Déjà vu All Over Again

I pick up the newspapers these days and all I can recall is the Sheldon Harnick “Merry Minuet.” I think I first heard it sung by the Kingston Trio or perhaps the Chad Mitchell Trio, I can’t remember which, but the lyrics have stuck in my mind for almost forty-five years now.
     The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
     The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
     Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
     And I don't like anybody very much! 

     The Republican majority in the United States House of Representatives and in, at least, the Wisconsin and Minnesota legislatures (!) are volubly and gleefully threatening to eliminate whatever legislation that the Congress passed during the past two years of the Obama administration. Ideologically, I abhor the Republican agenda. But the rhetoric emanating from Washington D.C. sounds like the new Congressional session is to be nothing more than a rather low-level boxing match in which two relatively untrained contestants will get in the ring and slug it out attempting to inflict as much bloody damage as is possible. I have no sense that occupying the Capital today are lawmakers; rather, they appear to me nothing more than crude (even cruel) brawlers, bullies on the playground threatening to steal the lunch monies of those preoccupied with other matters. I hate opening the papers and hearing yet another gleeful threat by the Republican/Tea Party members of Congress to take the country back to when it was safe for rich people to safely thrive without having to be at all concerned with the welfare of anyone else. Carnegie may have given away half of his wealth, but he acquired his money by robbing (and even killing) his workers. I am tired of the social Darwinsim (at best) and the fascistic rhetoric at worst of the Republican/Tea Party cabal. What country are they talking about that they aim to take back. And take the country back to where exactly? I would trust them as I would two adders fanged. They fool me to the top of my bent.
     I will return to my books and leave the paper to training the animals not to defecate in the house.