"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." - Frank Zappa


& the trumpets blared

Dunt duh duh Duuuuh!

That is exactly where we are.. & while the dumb masses nod & repeat

Murca! Lan' o the FRAY! Homo the Brayve!

theyll maintain the facade

but shouold the people realize the situation & rebel en mass the whole thing wil;l change in an instant

3rd or 4th grade I had a teacher who said

America will go down w/o a shot being fired.

ill bet i was the only kid who actually grasped what she meant. i became aware of " things that would indicate she was right" , from waste/fraud right there in the school to an ever increasing debt for the nation. our foreign policy is disastrous for our people.,,no matter what bunch is in charge, always downhill..

JOG-
America probably will go down at some point, as no nation, nor empire, nor any other political system has lasted forever, nor will one.  Unfortunately, that's a lesson that history has taught us.
Whether you begin with the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, ancient Greece ( although it wasn't really a nation, but only a collection of city-states ), then the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, then probably the British Empire, Hitler's dream of a Thousand Year Reich, the Soviet Union - all have come to an end.  Some through warfare, some through internal decay, and some, like the British Empire and the Soviet Union specifically because time and circumstances simply caused them to become passé.
Remember the old saying, "the sun never sets on British soil"?  I suppose that is still true if you consider Commonwealth nations like Australia and New Zealand to be "British soil", but that is hardly true in reality.
As a realist, I recognize that the U.S. will not last forever because nothing does.
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to preserve the greatest nation on Earth for as long as we can, however.  I still haven't figured out what would be better.

JOG -
Gotta run and shut down for the night, but our maim problem is internal decay and deviating from the capitalistic principles that made our country great in the first place.
More in a couple of days - I'll be on the road until Wed.