The battle between the incredible shrinking president and congress plods along with no end in site of any kind of solution that will not involve the requirement to squeeze the tip of one’s nose to eliminate the acrid odor of what will be ‘the deal’.  The perspectives of country and principle that at one time inspired and emboldened an nation to consider a permanent memorial to greatness to be etched on the side of a mountain, now leads the midget leaders of that same nation to attempt to block the view of such a monument to greatness with barricades.  Well, it is understandable in a certain context.  You certainly wouldn’t want people to take a moment to contemplate what they once had, and what they now have.

Frankly, the better perspective to understand the current batch of leaders is not a monument in stone , but rather, a bobblehead.  Small, plastic, and distinctly non-monumental. Something that can shake its head yes and no at the same time.  The bobblehead serves as the perfect reflection of the throwaway nature of our society, and its reproducibility of one indistinct forgettable figure after another.  Yet, its not that these leaders are not into building monuments.  No, they are building monuments every bit as lasting as the granite edifices in South Dakota’s Black Hills.   They are taking care to meticulously achieve a lasting memorial to their smallness that will dwarf the achievements of the epic giants we see on Mt Rushmore.  The current leaders’ children and  grandchildren will not have to travel to the Great Plains only to have their view of a great momument obstructed by a National Park Service barricade. Instead they will see the special immenseness of our modern momuments in their everyday lives, casting an colossal shadow over their every activity, their hopes and their aspirations.

The modern monument to be constructed is made of promises and paper, not granite.  The initial plans were constructed decades ago, but were vastly improved by the current architect.  The monument will be comprised of trillions of dollars of debt obscuring any shadow of the country the leaders we see in granite on Mt Rushmore felt they were endowing.The current foundation of the mountainous monument is being added to at approxiamently a trillion dollars a year, with a recent slowdown taking into account the wrenching effect on the nation’s economy of such an epic burden.  We need remind ourselves of the stature of such a monument.  We can gain some perspective if we consider the hundred dollar bill, and project what just one trillion dollars (much less our current 17 trillion in debt) would look like in stacks of one hundred dollar bills:The small figure to the left of the semi-trailer truck is you.  The pallet in front of the truck supports a hundred million dollars in one hundred dollar bills.  Every day, your leaders add 40 of those pallets to the innumerable pallets to the left that comprise a trillion dollars in one hundred dollar bills.  And that huge collection of pallets on the your left is only one 17th of what we currently owe.  And estimated to be only one hundredth as high as our unfunded mandates we are leaving our future generations.  More owed then the current accrued value of all the economies on earth.  This is the monument the current generation of bobble heads are building.

In Washington, the argument is not regarding this ominous future prospect, it is about whether a president gets what he wants.  If a president wants the future destruction of a nation, are we obligated to give him what he wants?  In a world of little, soft dictators with protruding egos and cults of personality, leading country after country down a path of societal collapse and economic paralysis, are we obligated as a great nation designed to be ruled by law not men, to allow the appeasement of our own leader who fashions himself after such soft dictators?  Is the progressive belligerence and police action of previous administrative arms of government as disparate as the National Park Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Environmental Protection agency the emblems of this soft dictatorship? If the answer to these questions remains the current neglectful ignorance by the very citizens the country’s founders worked so hard to protect against such action, then I would submit the time is coming where we need to think of building a new granite monument, one to the new generation of leaders whose influence will tower over those that were giants.  This monument will be a very interesting engineering and artistic challenge – how to support the bobble that will rest upon the granite shoulders.  Like the monument this leader is building, there’s a decent chance it would come crashing down.