The Question Is

 Globalization has spawned many things, among them an excruciatingly efficient, just-in-time supply chain that has worked to fill Walmart with easily affordable merchandise, geegaws and mandatory marks of modernity.

There are some guns too.

That supply chain, under pressure, has disintegrated.

A century of one-of-a-kind in history growth fueled by unleashing the power of stored carbon has heated the planet such that the answer to why Mars has no atmosphere seems to be pretty obvious; but the beneficiaries of carbon release don't live on earth; they are merely passing through, so any attempt to eliminate carbon release, and with it the vast wealth continually generated, is met with total blockage: the Carbon Releasers own the various governments of the world and governments call the shots - after being advised as to what the shots are.

The industrial structure of the world has been constantly refined over the last 50 years under the banner bearing the words "bigger is best; mergers prevail; monopolies generate the most shareholder value". 

A symptom of the effectiveness of that rush to bigness is the fact that Americans are in imminent risk of having their infant children starve to death.

Another such symptom of the efficiency of the business of big is the fact that the time lapse between the latest bad news about the increasing cost of oil in the ground and the price posted on the pump is less than 24 hours.

Damn that's fast.

And the pickups in the queue at the gas pumps and their owners all have guns; and there are few vehicles other than pickups at those pumps.

Religion reigns supreme in the land.

Politics of extremes reign supreme in the land.

The republican party has wrapped these two things up in a flour tortilla and are serving that product at mass rallies nationwide; the product is called the MAGA Wrap.

Hate lurks, leaps out of dark republican and dark religious quarters, and reigns supreme in the land; an existential fear of white people being replaced by almost everything cohabits all the dark quarters where hate reigns.

A new wrap of hate, replacement fear and virulent white supremacy - called the Non-Replacement/Hate Wrap - is being served up at MAGA events and republican dark dens.

A fusion of wraps appears imminent: Non-Replacement and MAGA are reaching critical mass.

And the rallies have lots of guns.

And the Wraps, with their associated frictions, the disintegrated supply chain with its associated scarcities, the intensity of unwillingness to acknowledge the cooking of the planet with its increasingly violent confrontations between the acolytes of the Carbon Releasers and the "Other Side", the imminent starvation of the babies of the land with the inevitable associated despair in the face of that looming event, and the price of living in a non-competitive economy with its implicit never endingly growing profit margins and bonuses and hyper concentration of wealth, and even cash flow, taken all together, are sources of new frictions.

Luckily there are lots of guns.

Guns are great way to settle things and deplete friction among warring factions.

There is more, a lot more.

And what I have said could have been said much better than I have.

But this is all the time, energy and talent that I have at my disposal; it's all I can offer preparatory to getting back to the title of this post.

The question is "is America still a country or is it a pressure cooker bomb"?