Ethics lingers between the moralizing of personal freedoms and the imposition of material constraints.
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I'm sure you'll all remember how Europe colonized the Americas,
Flourishing fields with puritanical, eco-destroying agrarian farmers,
Migrating greedy merchant disloyalists to populate the city shores,
Sending uncompassionate priests to shamelessly assimilate cultures,
And a march of conquistadors committing ongoing drunken genocide.
Well, it sorta looks like America has now successfully colonized Europe,
Intoxicating it as their pagan celebrity vacation to old-world empire glory,
Twisting in legal tender tentacles so it's contained by controlled networks,
Overwhelming by AI bots and feudal tech lords manipulating cloud data,
And also, using bully powers of expansionist military and trade alliances.
They even got an American Pope,
Perhaps the Patriarch is up next!
It reminds me of another time, another empire, and its little babbling creature of many delights,
For Rome would’ve been a boot, without a philosophical Greece educating with a soothing harp,
Without its paradise escape, wisest oracles in the temples, Dionysus running naked on the loose.
And today, America would be a mindless warring machine without Europe’s bloody wartime treaties,
Stupid without its endless babble of enlightenment age philosophers whose shadows all discuss from,
And weak without lineages to that Hellenizing Euroculture shipped across earth by colonial conquest.
But maybe,
America is democratic Greece overrun in oligarchy, unaware of an overtaking power growing to its west,
Lost amid squabbling city-states, an easy takeover by efficiency of a more singular authoritarian state.
After all,
East blends west, and west blends east,
North blends south, and south blends north,
When living on a round world, mixing contained.
It's all the same to me, 'we humane' stretched across a green planet,
So why do these oversized nations keep acting like greedy empires?
Who knows, history doesn't repeat, but damn, these tones sound so similar,
Especially when alluded to by an inept historian implying such connections.
It really looks like the capital is broke…
Can’t squeeze water from hard stones,
Or coins from the poor’s empty wallets.
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Greed, greed, oh yes, indeed,
It takes till there’s nothing left,
And on that, we can all agree.
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