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After Holmes introduced the four as country giants, saying “some might argue they are country music,” they began to talk about what’s ailing America. Willie Nelson led with “there’s a lot of things wrong with this country. I think the spirit is still here, the spirit just needs to scream a little bit.”

Kris followed with a far more biting remark. “Other than the fact that it reminds me a lot of the flag-waving and choreographed patriotism that we had back in Nazi Germany half a century ago … the fact that we’ve got a one-party system which is in control of all three branches of our government … a lapdog media that’s cranking out propaganda for the administration that would make a Nazi blush … other than that, we’re doing pretty good.”

Johnny Cash added “If you ask me, one of the illnesses is that there’s too much money being spent on military and there should be more spent on education, welfare, the children, and the elderly … There’s always been a lot of things wrong with the country but it’s always been our obligation and opportunity to help straighten those things out. I love America.”

Aside from specific contexts in history, for instance a Bronze Age army being slow to adopt Iron Age technology, collapse is always the result of two central factors:

One is that the wealth class becomes so generationally separated from the realities of living at subsistence levels that they cease to acknowledge the injustice of such disparity, or even recall what it means not to be able to pay their way out of any difficulty.

Jeff Bezos is not special. He is just another business wheel who, through hard work and an unusually gifted schematic mind, capitalized at exactly the right time in technological shifts to build one of the most amazingly successful businesses in human history. The fact that the business is also predatory, anti-worker, monopolistic, invasive, the tool of community destruction and isolation, and one of the main drivers of the immiseration of millions of people in exchange for convenience, speaks to the fact that the true talent of Jeff Bezos is leering into the camera to twist his mustache at the ethical void.

Being a billionaire is grotesque, but perhaps it is a useful marker of the edge of the observable universe. Being a proud multi-billionaire who thinks they deserve such a status without spending at least a percentage of their haul alleviating the suffering of others is a pathology that can be cured with Bottle Service uranium. At some point, wealth is more destabilizing than religion, because exclusivity becomes its own scripture, and that includes presuming the right to rape young girls without consequence is a byproduct of NASDAQ share value.