The Idol and the Avatar: Barack Obama, the second socialist politician from Illinois to elected President of the USA, borrows some mojo from the first.

"The president addressed Congress the other day. I don't know which was scarier -- the speech, or Congress cheering him on. He invoked Lincoln. Whenever a president is going to get us in serious trouble, they always use Lincoln." --Victor Milson, space adviser to the U.S. president, reporting ominous news from home to his friend Dr. Heywood Floyd (who is in the vicinity of Jupiter); from the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

Dick Cheney wasn't the first Vice President to shoot somebody: Aaron Burr is depicted here shooting and mortally wounding Alexander Hamilton during their 1804 duel in Weehawken, New Jersey, an "affair of honor" that came a couple of decades too late to save America from a lot of economic misery.

Recalling the death of Alexander Hamilton at the hands of Aaron Burr, one is inevitably prompted to borrow the line from Shakespeare's Scottish Play: "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."

After examining the legacy of the first U.S. Treasury Secretary in Thomas DiLorenzo's timely and indispensable new book Hamilton's Curse, one might be forgiven for wishing the deadly round fired by Burr's pistol during the 1804 duel at Weehawken had found its target two decades earlier, or that Hamilton -- who displayed genuine valor as an artillery officer in the War for American Independence -- had died heroically on the battlefield before laying the foundations of the corporatist system under which we now live.

Among my fondest hopes is that eventually this political conflict becomes an irreconcilable split between the "Red" and "Blue" Americas, and that this rupture would provide opportunities for regional secession by those of us who want nothing more to do with the Empire, its wars, its corruption, and its collapsing economy.

There is a certain diabolical genius behind the division of the United States into "Red" and "Blue" factions. Each of the constituencies cattle-penned into one of those categories covets the power of the central government to compel the other to do its bidding.

By mobilizing resentments through appeals to various hot-button issues that never grow cold through resolution, the Power Elite that created this artificial division herds people into the voting booth to perform a liturgy that has no demonstrable impact on public policy, but ensures the continued "legitimacy" of the Regime. In this way, all of us -- Red, Blue, or of neither of those synthetic political shades -- are rendered part of the "Whom," the undifferentiated "people" on the receiving end of whatever the ruling "persons" see fit to inflict on us.

But this arrangement may, at long last, be breaking down, just as the delusion-based fiat money financial system has entered its terminal phase. As we descend into what will be a long and bitter depression, it's possible that, not all that far in the future, the "Red" and "Blue" Americas might decide that they really don't want to be part of the same polity.

Try as I might, I can't see why this would be a bad thing. Our current configuration is not a reflection of some divinely ordained design, after all. There's no reason why several "Americas" wouldn't be able to share the same continent, engaging in peaceful commerce and otherwise minding their own business. And it's difficult to see how such an arrangement would be "un-American"; those who truly love America would want the world to be blessed with not one, but many of them.

Given the unfortunate outcome last time a group of American states decided to quit the "Union" club, it's clear that the dangers of political fission are great. But remaining artificially yoked together in a bankrupt, increasingly untenable Union would most likely be fatal to liberty.

Painful as it would be for the USA to disintegrate, this may well be the only way that we can avoid descending irretrievably into undisguised tyranny -- and Obama might just be the figure to precipitate such a breakup.

And given the fact that Washington is entirely broke and likely to run out of credit, there's even a chance -- a tiny one, mind you -- that this breakup could happen without Red and Blue replicating the mass bloodshed that accompanied the attempted divorce between Blue and Gray. Without the financial means to carry out an actual civil war, Red and Blue might simply have to say to each other, "Fare thee well -- and get ye lost."

It probably won't happen that way. But keep a good thought, anyhow.

American tables are not as dependent as Iceland's on imported food. But for the past several years, we have imported more food than we have produced. And now that short-term commercial credit has frozen, getting imported food to supermarkets and other retail outlets has suddenly become much more difficult. The effects of this development are yet to be felt, but they will be manifest in due time.

Icelanders are denuding supermarket shelves of basic household needs, from fresh produce to canned items to light bulbs. This is as close as that island's small, tranquil, and relatively homogenous population comes to an outright riot.

When Americans face the same circumstances -- and we will -- we can expect to see localized eruptions of Bedlamite violence that will make the 1992 L.A. Riots look like a series of mild high school pranks.

I'm cynical enough to think that our rulers, who eagerly seize power under the pretext of crises,
are counting on an upheaval of this kind in order to propel us into the "New Bretton Woods" global financial system now being openly discussed.