One of my favorite political cartoons from the end of America's War for Independence comes not from the colonies, but from a printer in London.  Entitled "The General P__s, or Peace," it shows an Englishman, a Dutchman, an American Indian, a Spaniard, and a Frenchman all urinating into a pot with their swords and national flags lying on the ground.  In sixteen lines of verse accompanying the drawing, the unhappy engraver bemoans the loss of America and ends with an acerbic final stanza: "Tis vain for to fret or growl at our lot, / You see they're determin'd to fill us a pot, / So now my brave Britons excuse me in this, / That I for a Peace am obliged to write Piss."

That always makes me smile.  "How on Earth," I imagine that printer grumbling to himself, "did a ragtag bunch of colonists end up dictating terms of surrender to the world's pre-eminent empire?"  Now it also reminds me of a popular internet meme juxtaposing the picture of a woman dancing in warm rain under the caption "People Who Trust the Government," with the picture of her neighbor urinating over their mutual fence and captioned appropriately, "The Government."  So it would seem we Americans have come full circle and are now on the receiving end of our government's piddling affections. 

Isn't it remarkable how everything the federal government does in the name of "general peace" ends up as a pot of the other stuff that we're expected to drink right up with a smile?  For the life of me, I can't think of anything helpful or good that has come from Washington's Leviathan or the D.C. despots that control that ungrateful monster in quite some time.  We're thirty trillion dollars in debt, and Congress couldn't care less, as the mental lightweights who compose that less than august body debate not how to pay for any of the extravagant socialist projects they've already foisted upon the American people for years, but rather whether a measly two or five or even ten trillion dollars in extra debt will momentarily satisfy their unquenchable lust to saddle the public with ever more extravagant socialist spending bills for years to come.  When it comes to printing money, the Democrats are all about "making it rain," but what's falling on Americans' heads is not at all different from what's drenching that poor dancing woman.  

It is an old truism that all fiat money eventually collapses because governments are unable to exhibit the self-control required to abstain from manipulating and devaluing their currencies over time.  Usually, this happens when short-term crises arise, and political power is preserved by expediently spending today what should be saved for tomorrow.  Technically, right now we are neither at war nor suffering from economic calamity, yet the government keeps spending and inflating the prices of ordinary necessities at a pace that would make one believe that global war had been raging for years.  During a time of relative peace, Washington has chosen to destroy what little value remains in its legal tender and then expects to win a future war in the Pacific by being able to continue selling IOUs to the same country it expects to fight.  Excuse me, Uncle Sam here, could you spare a dime, so that we might be able to pay for our war against you?  No?  What do you mean, you'd rather not?  These are the strategic thinkers filling our pot of peace today.

When you think of "general peace," wouldn't you expect the normal duty of any functioning government to be the promotion of some modicum of national unity?  If so, then it has to come as a surprise to those with even modest expectations for government competency to realize that unity is the farthest thing from the minds of those who insist on ruling us for "our own good."  The FBI is on the hunt for "hate crimes" lurking within every happy suburb while arguing that "white supremacy" is America's biggest terrorist threat.  Believing in personal liberty or inalienable rights is labeled "racist" by a Democrat party uninterested in either, and objecting to the illicit ways both Congress and the Supreme Court have rewritten the U.S. Constitution to serve the federal government's willy-nilly political impulses at any given moment is condemned as proof that America is secretly run by the Klan.  Black Americans are explicitly told that white Americans wish them harm.  Women are repeatedly told that a "patriarchy" exists to prevent their success.  Anybody who is not Jewish or Christian is reminded with regularity that Jews and Christians have rigged the nation in their favor.  And now even the private decision of whether or not to use an experimental "vaccine" is exploited to cleave Americans.  

Nobody in Congress — even those perched out on socialism's sprouting branches — could look around at all this manufactured animosity the government and a complicit media are selling daily to the American people and think it healthy for our nation.  Yet if there is an elected official concerned with the government's reckless agenda to splinter America into disparate warring groups too busy vying against each other to realize they're being hosed by those who call D.C. home, nobody is standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial calling for heads to roll.

In the United States today, our federal government spends most of its time telling each American why his neighbor is to blame for what may ail him while spreading animus generally under the guise of "social justice."  What's that we're forced to smell from coast to coast?  Why, that's the stench of "general peace."   

It should come as no surprise that Fraud Fauci threatened to cancel Christmas for American commoners if they don't take their required government shots but seemed pretty enthusiastic about letting any of the million or so new illegal aliens celebrate the coming holidays without restrictions because...science!  If microscopic disease is your game, then resettling unvetted illegal aliens around the country without knowing whether any might pose a threat to some unsuspecting community in Maine or Tennessee or Ohio might seem like an epidemiological problem worth pursuing.  If you're actually invested only in promoting the disease of division, though, "open borders" is the only game in town.  And if there is anything the Uniparty in D.C. has made clear for forty years, it is that it will not stop playing with our open borders, no matter how loudly Americans beg.  Who cares about uppity Americans' concern for national security or personal welfare when a more compliant population can be imported to do exactly as D.C. demands?  

If only that London engraver from two and a half centuries ago could get a good look at America today.  I have a feeling he'd say, "See, you get it now, Colonials.  Losing America is no easy thing to stomach.  'General peace' isn't quite so appealing when it's your nose that's being shoved in the pot."

Image via Max Pixel.

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