A fourth grader’s history of democracy.
Hello kids! Here’s a fun little history of democracy, are you ready?
In the beginning, there was no rule. There were cavemen, and they fought each other for food, women and shelter — that is, whenever they were not fighting a creature more fearsome than a fellow caveman. The strongest caveman got the girl, and the food, and the comfy cave. This sounds really sexist, but it’s still true today.
Eventually though, there were kings. And queens, and emperors, and sultans. Each country or kingdom had one. They amassed great power and wealth and they lived in palaces with slaves serving them. The rest of the population lived in pig shit and enjoyed no wealth, no power, no health, and they were killed if they spoke ill of the king. Some kings even became gods. Clearly, it was better if you were a king. Or a close relative.
In medieval times things were not much better. Peasants rented land and paid taxes for the privilege of having their crops taken from them by the landed gentry. The peasants were up to their arses in pig shit. The noblemen wore some rather comical costumes, and they frolicked. All the money was in the hands of the very few. It was better if you were a nobleman or noblewoman, but you probably weren’t one, statistically speaking.
Later, as explorers traveled to new lands, they had the idea of kidnapping African people and selling them as slaves, and this helped America become wealthier, except it only helped the landowners, not the poor white sharecroppers and certainly not the slaves. So the landowners decided to inject racism to keep the white sharecroppers from joining forces with the slaves to overthrow them. But then one day it was decided that slavery was not nice, so it was decided that it never happened and we wouldn’t talk about it again.
In victorian times, there was an industrial revolution going on. It created great wealth for some businessmen, who were not warmly welcomed into the noblemen’s circles because they had no table manners and didn’t speak French. Other than the nouveau-riche arrivistes, everyone else was slogging in a sweaty factory or coal mine, dying of black lung or fire or fall, and they had no money.
Then came the twentieth century. America and Britain were accidentally spearheading the invention of a thing called western civilization. It was based on democracy, where citizens could vote, and elections were used to hand power temporarily to public servants who would be un-elected in the next election if they didn’t do a good job. Well, they accidentally created the middle class — people who had enough money to take vacations, buy houses, invest in stocks, and send their kids to universities where formerly only the noble folk’s kids could be found. Kids, it was amazing!
This goofy bunch of misfits soon took over the world, and their civilization caught on, from Japan to Argentina, South Africa, most of Europe and many countries around the world. The middle classes were ridiculed by the horrified nobility, who hated these ankle biters being able to board planes and rent vacation villas in Spain, but couldn’t buy sprawling estates filled with servants. They bought automobiles, but not Bugattis. They wanted to do everything the nobility did, but had to settle for the economy class version much of the time. They invented divorce, family reunions, stepchildren, home movies and photo albums, and their culture grew like a fungus as they built boring modest houses that ate up the countryside and turned it into an endless suburban sameness. They filled office buildings, helping manage manufacturing, shipping, accounting, and of course, sales. The salesmen were charmers, dashing, always bullshitting, and searingly ambitious. These millions of suburban goofballs suddenly made up the moral majority of the ‘civilized’ countries they lived in. They not only had risen from poverty in just a couple of generations, they had taken over, leaving the old world’ noblemen and ladies to watch in bewilderment as they rewrote all the rules of government, business, banking, finance, and education. They focused quite a lot on men, white men, and they told women to be mommies and stay in the kitchen. They told people who weren’t white that white people we smarter and better. Well kids, that worked for a while, until it didn’t work at all. Women said “Enough!” and non-white people just showed white people that their story just ain’t true.
The poor people who didn’t follow this path into middle class life were eager to do so and treated the middle class people as role models, but also spat on them for being ambitious greedy little punk ass bitches. Oops, sorry kids. Poor people wanted to climb the ladders, and middle class people were building ladders everywhere, much to the chagrin of the noblemen who couldn’t burn them fast enough. It was working so well. Poor people were leaving poortown and headed for middletown as fast as they could.
Well kids, that was the twentieth century. The western century, and it was terrific. There was more than enough to go around, as the former colonies of England, Spain, France and Netherlands devoted their new independence to pursuing democracy and western civilization, so did America create colonies of her own, in the form of trading allies and mentored states, all eager to build their own democracies. Not all these stories played well. In some cases we built a weak democracy so we could bribe their puppet president to give us his oil / diamonds / copper / whatever.
In some countries, anti-democracy was also on the move. Tin pot dictators took over some countries, while communist regimes took others. The western generals thought the communists were a huge threat and started big expensive wars to snuff them out. Dictators were more amenable to oil and gas deals so they were allowed to hang out longer. We went on a religious mission to sell democracy around the world. Most countries were buying, and it was great!
Kids, you know, it was the happiest, messiest and most creative century the human race has ever seen. Capitalism shared the stage with patriotism, Christianity, Santa Claus and the television. The family became the holiest thing in our world, whether or not you believed in Jesus was less important. We lifted hundreds of millions of people out of the pig shit. They bought cars, took vacations, went shopping, and they invented jobs to support their culture. It fed itself and the wheels kept going around and around. Giant amusement parks, car washes, ski resorts, drive-in movies, shopping malls — everything was made for the middle classes. The super-rich just bought more of and bigger versions of the stuff we were serving up for the chubby people from the burbs in their Levi’s and sneakers. It was heaven! Some countries started running out of poor people so there was nobody to do the hard smelly jobs, but that was easily solved by opening the borders and allowing more immigration from poorer countries. And the wheels kept going around. And it was great!
But then around 2015 the western world woke up from a bad dream. It turns out we had abandoned the poorer people of our great western civilization. Technology had eliminated millions of decent jobs, making the tech founders very very rich, but not replacing the jobs we blew up along the way. At the same time, we gave China and other cheap labor countries the job of manufacturing all the stuff that was getting too costly to make in our factories, because the middle class people were less keen on working in smelly factories and living in cramped little houses, and the bosses were tired of talking with union reps who always wanted more money and shorter hours.
Well kids, here we are. Half of every western country is now a mob of uneducated, unemployed and very angry people. They can’t buy cars and take vacations or even fix the windshield on their old Toyota. And the angry people, they see that they’ve been dropped into, yes you guessed it, the pig shit. We’re back to the pig shit, kids.
Kids, the western world is at a crossroads isn’t it. Civilized countries will continue to see clown politicians rise to power and rule as dictators, riding on the anger of the angry poor people who no longer believe anything we tell them because, well, we lied to them and stabbed them in the back. When the dictators take over completely, countries will destroy their middle class and move to military rule. Most people will drop from middle class to the pig shit, while a few will have the survival smarts to be very nice to the dictator and get a job killing protesters for him, for example.
And as you see, it all comes around to the ancient times again, where the king is in his castle counting his money and most of the people are in the pig shit trying to find some scraps to eat.
I hope this story isn’t too scary for you kids.
