One of the more challenging parts of growing up, for me at least, was learning about sportsmanship. Oh, we'd be told about "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game", but the way adults acted when a team played well but lost versus when a team played poorly but won was not ignored by the children involved. As I grew up, hard lessons taught me the only time people play for the sake of playing is when they have nothing to lose. People who win, and do it consistently, have always understood rules are flexible things, rewarding most only when bent just to the point of breaking, but no further.

It's everywhere. Pro ball players, business owners, real estate developers, labor union leaders, senior citizen groups, gun nuts, peacenicks, hookers and homeless are all looking for an edge, an advantage that will give them exactly what they want, and at the top will do absolutely anything to get. Every one of them always keeping in mind the old axiom "it's not breaking the rules as long as you don't get caught."

What I find surprising about such things is that other people find them so surprising. In business and sports it's amusing, but in politics it's simply staggering. Thankfully, our founding fathers were nowhere near as naive about human nature as the current generation seems to be. They knew far too many of us prefer to bend our knees than use our heads, and that people who seek governmental power are always smart, charming, perceptive, funny, and at heart the absolute last people you would actually want to give that sort of power to. So they designed from the outset a system of government so Byzantine in its complexity we still haven't completely figured out all its subtleties more than two centuries later. Even then it was nearly torn apart by the efforts of the rapidly industrializing North to defang the power of the old-money South. Only the truly credulous think the Civil War was just about slavery, or state's rights.

I'm not so cynical as to say everyone is like this. Far from it. Our country is fantastically successful not just because it puts ruthless, vicious people in a precarious balance against themselves, but because it also makes them directly accountable to the vast majority of decent, law-abiding folks who make up the rest of it, folks who really do think good works, a pious soul, and living a clean life are signposts along the only real road to happiness. But to deny the monsters exist, or to claim they infest one side only, or that they are not in charge and have always been in charge (no matter which label happens to hang on them) is to at best show a fawning ignorance in the way the world works, at worst a denial so complete as to be called cynical itself.

It's very important to remember this... the US is not successful because of any innate virtue bestowed on us, but rather because the dark, powerful people who run our society are kept in balance with each other, while being held in check by and accountable to the rest of us. Even more importantly, the rest of the world is not as successful as we are not because we've lied or stolen or killed our way to the top. They fail instead because for the most part their countries do not have such checks and balances, and therefore are always at risk from the predations of evil and the miscalculations of good intent. History has proven time and again that such nations all too easily succumb to the abyss of totalitarianism, no matter what its disguise may be.

It is to our discredit that we fail to recognize this, and instead blame ourselves, and allow ourselves to be blamed, for all the evil that is in this world.