An anxious silence falls over the land this Memorial Day as we discern increasingly that those we put in charge of this shape-shifting thing called the public interest are running out of trips to lay on the people. Something grotesque is revealing itself: a bankruptcy not just of money but of national purpose, meaning, and legitimacy. You realize this day, with a breaking heart, that your country has been stolen by psychopaths.

Brace for impact. We're already off the road and now it's only a matter of how this vehicle comes to a stop in the ditch. Then, it's a question of how each of us emerges from the smoldering wreckage. The main thing, though, is clear to everyone: What we were riding in is no more. We're out there stumbling around in the dark, in shock, trying desperately to assess our whereabouts and what has happened to us.

Now, the trouble with being ruled by psychopaths is that they don't care about other people. They are actually incapable of imagining the lives of others, especially the fact that these others care about each other, and what happens to them. You may have noticed, for instance, that the psychopath Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) went to Ukraine last week and declared, "Russians are dying. We have never spent money so well." Only a couple of months ago, he called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. He stopped short of dissing Mr. Putin's mother.

Ukraine, of course, is a lost cause, and it was never a good cause in the first place. Contrary to Lindsay Graham's untoward utterance, American money has killed far more Ukrainians than Russians. He overlooked that because he doesn't care about the Ukrainians, for whose sake our "folks" in charge supposedly undertook this clusterfuck. Lindsay Graham also may not have noticed that our country is collapsing and Russia is not. That's must be because Lindsay Graham does not care about Americans, either.

As for our money, it looks like most of the rest of the world — the nations that still produce things of value — are so turned-off by American pathocracy that they are seeking every way possible to stop using our money in international trade settlements. That money, our dollar, became the world's reserve currency because our country ended up on top in the previous world war and for the better part of a century afterward dominated the planet militarily. Naturally, as our leadership turned more pathological and pathocratic, so did our military endeavors — until lately they amount to little more than just smashing up other countries to show we can do it.