Is America Great Again Yet?

The question ‘when was America ever great’ has been posed so let's take a look and see if we can answer it.
America became America in 1776 so we have a pick from 244 years although the criteria isn't easy to nail down.
George Floyd's niece was obviously looking at it through the eyes of race and America with a history of Slavery, the KK and it's all round terribleness towards anyone not white, the easy answer is it's never been great, always been awful.
Donald Trump, the man who started the whole make America great again buzz, is probably looking at things through an economic viewpoint and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that the only year there was no national debt was 1837 during the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the lowest ever unemployment was under Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1967 at 2.50% and the lowest poverty rate came during Richard Nixon's Presidency in 1973 with a record low of 11.1% of the population in poverty. 
Regarding wars and conflicts, in its 244 years America, wikipedia shows that it has not been involved in a war or conflict somewhere for only 18 years, at peace for a paltry 7.4% of it's existence and none of those years chime with the years of the best economic measures so we still can't nail down when America was great.
The final measures would be approval of the President and when the voters were most happiest with their lot and that would be Harry S Truman who had the highest approval rating of 91 in 1945 and as 1945 was also one of those rare years when America wasn't actually at war with someone, that would make 1945 the year that America was last great, at least in the eyes of Americans.
Not very scientific but with race protests filling the streets, a current debt of $24.95 trillion, 13.3 unemployment rate, 12% poverty rate, conflicts ongoing in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Yemini and Libya and a President with a record low approval rating of 45, America certainly isn't great again just yet.

Special Guest Blogger: Peter The Great

Due to having a mentally nutty brother, i became Tsar aged 10 sharing power with my half sister but she was overthrown and one of my first rule changes was to introduce some fashion sense.
When Henry VIII began wearing long trousers in England, Russia was a long way behind in the fashion stakes and as they were a sign of power, i ordered every man to put some damn trousers on.
To be fair, fashion wasn't the only thing we were behind on as Russia's territory was massive, it's population was pretty small and mostly comprised of farmers, with only a small fraction of all Russians living in towns and i saw trousers as a way of bringing Russia into the 18th Century, so issued a decree commanding everyone at every level of society to wear pants, other than clergy and peasant farmers.
That meant no more long cloaks or whatever the hell the farmers wore but as well as leg coverings, i taxed beards (moustaches were tax free) and suddenly, Russian men were forced to wear leggings and shave their facial hair at all times, despite Russia's climate being brass monkeys pretty much all year round in Russia.
Basking in the glory of a trousered and goatee free nation, i declared myself Emperor of all the Russians and then built a great military which i used to smack around the Swedes and pummel the Persians but i did have a bit of a dicky bladder which was made worse by wading into the cold sea to save some drowning soldiers exacerbated my bladder problems and ultimately caused my death.
My legacy would therefore be launching an empire that lasted 200 years until the Soviet Revolution of 1917 and it all started with long trousers.

Statues In General

I'm not much of a lover of statues and i don't buy for a second the argument that those of the people currently standing around in parks and city centers should be left there as a reminder of our past indiscretions.
They were built and prominently placed to honour them, i doubt many people knew the dark stories behind Colston or Rhodes until the furor blew up about them but leaving them in place just seems to condone them, literally placing them on a pedestal.
Apart from racists and slave traders, many of our statues are of long dead military personnel and i am with the pigeons on what we think of celebrating them.
Brits do have a strange compulsion to put things on Statues, usually wigs and traffic cones, the nearby Charles Dickens statue is a regular recipient of a comic relief red nose and is currently sporting a face mask but if we are going to have statues, pick people who have benefited mankind such as Darwin, Newton, Watt, Fleming, Shakespeare or Nightingale, all people who made enduring contributions to our existence and should be celebrated front and center on 40ft high columns, not some Admiral who mowed down Johnny Foreigner a few centuries ago.
I say a rule of thumb should be if your ships transported 84,000 men, women and children to slavery then the statue is probably not of someone who should be celebrated and to say it was a different time then, it was, but doesn't mean it was right then, just means people were more able to get away with it then. 

Special Guest Blogger: Cecil Rhodes

I might be dead but i know why i have been asked to write here today, it's because i'm British and as i said 'being British, we won the first  prize in the great lottery of life' which may sound a bit arrogant but i didn't mean it that way, i meant it was because we were better than everyone else.
I went to live in Africa due to my asthma and the British climate wasn't good for me, the Great in Britain isn't there because of the weather and a chance discovery proved that diamonds were not only a girl's best friend but did brilliantly for me also, it made me so much money i started buying land but the problem was the land had people who were not White British living on it.
With all the good grace you would expect from a white Victorian-era diamond magnate, i bought over white folk and gave them land while reducing the amount of land a black person could legally own. 
Then i ingeniously changed the voting rules so the blacks could vote only if they owned enough land, which they obviously never, see the previous sentence.
Oh, then just in case they ever started that wanting to vote in their own country ball rolling again, the sweetest plum in the up-yours basket was when i introduced a tax that increased sharply with the size of the hut they lived in which didn't go down well but i explained that life isn't fair, nor will it ever be anyway, i've got lots of money and am very famous and you're not so shut up and dig.
I ended up buying, controlling and lording it over 850,000 square miles of the earth's surface and called it after myself, i wanted Cecil Rhodes African Peninsula but the initials didn't look good on the flag so ended up going with Rhodesia instead.
I treated my people well, the white settlers in Australia and North and South America slaughtered their indigenous people but i did what i did out of an undying love for my fellow Rhodesian's and Britain and if anything i didn't know the strength of my own love, like Lennie from Of Mice and Men, if he had access to millions of pounds, powerful firearms and an army.
When i died aged 48 us Brits had maintained their position as the supreme race and the ultimate accolade, statues were built of me including in Oxford University which as i saw today, still draws thousands of students, many of them black, to gathering around it, singing and staring up at the man who bought a little piece of Britain to the Africans, not a good bit obviously, somewhere like Essex possibly, but it still brings a tear to this Brit's beady little eye.

Special Guest Blogger: Mary Seacole

The Crimea War will forever be known as the war which made Florence Nightingale but anyone would think that she was the only Nurse amongst the muck and bullets because i was there also although not many people seem to have heard of me.
I learnt my skills in Jamaica where my mother was a nurse but being a black woman i had to overcame the double prejudices of sexism and racism and when the Crimea war started i applied to be part of Florence Nightingales crew but she turned me down because i was black and as she wrote, association between me and her nurses was absolutely out of the question, but despite her i still went on to accomplish great things and save thousands of soldiers lives.
I set up what came to be known as the 'British Hotel' for convalescent officers behind the Crimean War’s front lines and cared for wounded soldiers on the battlefield using traditional African and Caribbean herbal remedies.
After the saintly Florence turned me down i applied to the War Office but they also refused so i funded my own way to Crimea where i would trek the battlefields under fire, to nurse the wounded, not miles back in safety like some other nurses i could name who had time to piddle around designing pretty Pie Charts.
When the war ended i was broke and had to file for bankruptcy but my story was reported in the British Press and my financial situation improved although not the racism, Punch magazine wrote a piece asking 'Who would give a guinea to a foreigner when he might bestow the money on a genuine English one' but plenty did and even more bought my autobiography despite the angelic Florence moaning that i was getting too much acclaim for my efforts in Crimea and even wrote a letter to her MP to muddy my name, lying that i had kept a bad house in Crimea, and was responsible for much drunkenness and improper conduct.
After i died of a stroke i faded from British memory, afterall they had a famous white Nurse to celebrate that fitted the English ideal of a Victorian heroine more than a dark-skinned Jamaican, and when a statue of me was placed outside St Thomas' Hospital, the Florence Nightingale Society complained that i did not qualify as a mainstream figure in the history of nursing, as she did so much to discredit me, she would have been proud that the society that bears her name is just as spiteful and bitchy as she was.

Special Guest Blogger: Marie Antoinette

I allegedly said 'Let them eat cake' when i found out the people of France were out of bread and starving which makes me sound a right bitch and then the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft repeated and then Jean-Jacques Rousseau, attributing it to me.
Because of my Austrian ancestry, i was not very popular with the French at the time anyway so when the 'let them eat cake' story came about, everyone believed it.
Rousseau recounts an episode in a bakery when he heard a great princess say, when told by the baker that the peasants had no bread, replied: 'Then let them eat brioches' and the Princess was Marie-Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV'.
So i lost my head for something i never even said, what i actually said was they're a bunch of snail eating frogs who smell of cheese, see, nothing about cake whatsoever.
I married Louis XVI when i was 14 and he was 15 and the main part of why i was so hated by the French was because the country was bankrupt due to him sending massive amounts of Francs to support the American Revolution but i did not have particular grand tastes, i liked diamonds, gold and beautiful clothes as much as the next woman and on the farm attached to the Palace i had the animals sprayed with expensive perfume but they did stink.
We almost escaped just before our execution but the guard we bribed turned out to be a untrustworthy piece of crap so off to the guillotine we went and after watching my husbands head bounce off the block and into a basket, i climed the steps and accidentally stepped on the executioners foot and
naturally apologised for my clumsiness.
Looking back now i probably should have just kicked him really, really hard in the nuts, what was the worst he could do? He was about to kill me anyway!

Edward Colston Statue In The Right Place

Statues are erected to say this person was one of Britain's very best but that's the problem with statues, if we are going to celebrate anyone with a likeness in our towns and cities, it should be people who are genuine heroes who have helped mankind, not conquered, enslaved or killed as many as possible of them so why the statue of Edward Colston was not removed decades ago is a disgrace.
Edward Colston was a slave trader who made his fortune by transporting 84,000 men, women and children from West Africa to the Caribbean in the 17th Century and his statue which until this afternoon standing in Bristol Town Centre, is now at the bottom of Bristol's Harbour after protesters pulled it from the plinth and dragged it to it's watery end.
The Home Secertary has come out and described the toppling of Colston's statue as 'disgraceful' but i would say a good guide is if the statue is a representation of someone who made money selling black people for slaves, then the statue is probably not of someone who should be celebrated.
Britain has a shameful and reprehensible past with the likes of Colston, a white supremacist who wreaked havoc in Africa and represents Britain at it empirical worst, when it was stomping around the globe and putting the natives down while they raped and pillaged the land for Blighty.
Colston's actions were abhorrent in the 17th Century and it is wrong today in the cold light of the 21st Century when we see them for the hideous creatures that he and his ilk were, so they should be torn down and thrown in the sea out of sight, i would also lob every Winston Churchill statue into the river if it was up to me.
My only concern is that the people who did it, i hope they sanitised their hands afterwards but no amount of scrubbing will remove the stain of what Britain and it's slave traders did, but making sure we don't have a 18ft bronze statue to them as a constant reminder of our previous generations racism is a great start.

Special Guest Blogger: Sigmund Freud

I gave the World the concept of Psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, repression, dream analysis, psychotherapy, the subconscious/unconscious, id/ego/superego and the belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories and most of them concern sexual symbolism.
I also gave the World the Freudian slip, an unintentional error regarded as revealing subconscious feelings, usually concerning sex and offering us a look into the human psyche and discovered that it's full of cocks.
Many of my works ended up having sexual connotations, such as females wanting equality suffering a form of feminine castration complex and penis envy and smoking was just a substitution for masturbation but it is absurd to say that i was obsessed by the male genitalia or phallus, dicks, pricks, members, tools, organs, cocks, wangs, knobs, choppers, plonkers, dongs, winkles, joysticks, peckers, John Thomas's, weenies, whangs, todgers, schlongs or willies.
One of my patients had a severe leg pains with stomach and menstrual pains which i diagnosed as being caused by habitual masturbation and could be cured by an operation on her nose which resulted in recurrent nasal bleeding which were, i said were due to 'hysterical wish-bleedings linked to a wish to be loved', see that's the good thing about being a famous psychiatrist, you can say any old bollocks and they believe you. 
Things were going great penis's until the Nazis turned up to ruin things so i fled to Britain and continued my career of the patient paying me a lot of money to pour out their feelings on a couch while i nodded and took notes and concluded they jerked off too much.
In no way associated with cigarettes and penis's, i smoked only great big, long, thick cigars and it was these that did for me as i contracted cancer of the jaw and died and left the World Psychoanalysys, so-named because anyone who believes that analysis i spouted must be a psycho.

Special Guest Blogger: Sam Cooke

I didn't know much about history, geography, a science book or the French i took which is why i was never invited onto any pub quiz teams but i know you have to be a special type of talent to make a song of prisoners working on the side of the road sound like a love ballad.
Despite being a deeply religious man, i was a bit of a philanderer, during my group stage before going solo i had 3 pregnant girlfriends, all at the same time, and it was trying to get my leg over a fan that led to my untimely death.
I brought a female fan back to my room at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles for drinks and then a spot of sex but after the drinks and getting naked, i went to the toilet only for her to get cold feet and run out the room, grabbing my clothes along with hers, leaving only one of my shoes.
Being drunk, and naked except for one foot, i tracked down the manager of the hotel and demanded i be allowed to search her office for the missing girl and my clothes but strangely, she didn't like the idea of an angry, naked black man raiding her office for underwear so i grabbed her, she grabbed a gun and shot me in the chest, killing me.
Bobby Womack was my friend since childhood and was a member of my first band, and he showed up at my funeral in my car with my wife wearing one of my suits.
Three months after my death he married my wife and cheated on her with my daughter which sounds awful but to be fair, roles reversed, i would have done exactly the same.

Special Guest Blogger: Nicolaus Copernicus

If there is one thing we know about space it is that the Earth orbits the Sun and you have me to thank for that. You're welcome.
It was my book 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium' (or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) which proved not only that i was terrible at book titles but also that the Earth orbited the Sun but i was canny about it all because i knew that if i had just come out and said: 'Hey what if the Earth is not the center of the Universe and actually goes around the Sun', the Church would have replied: 'Hey, what if we set you on fire and piss on you to put it out' so i delayed the publication until i was literally on my death bed, the book was printed on the day that i died.
Although i get all the glory, the idea was first put forward by Aristarchus in about 300BC when he said the middle contained a great fire which the planets circled around but he was up against Aristotle and Ptolemy who said we were the middle and was ignored but he did get a moon crater named after him although so did i, and mine was bigger as well as an element, Copernicium.
Such was my concern that the Religious folk would batter me that i tried to get around it by dedicating my masterpiece to Pope Paul III but it didn't stop them criticizing me, to be honest i don't think they quite got the jist of it.
The main criticism was the theory wasn't compatible with the Bible because in Genesis 1:14, 'God places lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night' and the central location of the Sun was not compatible with it being described as one of the lights placed in the firmament.
Kinda missed the whole point really but then the Bible thumpers really did think that the whole Universe revolved around them.