed across the entire run of human beings owing each other anything, and no one else is within a continent of us.
Rome never got here.
Britain never got here, not at the very top of running half the world.

We add billions a day to it, like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, and right when you’d think we might ease off we sign up for another few trillion because you. do. not. slow down. when you are this far out front.

The interest by itself – just the rent on what we already borrowed – runs bigger than the entire military now, and we have the largest military that has ever existed.

We are literally out-spending ourselves.

THAT is how far ahead we are. We ain’t just winning! We are beating us.

I welled up when the 30-year sailed past five percent again. Other countries see a number like that and they panic, emergency sessions, sweating through the good suit.

We watched it sail past and kept right on walking like it was Tuesday. Maybe whistled a little tune.

I’m not crying. Allergies. Totally allergies.

And the people…

Nearly a thousand billionaires!

Close to a third of every billionaire drawing breath on this planet, all of them ours.
The man at the very top is worth more than any human being who has ever lived, and we grew him right here at home. The top ten of them put on hundreds of billions in a single year, most of it off their phones while sipping something more expensive than this knock-off whiskey in my hand.

The top 1% holds nearly a third of all the wealth there is. The share at the very top has doubled, the share at the bottom shrank, a quarter of us work low wages, and the bottom half of the country splits two and a half percent of everything there is and turns out to cheer anyway. Biggest gap in a hundred years.

You cannot buy that kind of loyalty. (Well, technically you can, but it’s expensive and why should you if they’ll still vote for you?)

We don’t just talk about freedom – we stockpile it. 120 guns for every 100 citizens. More firearms than human souls walking these great lands. Other countries look at their sad little single-digit rates per capita and weep into their weak tea.

We rack up more gun deaths most years than the calendar even has days, but that is the price of unmatched personal liberty.

Nobody else is even trying to keep up.

But worth it. Absolutely worth it. Thoughts and prayers sold separately.

Our infrastructure? The engineers just handed us a straight-up C – our best grade in decades. Roads, bridges, dams, schools, all cruising on that beautiful gentleman’s C while we focus on the more important things like stock buybacks and defense contracts.

Other nations obsess over “maintenance” and “sustainability”.

Adorable amateurs. Bless their hearts roads.

We charge a fortune for the diploma, and we are not shy about it. Tuition has outrun inflation for forty years straight, and we send the graduates off the stage carrying $1.83 trillion in student debt like a parting gift. A whole generation starting adult life with more red ink than some countries have in their entire economy. That’s how you build REAL character.

But it works! Fifty-eight percent of recent graduates can even find a job that asks for a degree. The others, they’re just lazy! That’s not me… Our unemployment counts are GREAT! Just don’t look at the ones that “have given up”. Cleans those figures right up. Beautiful numbers. The BEST numbers.

We even perfected the opioid masterpiece, tens of thousands gone every year, our own homegrown contribution to pharmaceutical innovation. We spend twice what Germany spends on healthcare, three times Japan, and we still die younger, lose more mothers, bury more babies, drop the diabetics faster. More money, shorter lives. You could not arrange that kind of value proposition if you sat down for a week and tried.

We did it on accident. Legendary.

We’re not like those scary little Europeans that pulled stuff off the shelf decades ago. We’re tough. We eat everything! Including the bromate, the dye, the foaming agent that also goes in yoga mats! Straight down the hatch, no questions asked.

They took the red dye out of lipstick in 1990 and we kept it in the cherry another thirty-five years like true champs.

That is PURE conviction.

The forever chemicals are in our water and our blood. All fifty states, baby – coast to coast, we’re marinating in it. Other countries treat this like a problem. We treat it like seasoning.

Some scientists say it might cause cancer and mess with fertility.

Details, details.

That just shows how committed we are to chemical innovation.

Two million of our own behind bars. More than China, even though they have four times the people to pick from. Highest incarceration rate among major nations, baby.

Other countries rehabilitate.
We warehouse.

Nobody else is even trying to keep up with this level of “law and order”.

Exceptional justice for an exceptional country.

We even started a fight this winter. Swore up and down we’d have it wrapped by Tuesday. It is almost June and we are still out there swinging, still standing, still able, while the rest of them won’t so much as step into the ring. Wussies. ALL OF THEM!!

America’s the GREATEST by THE most important metrics!

I have never in my life been so proud of anything.

Greatest we have ever been. Greatest ANYONE has ever been.

 

I just hope I’m not around to see how it ends.

 

 

 

 

Data which I didn’t want to add to disrupt the flow of the prose: