Put on your MAGA hats, Ed and Martha, grab a beer and some chicken wings and settle into the couch to watch your cities burn on Fox News. Finally some live entertainment on a Sunday afternoon. Aren’t you feeling great again? Put on some popcorn, Uncle Leroy.

As the U.S. implodes amid a pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans and left 40 million unemployed, the President has a conspiracy theory to sell about a TV host who got away with murder.

Not relevant?

How about:

‘The pinko ‘lamestream media’ is spurring rioters on to help the Dems.’

‘Obama, a criminal mastermind, is behind the whole thing.’

‘Anarchists and atheists want to bring the country down.’

‘The dark state did it.’

‘A diabolical Chinese plot.’

Switch over to MSNBC and you’ll hear talk of white supremacists, right wing militias and racist Republicans acting in consort with Russian social media bots.

With the President preening for the cameras at a ground-breaking rocket launch heralded as the new era of space travel, images of arson and looting beam from circling satellites into the living rooms of the world.

America, land of opportunity and riots.

The right blames the left and the left blames the right but from the perspective of an outsider all Americans are responsible for what the great experiment in democracy has become in The Year of Our Lord 2020.

Donald J. Trump is a symptom of the rot, not the cause. That 40-plus percent of Americans support a pathological liar, an ignorant, venal, charity-cheating bully that no caring parent wants their child to grow up to be, says everything an outsider needs to know about the state of the country.

But even the most fervent Trump critics share responsibility. He got elected on the watch of all Americans because you have allowed your precious democratic system to devolve into a partisan pit of celebrity worship, money-grubbers and power-grabbers.

You accept the fiction that your judicial system is blind as each political party that comes to power rushes to fill court vacancies with judges who peek under the blindfold with a partisan view of the world.

You embrace dog-eat-dog capitalism that leaves millions of your children reliant on school lunches for nutrition and tens of millions without adequate health coverage.

Socialism, the system in which society takes care of the most vulnerable, is a dirty word in American politics.

You imprison more of your own people, a disproportionate number of them non-white, than any country in the world. It’s not even close.

You condone men armed with assault rifles defiling your democratic institutions and threatening your elected representatives.

You revere a constitution written hundreds of years ago by slave-owners, who did not consider red, black, yellow or brown people to be their equals.

You cling to the belief that no man is above the law but allow a President to pardon co-conspirators in his crimes. You remain passive as lawyers argue in earnest that the President cannot be investigated even if he shoots someone in broad daylight on Fifth Ave.

In the end, the finger-pointing of the left and right has little merit in face of the facts. America is leading the world in Covid-19 deaths and in the early stages of an economic earthquake that’s ramifications could make the Great Depression seem like a minor tremor.

The downtrodden and disaffected will not go gently into the good night of economic despair as they did in the 1930s, riding the rails in desperate searches for work to feed their families.

The world is watching a prelude of what is to come in November if the man Americans have entrusted with their liberty loses and refuses to accept the results of what he is already touting as a rigged election.

Americans have been careless with their precious democracy for quite some time, watching as majority rule gave way to corporate elites who control the money.

The empire has no clothes and it’s not a pretty sight. The self-proclaimed ‘greatest country in the world’ is being exposed in real time as a divided, diseased, feckless, flabby, degenerate country rife with grievance and inequality, seething with violence.