THIS is why government has failed -- not because of some phantom conservative "other", but because of a lazy, ill-informed, self-absorbed citizenry that, for the most part, is no different than those we decry in government.

It is obviously not just those in government who are thoroughly corrupt, but virtually every group and those they represent that lobbies and bribes government officials for special favors. Nearly everyone is out to bend the system to their own personal advantage. This utter lack of social conscience was, I believe, best analyzed in The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch.

"To live for the moment is the prevailing passion -- to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity."

-Christopher Lasch

"We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms."

-Lasch, quoting Erich Fromm

"It was by the sober sense of our citizens that we were safely and steadily conducted from monarchy to republicanism, and it is by the same agency alone we can be kept from falling back."

-Thomas Jefferson

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

-Walt Kelly

re: "they censored the extraordinary eruption of Comet Holmes"

Apparently, "they" were unsuccessful.

"Its startling outburst, however, has a precedent. The comet was also in a major eruption 115 years ago, in November 1892, when English amateur Edwin Holmes was the first to spot it. It reached 4th or 5th magnitude, faded in the following weeks, and then underwent a second eruption 2½ months after the first."

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/10775326.html

re: "McClelland has admitted to seeing a 8 t0 9 ft tall alien on his monitor..."

Dr. Egon Spengler: "You said before you were waiting for a sign. What sign are you waiting for?"

Louis Tully: "Gozer the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!"

What a country. Have sex: Front page news, end of career, endless fodder for the right wing media. Lie the country into war and kill and maim hundreds of thousands: Ho-hum.

And we wonder why we're going down the toilet.

re: "popes were famous for having out-of-wedlock children and millions of mistresses"

I trust that you are merely engaging in hyperbole here.

re: "Society embraced the idea of love in marriage...

You mean, Western society. There are many other societies that have existed with many different ideas of -- and reasons for -- marriage.

Most Polynesian societies prefered intrastatus marriages, varying from mere bonds between chiefly families to the extreme case of Hawaii, where special care was taken to select the nearest possible relative as a wife for a high chief. This was practiced to such an extent that it led to marriages between brothers and sisters, what Westerners describe as incest, a word which does not exist as such in the Hawaiian language. Thus what is dubbed “Hawaiian royal incest” (marriage between blood relatives of the first degree among the ali’i) appears as a unique case of intrastatus union in Polynesia. Practiced among the ali’i only, incestuous unions were considered with much respect. If the royal union bore fruit, the child would be of the highest kapu rank. His kapus would be equal to those of the gods. He was called divine, akua, and was considered a god. The most perfect and revered union was that of a full brother and sister of highest rank.

http://www.transatlantica.org/document525.html

re: "We are now taught to expect that we would find in our spouse a great lover, a best friend, a constant companion..."

The degradation of work and the impoverishment of communal life force people to turn to sexual excitement to satisfy all their emotional needs. Formerly sexual antagonism was tempered not only by chivalric, paternalistic conventions but by a more relaxed acceptance of the limitations of the other sex. Men and women acknowledged each other's shortcomings without making them the basis of a comprehensive indictment. Partly because they found more satisfaction than is currently available in casual relations with their own sex, they did not have to raise friendship itself into a political program, an ideological alternative to love. An easygoing, everyday contempt for the weaknesses of the other sex, institutionalized as folk wisdom concerning the emotional incompetence of men or the brainlessness of women, kept sexual enmity within bounds and prevented it from becoming an obsession. Feminism and the ideology of intimacy have discredited the sexual stereotypes which kept women in their place but which also made it possible to acknowledge sexual antagonism without raising to the level of all-out warfare. Today the folklore of sexual differences and the acceptance of sexual friction survive only in the working class. Middle-class feminists envy the ability of working-class women to acknowledge that men get in their way without becoming man-haters. These women are less angry at their men because they don't spend that much time with them. ... Middle-class women are the ones who were told men had to be their companions.

-Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism