There was a time in our life — we can’t remember when — when it was considered naive to think politicians could be bought.

It wasn’t so simple, we were told, not so obvious. You don’t just hand over a bag of cash and order a vote. No, it was far more subtle — the ability to make a call or walk into an office and command attention, a degree of access unavailable to a mere constituent. You’re buying influence, not action.

And that may have well been the case. Just like it was once the case that MTV played videos. Or that our nation once celebrated what we called “democratic norms”. But whatever world may have existed a generation or two back, it no longer exists today.

You might think folks would notice.

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Our mother recently discovered a photo of our grandfather’s high-school basketball team. This in itself was a surprise, since we had no idea Grandpa played basketball. Or, for that matter, that he was once young, because the eternal role of grandparents is to seem unbelievably old to their grandchildren.

Douglas High School won 12 of 16 games that year, almost doubling their opponents’ points, then went on to take the league championship.

The year was 1923. Douglas was, and is, in Juneau, Alaska, where both our mother and godmother grew up. Close friends, they would leave for college together, and eventually raise families within a short drive of each other. We watched the first Moon landing from our godparents’ house.

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Life got you down? Country swirling around the drain? Planet about to finally fulfill the promise of Seventies apocalyptic movies? We have a cure for what ails ya.

Okay, there’s a cheat here — it’s a ceramic squirrel. Kinda spoils the fun, doesn’t it?

Or not:

A South Carolina woman was held on a domestic abuse charge for allegedly stabbing her common-law husband with a decorative ceramic squirrel when he came home late on Christmas Eve without any beer.

Now that’s journalism: A sentence that could have happily ended after “squirrel”, but continues for three additional clauses, each topping the last. We’ve seen entire movies with less story.

[via Know Your Meme]