When I read, Thomas Cahill’s, How the Irish Saved Civilization, I was struck by a passage that I wanted to include in my blog, a passage that is of great relevance to America. As I listen to and watch our blundering politicians and policy makers (of both major parties–Democrats and Republicans), I can’t help but think that maybe my friends in the Libertarian, the Constitutional Party, and the League of the South are right: The American political system is broke and can’t be fixed. Here is Cahill’s quote:

“There are, no doubt, lessons here for the contemporary reader.  The changing character of the native population, brouigh about through unremarked pressures on porous borders; the creation of an increasingly unwieldy and rigid bureaucracy, whose own survival becomes its overriding goal; the despising of the military and the avoidance of its service by establish families, while its offices present unprecedented opportunity for marginal men to whom its ranks had once been closed; the lkip service paid to values long dead; the pretense that we are still what we once were; the increasing concentrations of the populace into richer and poorer by way of a corrupt tax system, and the desperation that inevitably follows; the aggrandizement of executive power at the expense of the legislature; ineffectual legislation promulgated with grew show; the moral vocation of the man at the top to maintain order at all costs, while growing blind to the cruel dilemmas of ordinary life–these are all themes with which our world is familiar, nor are they the God-given property of any party or political point of view, even though we act as if they were . . . .” (pp. 29-30)