An end looms, but of what?

In the unsafe but sure world of Hollywood horror, faith in the resurrection is empirical: the bad guy always rises from the dead. Life adds a twist: sometimes the bad guy wins. That scenario plays on continuous loop in another world, that of the blogosphere where conspiracy theorists hover and are dismissed. Still, a peek inside, revealing a bogeyman stirring, troubles.

The latest rage is about a column appearing on Pravda Online, an Internet news site operated by former staff members of the propagandist daily of Soviet infamy. “The American decent [sic] into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple,” Stanislav Mishin opines. “... They care more about their ‘right’ to choke down a McDonalds burger than for their constitutional rights.”

Naturally, President Barack Obama occupies a central if not exclusive place in America’s looming demise, an assertion that predictably resonates. “The final collapse,” Mishin says, “has come with the election of Barack Obama. His spending and money printing has been ... record setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more than another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.”

Russian scholar and former KGB analyst Igor Panarin concurs. For a decade he has predicted a U.S. collapse in 2010, a prophesy that the Wall Street Journal pointed out in a front-page story mostly has been dismissed but is getting a wider hearing now. Splintered over immigration, a wilting economy and, of course, moral degradation, America will break out in civil war and by summer 2010 will be shattered into six pieces with Russia becoming more visible from Gov. Sarah Palin’s house as the former communist regime regains Alaska.

Free-market gears have shattered, Mishin says, and “the American public has taken this with barely a whimper ...”

Pravda scribes and former KGB men, of course, rightly are construed to have an interest in performing jigs on the American grave even before last gasps have been heard. But Panarin notes the event is not one over which Russians should rejoice. Dependence there on trade with the U.S. remains heavy.

Whatever the case, the White House under President George W. Bush hardly trembled. Asked at a news conference for a reaction to Panarin’s oracle, spokeswoman Dana Perino answered blithely, “I’ll have to decline to comment,” cuing guffaws.

That reaction, Panarin says, was similar to the one French political scientist Emmanuel Todd evoked when he predicted in 1976 that the Soviet Union would fall, an event that took place 15 years later. Still, rumors of demise frequently are exaggerated and disbelieved by sensible folk. Bad guys stay dead.

But this does not chase away clouds formed in days unprecedented in American history. The inclination accelerated at breakneck speed by Obama but initiated by Bush, to smash free markets in the name of rescuing the country from economic hardship, threatens to undo us, if not in the immediate geopolitical sense forecast by Panarin certainly in the philosophical sense envisioned by the country’s founders.

One of them, John Adams, admonished: “All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution ... nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.” Such truths cause bogeymen to take flight. Pray these have not died yet in America’s psyche for once gone they may never here again rise.