Images courtesy of flickr.com

Travolta explained to me that his fat head is populated by a teeming swarm of thetans, which continuously push its massive volumetric limits. Their growth and replication feeds the ever-increasing diameter of his melon. However, every inch that my friend’s gourd expands, yields another inch of room for a new generation of these little buggers — who begin this cycle anew. In this manner, John’s expanding head and thetan-swarm growth reinforce one another. This is called a positive feedback loop (it is also called schizophrenia). A positive feedback loop often results in an unstable equilibrium and runaway results. In my friend’s case, he has runaway head volume.

I think our American democracy can also be characterized by a positive feedback loop. Our status quo is continually renewed by mutual reinforcement between a functionally retarded voting populace and an incompetent puppet leadership. Every four years, hordes (well, dozens) of drooling, diabetic swine trudge to the polls to pull the lever for some guy whose name they recognize, who looks vaguely nice. This guy then spends four years ensuring that America remains a nation of flat-faced, blubbering lardbots. In America’s case, we have runaway ignorance.

This phenomenon is evidenced by the fact that, in a resounding referendum on the quagmire in Iraq, one of our most “independent” states just cast their nominations for Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain, two of the biggest warmongers in modern politics. If you pit these two in a debate against one another, by the end, one or both of them will eventually pledge to bomb Candyland in an urgent effort to defuse the threat of Gumdrops of Mass Destruction.

An enlightened populace would presumably push to the forefront the candidacies of Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, two gentlemen currently serving in the House of Representatives. Kucinich and Paul agree wholeheartedly with respect to foreign policy: they believe we should dissolve our imperial outposts, stop invading countries, abolish torture and close Guantanamo. They also agree that the civil liberties denied to the American people in the post-9/11 hysteria should be reaffirmed.

In a Kucinich/Paul race, we would enjoy boring debates regarding monetary policy and the nature of welfare. We would, of course, miss out on debate gems like “Which of you owns a gun?”

Why the fuck are we asking our Presidential candidates if they can handle the steel? Did we outsource Secret Service duties to Blackwater or something?

With either Kucinich or Paul in office, we would also no longer be trifled with nagging questions like “Is the leader of the fucking free world lying to my fucking face right now? Does he think I am this stupid? Is he right?”

Sounds nice, right?

Regardless of who won this enlightened race, America would win. Whichever horse we bet on would be granted the daunting task of pushing his respective brand of “wacky” socioeconomics through a stagnant congress. And if either Paul’s fiscal conservatism or Kucinich’s borderline socialism actually made it out into the real world and proved to be misguided, then the American middle class would shrink a touch, and the other guy would get to take a stab at it in four years.

Doesn’t this sound slightly little less foreboding than putting our kids in a trillion dollars of Chinese debt just so that they can go off to fight concurrent wars against the Iranians, the Pakistanis, and the Gingerbread Army?

Wake the fuck up, America.