[Last Section – 20 points] Choose one essay prompt and respond to it thoroughly and correctly after you have turned in the multiple-choice part of the test:
1) Detail the impeachment process, important during this last Clinton term, and critique the reality of a partisan process that allows “the jury” to put party loyalty ahead of
2) Why do Republicans want a balanced budget? Why do Democrats resist that mandate?
3) Of 1937’s Helvering v. Davis (giving us the welfare state), 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education (which eradicated state rights), and 1973’s Roe v. Wade (making child murder legal) which was the worst Supreme Court decision and why?
4) Without needing to provide obvious details about OUR democracy, contrast the characteristics of a 3rd World Banana Republic.
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Name – Grace White #4 – Essay Question Prophetic Bible School
| Amazing, Grace! A+ Again |
The term 3rd World today suggests a poor country needing help. Banana Republics are a particular type of 3rd World Country, often on our side. The term came from, of all people, that Irish guy, O’Henry, who wrote the story Mrs. Daniel teaches every Christmas about the woman who chops off her hair and the man who sells his watch. He used the term in a novel about a country like Honduras, ruled by a dictator and dependent on a foreign power to oversee production of its one real resource.
Despots, seemingly informed by Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” hold power in 3rd World Banana Republics [3WBRs]. In their minds, they become synonymous with the country itself so that anybody opposing them is a traitor to be jailed, or worse. They and their vociferous supporters clamor to ship selective opponents abroad.
Because the leader kowtows to foreign leaders who helped him gain his position, there is a continual instability, especially as the leader gets more brazen. Modeling Stalin’s methods, he repeatedly hires and fires advisers and cabinet members as if it’s a game show. Despite traditions of compromise, he rules by executive order. He also, at least, voices a desire to hold his position for life.
Primping as if he’s God’s gift to humanity, he often has an “eye candy” wife, usually not his first. Sexually promiscuous, like his cronies and others in his class, he has bedded or still does bed other women, while at the same time getting in bed with major religious groups like Latin American Papists that forgive his faults because he outwardly backs their positions.
The leader courts favor from adherents who would take or shoot a bullet for him when he convinces them that he’s being victimized by opponents who once held power. They respond in part because he controls selective media outlets that become the de facto repositories of truth – itself a victim of conspiracy theories and big lies.
The leader normally owns various opulent properties in exotic locations, in country and out, where the upper crust and foreigners, wanting to engage in profit-making, gather. He masters new technologies to control the masses. He refuses to share personal and business information and profits financially even while his country runs up huge debt to foreigners.
A lack of social mobility and an eroding middle-class mark 3WBRs. Many citizens, in their misery, succumb to alcohol or drugs. Women are disparaged, or treated as sex objects, especially to entertain the leader’s class. The environment is despoiled so that the leader and his business cronies profit. Marginalized people become homeless, urban areas get blighted, prices are inflated, and security becomes paramount for those who can afford it. Some feel more threatened than protected by police. Power shortages and blackouts become more commonplace. Privilege is rewarded through school admissions, welcomes to gated communities, and opportunities for capitalistic ventures in technology, business, education and health.
If not in the economic top tier, the leader’s adherents don’t share in rewards bestowed on the leader’s class and cronies. Instead, as the country becomes meaner, they revel in his “in your face” persona and verbal shredding of opponents, minorities and immigrants, all of whom he scapegoats to fire up those who see their own fury in his posturing. He is protected by “his party” to the death.
To be totally objective, I should point out that America, as a rapturous millennium approaches, does share one aspect of a 3WBR. The infant mortality rate is scandalous. In our case, though, it’s self-inflicted through abortion.
Still, I can’t imagine living in an America that is a 3WBR. That would TRUMP all visions of hell.