I believe in finding the victory in any situation. Perhaps that is especially true when apologizing.

So here I am, prostrating myself before God and country, Naomi Wolf-style. In fact, I see her humility and I am inspired to follow her example. I’ve learned my lesson. I wish to be made clean. And here’s the kicker: I have liberals to thank for it.

They were stone-cold right about stuff like forever wars and corporate greed. I couldn’t see it back in my “we’re America, b****es” 1980s jingoistic days. It simply didn’t compute to me that a heinous act like 9/11, perpetrated by cave-dwelling jihadists, could be cynically fashioned into the longest military excursion to nowhere in American history. Or at the end of America’s Afghanistan story would be an unapologetic homage to America’s ignominious exit from Vietnam.

It was almost as if failure and embarrassment were the point all along.

Back here in the homeland, my Alex P. Keaton wannabe younger self would never have dreamed that the free market was about as honest and noble as the dark corner where crack addicts and prostitutes conduct their “commerce.” Because it turns out the “free market” largely doesn’t exist at all.

We live in a command economy, too, it’s just that we march at the command of the mutual admiration society forged by big government and big business. Like when we supposedly have a pandemic, big government miraculously determines the billion-dollar big box stores were all safe and essential to stay open. Meanwhile, the small and family-owned businesses were nonessential super-spreaders or something. This, not coincidentally, activated perhaps the single largest transfer of wealth in human history – to the already wealthy. Robber-baronism isn’t any holier than Marxism.

Goodness, was I wrong, because somewhere along the line, proud American businesses did in fact become soulless global masters of manipulation like, for example, Big Pharma. All they did was take a bad flu (they) made in a Chinese lab and run with it to the tune of gazillions of dollars in profit. And they did so by suppressing all of the cheap and early treatments, in order to receive the emergency declaration required to sell a jab that protected almost no one while poisoning countless people.

And from whom did Big Pharma receive that emergency dispensation … err … declaration? Why, from big government, of course.

Again, shame on me, though. Because while I may be a total depravity guy, I still somehow fell for a version of that whole Francis Fukuyama “end of history” thing. I thought our propensity for evil would somehow be muted by mankind’s increasingly broad access to comfort and opportunity of all kinds. And yet it turns out that my trite notions of peace in our time, or the superiority of Western medicine, simply don’t come close to satisfying the endless lusts of those for whom power and control will always be the endgame.

The liberals of my youth tried to warn me about all this, especially in the really cool music they wrote or listened to, but even though I was jamming along, I wasn’t really listening. They told me “the man” was trying to keep me down, and it turns out they were right. For if these last three myocarditis-inducing years have taught me anything, it’s that I’m even more of a pawn than I am a person to those truly in charge.

Bob Seger was basically an Old Testament prophet in his classic song “Feel Like a Number.” We’re merely another brick in the wall to forces far darker and with greater reach than all the slippery slopes I had previously believed in and warned about.

Which leads me back to the beginning. How could I possibly declare a victory after all of this self-flagellation? Simple, really. It’s because I now get to ask this question: Why don’t liberals believe their own warnings any longer? Or were they ever even serious at all?

What else am I supposed to think when they now cheer on a World War III-provoking forever war in Ukraine? Or when they demand to this very day that healthy children be forced to take a jab that has proven to be the equivalent of sitting down at the Russian roulette table in the movie “The Deer Hunter”? When bands who vow to “rage against the machine” force their own audiences to be injected with a toxin to attend their shows?

My newfound liberal friends, here I am ready to consider how far down the rabbit hole goes, so where is the orgy of free thought and open minds that I was promised?

The liberals should be declaring the mother of all scoreboards on me. Instead, aside from a remnant like the aforementioned Naomi Wolf, or Russell Brand, or Joe Rogan, they have largely become meet the new boss – same as the old boss. Corporate America is the devil, man, unless its name is Pfizer. Then it’s holy writ, and I offer my body up to it as a living sacrifice, because the Spirit of the Age is truly contained within the substance I’m taking in.

This is a very old and Orwellian tale. Let us pray, though, that it has a different ending this time. For there isn’t much time left for all of us to get off this very stupid ride.