To preserve sanity I vowed to avert my gaze from America’s wreck but it’s not that simple. Your house burns to the ground, you’ve gotta build a new one – either that or camp out.

The following proposals have as little to do with plausibility as Lego bricks with engineering. Since Plato’s Republic, ponderers have fantasized improved societies. Thomas More took a crack with Utopia, Francis Bacon with his New Atlantis. Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and Walden limn new worlds of different sorts. Science fiction makers practically commute to whacko-land. For writers, envisioning elsewheres is akin to drooling over porn: If only!

My UST (the United States of Tuckerdom) fixes various of the flaws which toppled its predecessor. To thrive a democracy needs citizen comprehension, participation, justice and equality of opportunity. All its stakeholders must believe E pluribus unum, out of many one. America experienced this fervor once but ost it – to greed, sloth, laziness, material success, and the Internet. Responsible citizens became snoozing passengers in a canoe drifting toward a cataract until oops, damn, too late, what went wrong?!

How will Tuckerdom prevent this recurrence? Citizen involvement is an obligation not an option. To vote, as to drive on public roads, a license will be required – not hard to get, not meant to exclude like Jim Crow laws, but demonstrating a rudimentary understanding of the system being directed. How can you steer if you’ve no idea where you’re heading?

Every citizen of Tuckerdom must do national service – for two years – no exemptions. During that period, in addition to doing good, they’ll be indoctrinated into Tuckerdom’s ways and means. Patriotism commences in participation.

A graduated wealth tax will keep the rich from getting so rich they can enslave (and ignore) their fellow Tuckerdummies. One billion’s plenty for the piggiest piggybank – who needs a hundred? All volunteer work for Tuckerdom will be paid for – modestly – so soccer coaches, caregivers, school board members and firemen aren’t economic schmucks.

Universal education and healthcare, duh.

Nutrition for youngsters, duh.

Breathable air, survivable planet, duh.

Malicious liars will be clapped in the stocks and mercilessly pelted – after a first offense. If they risk it again, to hell with them.

Elected officials and judges will not be bought and sold – or if that can’t be prevented, their purchase prices will be conspicuously posted. Pickpockets are prosecuted, why not plutocrats?

Public pundits will be lavishly lauded if they pen in pungent English. (An emoji ban was considered, but rejected, by Tuckerdom’s Planning Committee.)

The good news about a wipeout is you get to start fresh. In this pundit’s opinion, a wipeout’s where America’s headed and if our doom is inescapable, the sooner the better. The pipedream of Tuckerdom is conscientious self-government. The alternative is despotism, which would be a drag, especially for pundits. (Plutocracy, oligarchy, autocracy, dictatorship are forms of despotism.)

Are the conceivers of Tuckerdom convinced their concepts will be implemented and embraced? Hardly. But if we don’t learn to rule ourselves, for sure we’ll be ruled by others. Anarchy is a bore.

America’s confounded Founders foolishly trusted in human sense. Neither did these innocents foresee nukes, hi-speed transport, Big Macs, Elon Musk, a population of 335 million over fifty states, or the inconceivable corruption of inordinate wealth. Their notion of democracy was charmingly naïve.

Tuckerdom will remedy these defects. Tuckerdom’s citizenry will do what’s sensible not because they’re sensible but because they’re forced to. Applications for the new order will be accepted shortly.