I think you're a realist. A nation born in violence, dispossession/theft, economy grounded in slavery and salve trade - what way would you expect it to grow? If it, or any idealistic souls in it, tried to change it, the thing would fall apart because there is no substructure of honest ideals and practices to support mere idealism. Before the whole show goes down it'd be best to take up boat building. Pity, as there's tons of stuff about the place and people to love.
What I would expect from reading history is that the violent, piratical slave drivers, as they acquired stuff and wanted to keep it, would make up a culture and a bunch of rules which looked a lot like the previous culture and bunch of rules. For an example, consider the Mongol empire -- or the Romans, or Alexander the Great, and so on. The horsemen grow tired, dragging our booted feet upstairs to come down in velvet slippers -- even that grows old, and pretty quickly. In the USA, we are still not very far from our violent, piratical slave-driver ancestors. The last survivor of the last American slave ship died in 1940, a year after I was born; the last person who had been enslaved died in 1971. Only fifty years later, we are most delicate about the names and games we assign to our fellow citizens. But as Mr. Faulker said, the past isn't dead -- it isn't even past.
I suppose it's true that _this_ scene is going to drive right off the apocalyptic edge of the cliff. The Mongols were somewhat smarter.
I think you're a realist. A nation born in violence, dispossession/theft, economy grounded in slavery and salve trade - what way would you expect it to grow? If it, or any idealistic souls in it, tried to change it, the thing would fall apart because there is no substructure of honest ideals and practices to support mere idealism. Before the whole show goes down it'd be best to take up boat building. Pity, as there's tons of stuff about the place and people to love.
What I would expect from reading history is that the violent, piratical slave drivers, as they acquired stuff and wanted to keep it, would make up a culture and a bunch of rules which looked a lot like the previous culture and bunch of rules. For an example, consider the Mongol empire -- or the Romans, or Alexander the Great, and so on. The horsemen grow tired, dragging our booted feet upstairs to come down in velvet slippers -- even that grows old, and pretty quickly. In the USA, we are still not very far from our violent, piratical slave-driver ancestors. The last survivor of the last American slave ship died in 1940, a year after I was born; the last person who had been enslaved died in 1971. Only fifty years later, we are most delicate about the names and games we assign to our fellow citizens. But as Mr. Faulker said, the past isn't dead -- it isn't even past.
I suppose it's true that _this_ scene is going to drive right off the apocalyptic edge of the cliff. The Mongols were somewhat smarter.