You and me both.

The pessimist in me fears that the country may be too asleep from mindless, pornographic entertainment and the decayed remains of the Fourth Estate to care much about the potential utter ruination of America as a Republic. Maybe the Powerful in America have figured out that you don't need to be a formal autocracy to rule the world and your citizens as an empire; you just need to keep the plebes busy with porn and "When Planes Crash" -style "reality" television and gladiatorial contests and bread and circuses. Just keep their reptilian brains busy and stimulated enough so they don't notice their increasing powerlessness and slavery - they just feel free because they vote every four years for candidates, none of whom pose any real threat to the lever-pullers controlling the Machinery of Night (to borrow a phrase from Ginsberg) that binds their souls and enacts their slavery.

Or, maybe Americans will begin to talk to one another one-on-one about the danger posed to their freedom by ceaseless propaganda-in-service-of-empire, and turn off their televisions and porn and stop eating themselves into gaseous stupors, so they can look hard enough to actually see what's really going on all around them.

Bingo. The left should have some of the blame for the tea partiers.

Someone asked Sherrod Brown why working class folks in SE Ohio were voting for Republicans. His answer: "Because the Democrats stopped talking to them." There's your problem right there.

But when the repubs are in charge, that same oligarchy gets 99%.

Agreed. The thing is, though - if this continues, there is no reason to think this won't end in the grief that oligarchies everywhere usually end up in eventually: social instability, mounting unrest, maybe even revolution.