Were Time magazine founding publisher Henry Luce still alive, the man who’d coined the 20th century “the American Century” would today declare any extension of it dead.

Our epoch of true world influence stretched from the Jazz Age until Bolshevism collapsed under capitalist superiority. Although our Levant fiasco significantly diminished the nation’s prestige while emboldening adversaries, much of the global community still accepted the United States as the planet’s cock of the walk.

After wrong-footing throughout 2017, the only standing America retains is being musclebound and brainless.

Mind, military might didn’t sweep communism into the dust bin of history. Internal pressure from nearly enslaved Iron Curtain citizens envying the West’s ample supply and selection of consumer goods, better standards of living, and more open ways to live sent comrades and commissars packing.

That’s how the East was won, like it or not.

Of course it helped immensely that armed containment limited fighting to proxy wars. It’s a swell thing to have others do one’s killing and dying to demonstrate resolve.

Once the Soviet imperium cracked apart, its vassal states regaining independence unseen since World War II, the reasons for American dominance crumbled too. Except Americans refused acknowledging the true new world order.

What monarch hasn’t said, “It good to be the king”? And while the United States proclaims itself a representative democracy, voluntarily stepping back and surrendering hegemony even unknown to the Romans was going to be difficult.

Think of a junkie undergoing withdrawal pangs. Almost unfettered power was our drug.

A good chunk of the American public is happy to remain blind to the fact that Western Civilization no longer requires our guardianship. When the world was split into East and West, yes, the latter needed a Big Daddy. Simple polarity kept choices black and white.

Say this for the administrations that came after the Red Menace’s demise, they strove mightily for the United States to remain relevant as the globe’s Pater Praetorians. All the more so because a faster revolving world is rendering us inessential, making our old notions useless.

Some presidents finessed our reduced necessity better than others. The secure ones did. It also helped that America’s one-time client states have conducted fine masquerades that bolster belief in our indispensability.

With the foreseen arrival of another level-headed, experienced, sober, sane executive, it’s likely that chief would’ve exerted every wile available to convince the public that a smaller global footprint meant a true peace dividend. Despite its extensive military encumbrances through worldwide outposts, the United States is not an empire.

William Walker and United Fruit aside, Americans are lousy imperialists. The concept goes against our founding principles. We may still claim ourselves acting on behalf of “good” without breaking out in laughter afterwards.

Our nation is young and not yet fully formed. We are naïve enough to still mine virtue from “good.”

A thoughtful, farsighted administration immersed in the 21st century would’ve adjusted the country’s priorities for this reconfiguring world. Accommodating to reality ought have further relaxed the intractability of age-old tensions and pressures.

Unfortunately for 21st century Americans our future resides in the jumbled mind and tiny hands of Donald Trump, Fate’s ultimate electoral joker. While ours wasn’t a perilous time before the short-fingered vulgarian began soiling the Oval Office, his spoiled petulant presence there now imperils the United States.

This charmless P.T. Barnum, the personification of a vile pig, possesses an immaturity, a witlessness, an insecurity making him unworthy and unfit of leading us. Those who foolishly voted for Der Trump did so ignoring his promises of reducing America to a lesser state.

Yes. Lesser. Everything Der Trump hawked during his campaign rants retards every avenue of national growth and advance and innovation.

America ceases being a beacon in his “restoration.” In Der Trump’s revival, plain mendacity, outright hypocrisy, baser inequality, and naked prejudice gleefully return from the forced exiles progressive Americans had consigned them across the last six decades.

While a great many true Americans greeted Barack Obama’s presidential ascendency with the proper “It’s about time!” sentiment, the low among us never got their narrow minds around how the best qualified candidate who won election then reelection didn’t squeeze into the traditional image of “chief executive.” Include Der Trump at the top of the list of this some animals are more equal than others sty.

For eight years, President Obama ceaselessly absorbed personal scorn which might’ve broken Hercules. Personal, not political. Obama’s policies, as presidents’ before him, will remain fair game.

One can’t imagine Der Trump enduring an hour of the years Obama underwent in this regard. The first occasion certainly would’ve sent him scampering back into the womb.

Obama deflected those brickbats minus complaint. He wasn’t so much stoic or immune as much as a man with little time for trifles and trifling people. We all know the rhetoric against him, his character, his family, must’ve pierced. But his position demanded he brush off these assaults.

Not the presidency per se itself asked it of him. But like anyone who’s been the first outsider to breach what had been a grove exclusive to specific types, our 44th president couldn’t give as good as he got or even better. No one should doubt Barack Obama often struggled to subdue his inner Khalid Muhammad.

It’s disappointing mainstream media failed crediting the icon Obama emulated. Jackie Robinson. The crap the sainted Brooklyn Dodger took shamed America. Yet justified as Robinson would’ve been to reply, to retaliate, any outburst could’ve delayed or denied plenty of black baseball players’ elevations into the major leagues.

Obama, similar to Robinson, knew the goal bigger than the individual.

Like Robinson, Obama knew his replies needed measuring, tempering, be heard as Zen-like almost. Either that or Boomers could never likely see another non-traditional president in our lifetimes. Naturally one hopes a subsequent non-Anglo or first female chief executive can Mau-Mau his or her detractors minus trepidation and hesitation.

Barack Obama is gone today. He’s been replaced by a mook. A bad-mannered one at that.

But let’s give the porcine devil his due. The calamitous election which burdens us with him also frees our Plantagenet stridency.

With Obama out of the frame and Der Trump’s suet filling it, we no longer must abide by the temperance modeled after the former president’s. We mustn’t be reserved anymore. We needn’t reply soberly to the most insipid utterances from the most willingly dense people ever.

As much as Der Trump has earned our bile, more so have the walking talking colonic bags supporting him.

Such puerile boobs are undeserving of our least respect. While they are entitled to spout their febrile opinions, they’ve forfeited the civil receptions we once extended such tripe. Their opinions, which they splattered against Obama, are today unimportant. We consign these swine to the depths.

We can ridicule and humiliate these baboons and the waddling tweeting pile of turds they revere. And we will.

Now. We say no time like the present.

After George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin, some Anglos got bent noses when President Obama addressed the teen’s death. Obama mustn’t mine empathy before commenting on the killing. He personally suffered the sort of prejudice allowing a weak sister like Zimmerman to categorize Martin instantly.

The president honestly remarked how the dead youth could’ve been his son, indeed, because he and Zimmerman’s victim shared racial backgrounds. Rather than understanding the plain connection, too many intentionally obtuse gringos found umbrage in the president’s distinction.

Some of the bigger dumb asses even cited Obama’s own prejudices. (!) They along with others lacking perspective asked how couldn’t he have imagined a white teen-ager who suffered the same fate as Martin as “his son”?

Oh, same way men can’t imagine being pregnant.

Familiarity and frequency of American black males being shot and killed for all sorts of specious reasons that would easily enflame other racial or ethnic groups contributed to and compelled the president’s claim. Also like every other American adult black male Obama knew under the same circumstances as a teen he could’ve been Trayvon Martin. One who crossed paths with a Zimmerman toting a rod to bolster his own inadequate piece.

In his speaking the truth, black America heard nothing wrong from Obama. Doubtlessly even that hanky-headed, butt-licking, sellout coon Clarence Thomas concurred. (Op cit, Khalid Muhammad)

We’ve heard more than our unjust share of complaints about presidents who haven’t paid sufficient obsequiousness to the honored war dead. In these omissions aren’t the chiefs following the public’s lead?

Americans wishing to see deceased military members venerated ought to visit England or France on Armistice Day. In both grand nations, the Great War sustains relevance until today.

Over there, Britons and French pay proper due to the fallen Tommies and Poilus.

While swaths of Britain engage in commemoration, the most lavish ceremony occurs in London at the Cenotaph, a monument for those Great War Britons who succumbed overseas and whose remains were interred elsewhere. At this site, the queen, those who’ve borne arms for Britain, and other leading figures attend a service focused on supreme sacrifices asked and received.

Across the Channel in France, memorializing Frenchmen whose defense of the country during the Great War cost them their lives is just as reverent but simpler. Especially in the small towns.

In them reenactors wearing period uniforms will recite the names of townsmen who died for France. Human migration what it is, often a lot of the successors bearing the family surname have relocated or died out. Therefore, the combatants are unknown. However, thanks to these annual recognition of valor, they are recalled.

Pomp on one side, modesty on the other. In either case the message is clearly the same.

Let us contrast between the Old and New Worlds, shall we?

Are Americans aware 2017 is the centenary of our nation’s entry into World War I? Highly fucking unlikely.

How did we distinguish the conflagration which began our march into eventual global prominence, the initial step towards “the American Century”?

Was there a national call to clean and refurbish those monuments dedicated to fallen doughboys? Nope.

Were symposiums organized to study and evaluate how the inhabitants of the then world’s most sophisticated continent let themselves stumble into industrial slaughter? Nah.

Did our preeminent historians gather to debate whether the incident precipitating the First World War’s carnage could possibly have been the biggest rock ever thrown into mankind’s pond? After all ripples created a century ago continue to violently disturb us today.

Uh-uh. Of course not.

We’re Americans. Instead we sponsored mattress sales on Veterans Day.

There. Your hash is settled.