The dominant emotions tonight in America are, of course, still grief, sympathy, and horror. Taking the long view, there should be another: embarrassment. But there won't be, because this is America. As many others have said, there is only one country on earth where this continues to happen, America. We call ourselves exceptional, because we lack any sense of shame.
Take the longest view. America will cease to exist except in history books one day. What will historians write of the short, unhappy life of the American Experiment, the "last, best hope of mankind"? That the new nation was a government of bullies, by cowards, for the craven, an ugly, failure built upon slavery and lies, hypocrisy and propaganda in the pursuit of money, and that it perished from the earth. Future archeologists will pore over its cultural artifacts: the abandoned plantation, the AR-15, the burial mounds of massacred innocents, its standard, comprised of the stellate wounds in the foreheads of the slain and the stripes on the backs of the slaves, the remnants of The Wall, the transcripts of its leaders' statements.
