Before taking a trip down memory lane, rewinding the clock a quarter of a century or so, I want to share a couple quotes.

Shakespeare, in his play The Tempest, famously wrote: “What’s past is prologue.” And Yogi Berra reputedly said: “It’s deja vu all over again.” The scribe and the jock similarly opined that nothing ever changes.

For evidence, we need only reference the ritual impotence of our so-called political leaders whenever they’re confronted with the latest all-American bloodbath. It’s the same horseshit every time, and now, in the wake of a neo-Nazi’s Texas mall massacre, the prize for slinging dung goes to a Texas Republican “Christian” zealot named Keith Self – a congressman, no less – who of course says that guns aren’t to blame for gun violence, who says that we should simply entrust our fates to “an almighty god who is absolutely in control of our lives.”

There’s nothing in this benighted world more worthless – save, perhaps, a soiled Kleenex – than a thoughts n’ prayers Texas gun loon, but, as we know, Self is just the latest hack on a long assembly line that dates back decades. It’s hard to precisely determine when the pols first lined up to emit these vaporous nothings, but I have my own starting point: the Columbine High School killings in Littleton, Colorado (12 students and a teacher) back in 1999.

As the national political writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, that’s when I first began to track the cowardice and fatuousness of those who are, or aspire to be, entrusted with keeping Americans safe. I’ve now retrieved some of the stories I wrote in the aftermath of Littleton (with a presidential race just one year away), and you will be sadly unsurprised to learn that the stuff pols were saying then mirrors the stuff pols are still saying now.

In other words, as a nation we suck.

Here’s what I found in my ’99 time capsule: Republicans and conservatives were saying that the problem wasn’t guns at all, the problem was a nation alienated from God. (Or some god. Whatever.) Presidential candidate Lamar Alexander said we needed to return to a time when “choirmasters” kept kids in line. Jeff Bell, a conservative strategist, told me that “voters have morality on their minds. They’re asking, ‘What’s wrong with us as a culture?’” (His answer: Hollywood.) Religious-right presidential candidate Gary Bauer said the culture wasn’t so godless in the good old days. George W. Bush pleased his home-state gun nuts by refusing to support a Texas bill that would’ve required buyer background checks at Texas gun shows. Kansas Senator Sam Brownback said that we’d already passed enough gun laws, and what we really needed to do was “change the atmospherics” in the culture. And so on.

As for the Democrats, you’ll be shocked to hear that they were reluctant to confront America’s frontier ‘tude. Al Gore, the Democratic front-runner, shelved all talk about gun reform and got spiritual instead. He didn’t want to tick off the gun lobby or alienate gun-loving white guys, so instead he heaped praise on the Columbine High students “who stared death in the face and affirmed their belief in God.” He hewed to the advice of party pollsters like Geoff Garin, who told me that Dems “have to be careful” while talking about guns.

Gore’s top challenger for the ’00 nomination was New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. But in ’99 he too fled the gun issue with all deliberate speed. His chief spokeswoman, Anita Dunn, told me: “We have not gone out and made political capital out of Littleton. We agreed early on about a strategy for this campaign” – to talk broadly about children, race, health insurance, campaign-finance reform, foreign policy – “and this is a strategy we need to stick with.”

Most often, the reaction from pols in ’99 was that crazy people are gonna do crazy things, so whatcha gonna do. Which prompts me to ponder anew the pearls of wisdom from that Texas congressman, the pro-“life” guy who said this weekend that “almighty god” should get the last word on whether we live or die.

I have two questions: If “almighty god” is fine with crazy people doing crazy things, if indeed “almighty god” is fine with so many bloodbaths, then why should we worship such a spirit in the first place? And why is “almighty god” apparently so much kinder to all other affluent western nations, whose firearm homicide rates are a fraction of ours? (We have become an international embarrassment. New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and France have all issued travel advisories about visiting the U.S.)

I’ll finish with another trek down memory lane, all the way to the Twilight Zone. We can never say that Rod Serling didn’t warn us:

“When we so cheapen the concept of human life that we can be permissive to the occasional bomb or bullet, I think we’ve taken a giant step back into the Dark Ages. And I don’t think there’s a light at the end of that tunnel.”