I recently read an article by a third-rate political commentator (who shall remain nameless) who pointed out how grateful we as American’s should be for what we have and where we live, and because of those factors we should excuse the less-than-perfect handling of foreign affairs by the Bush Administration. I am very thankful for what I have and where I live. However, to extend that gratitude to the point of quelling my dissatisfaction with how America is represented in the world arena by our President and his handlers is quite another matter all together. I hope my angry words will not detract too much from the point I am trying to get across...
As a nation, we are an ungrateful pack of overindulged and ignorant consumers. Our overindulgence comes from the willing consumption of unnecessary material goods that appeal to nothing more than the baser elements of our ego and vanity. Our ignorance comes our disregard for the fact that such items serve no greater purpose beyond titillating our egos and furthering some of the least desirable traits that we as humans possess: the desire to be look, act, and conceive of ourselves as superior to one another. Furthering this ignorance is that people are foolish enough to saddle themselves with debt far greater than they can reasonably be borne by incomes, which have little to no prospect of substantial increase given the overwhelming lack of employment opportunities that would lead to income sufficient to sustain such a lifestyle.
On a higher level, what is even more appalling is that America, as a player in the international community, take this materially-driven sense of superiority and stomp around the world bullying others into submission and pissing everyone off in the process. I liken the modern United States to a large retarded child, wandering around the schoolyard with a t-shirt that says DEMOCRACY, stealing candy from other children. When I say this, I mean we (as a nation) have no regard for the policies, ethics, or philosophies of others as long as there is a market for our goods or some resources we can sap. We have no interest in the Middle East other than for natural resources. It is indeed colonial in its dimensions, as you point out. The British and French exploitation of Africa, India and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century under the premise that they were bringing religion to the “savages” (or, to use Rudyard Kipling’s charming label, the “fuzzy wuzzies”) is no different than using the noble principles of democracy and freedom to premise our use of the Marlboro Man, the Coca Cola Kid, and Britney Spears to push our distasteful consumer culture on the rest of the world. What most people don’t understand is that our professedly benevolent desire to spread freedom to people--portrayed in the media as miserable wretches cowering in the shadow of a ruthless dictator--is by no means a permanent devotion. By all reasonable estimations, depletion will make it no longer economically viable to drill oil out of the Middle East by the end of this century. Anyone who is deluded enough to think the United States will devote equal time and resources to that part of the world once the oil is gone is probably the same moron who rents luxury watches by the week off the Internet and thinks that Fox News “tells it like it is.” As for those who think Israel will anchor a permanent American presence in the Middle East, they are in for equal disappointment. Our support for Israel comes from its geographical proximity to a plentiful supply of bubblin’ crude (oil, that is…black gold, Texas tea…). Most (if not all) American Presidents over the past 100 years have been indifferent to the Zionist impulses of Jewish Israel at best and straight-up anti-Semitic at worst. You can bet your grandmother that Harry Truman didn’t have a poster of Theodor Hertzl hanging on the Oval Office wall! Nevertheless, economic interests smooth the most rocky differences in politics and human ethics. How else could the United States (as the mighty defender and advocate of human rights) mine uranium-235 out of Apartheid South Africa during the Cold War or back Augusto Pichochet’s brutal regime in Chile?
What I also find offensive about this journalist’s comments is his romantic conception of the noble volunteer soldier. It is inaccurate and downright comical. I’m not going to condemn someone for going to fight for an ideal but I certainly don’t think an “ideal” is what some high school graduate with a double-digit IQ has in mind as he runs to the local Army recruiting office, amped-up on Grand Theft Auto and other unsavory video games. That is, unless his “ideal” is having a machine gun in his hand with which to dispatch some disgruntled “ragheads” as revenge on humanity for all the beatings he took in high school. Moreover, what of those brave volunteers who are raping innocent women and young girls in the back alleys of Basra and Darfur? What of those brave volunteers who are pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars selling off military equipment and rations to local para-military factions? Sure, a great many decent men and women have given their time (and sadly, in some cases, their lives), to fighting for an ideal, but what is their legacy? Post-traumatic stress disorder and a host of incurable micro-biological diseases and neurological disorders? Goodness, I have little respect for the decision of one of my opposing counsel’s decision to volunteer for three tours of duty back in Vietnam, but I would never wish upon him the Agent Orange-induced leukemia that he currently dying from!
Our way of living is certainly cushy but democracy has very little to do with the issue. The Founding Fathers were (let’s face it) a moneyed cadre of slave-owners who shared a very unoriginal disdain for taxes that transcends the entire course of recorded human history. Their philosophy was lifted more from the French than it was original. Nevertheless, the American political model did yield some good things. We live in a far freer society than others but that freedom has its limits, far more than most think or even are willing to believe. We should not be so trusting of our leaders or popularized accounts of our history to ignore the fact that our modern “Republic” has used democracy as a superficial premise of for militaristic invasions that ultimately serve no other benefit but to further enrich the business interests of a select few. It is true, we as Americans are often very ungrateful for the bounty that we are blessed with. But, we are also sedated by the ease with which it is carried to excess, and through that sedation we are failing to recognize that our greed for unnecessary material items is amplified on the international stage, guiding our sense of diplomacy into making convenient alliances with dangerous people. If our government keeps this up, there just might be another terrorist attack on the scale of 11 September. Paranoia will run rampant and airports will shut down, but more frightening than anything else, Banana Republic will probably close early that day!
As a nation, we are an ungrateful pack of overindulged and ignorant consumers. Our overindulgence comes from the willing consumption of unnecessary material goods that appeal to nothing more than the baser elements of our ego and vanity. Our ignorance comes our disregard for the fact that such items serve no greater purpose beyond titillating our egos and furthering some of the least desirable traits that we as humans possess: the desire to be look, act, and conceive of ourselves as superior to one another. Furthering this ignorance is that people are foolish enough to saddle themselves with debt far greater than they can reasonably be borne by incomes, which have little to no prospect of substantial increase given the overwhelming lack of employment opportunities that would lead to income sufficient to sustain such a lifestyle.
On a higher level, what is even more appalling is that America, as a player in the international community, take this materially-driven sense of superiority and stomp around the world bullying others into submission and pissing everyone off in the process. I liken the modern United States to a large retarded child, wandering around the schoolyard with a t-shirt that says DEMOCRACY, stealing candy from other children. When I say this, I mean we (as a nation) have no regard for the policies, ethics, or philosophies of others as long as there is a market for our goods or some resources we can sap. We have no interest in the Middle East other than for natural resources. It is indeed colonial in its dimensions, as you point out. The British and French exploitation of Africa, India and Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century under the premise that they were bringing religion to the “savages” (or, to use Rudyard Kipling’s charming label, the “fuzzy wuzzies”) is no different than using the noble principles of democracy and freedom to premise our use of the Marlboro Man, the Coca Cola Kid, and Britney Spears to push our distasteful consumer culture on the rest of the world. What most people don’t understand is that our professedly benevolent desire to spread freedom to people--portrayed in the media as miserable wretches cowering in the shadow of a ruthless dictator--is by no means a permanent devotion. By all reasonable estimations, depletion will make it no longer economically viable to drill oil out of the Middle East by the end of this century. Anyone who is deluded enough to think the United States will devote equal time and resources to that part of the world once the oil is gone is probably the same moron who rents luxury watches by the week off the Internet and thinks that Fox News “tells it like it is.” As for those who think Israel will anchor a permanent American presence in the Middle East, they are in for equal disappointment. Our support for Israel comes from its geographical proximity to a plentiful supply of bubblin’ crude (oil, that is…black gold, Texas tea…). Most (if not all) American Presidents over the past 100 years have been indifferent to the Zionist impulses of Jewish Israel at best and straight-up anti-Semitic at worst. You can bet your grandmother that Harry Truman didn’t have a poster of Theodor Hertzl hanging on the Oval Office wall! Nevertheless, economic interests smooth the most rocky differences in politics and human ethics. How else could the United States (as the mighty defender and advocate of human rights) mine uranium-235 out of Apartheid South Africa during the Cold War or back Augusto Pichochet’s brutal regime in Chile?
What I also find offensive about this journalist’s comments is his romantic conception of the noble volunteer soldier. It is inaccurate and downright comical. I’m not going to condemn someone for going to fight for an ideal but I certainly don’t think an “ideal” is what some high school graduate with a double-digit IQ has in mind as he runs to the local Army recruiting office, amped-up on Grand Theft Auto and other unsavory video games. That is, unless his “ideal” is having a machine gun in his hand with which to dispatch some disgruntled “ragheads” as revenge on humanity for all the beatings he took in high school. Moreover, what of those brave volunteers who are raping innocent women and young girls in the back alleys of Basra and Darfur? What of those brave volunteers who are pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars selling off military equipment and rations to local para-military factions? Sure, a great many decent men and women have given their time (and sadly, in some cases, their lives), to fighting for an ideal, but what is their legacy? Post-traumatic stress disorder and a host of incurable micro-biological diseases and neurological disorders? Goodness, I have little respect for the decision of one of my opposing counsel’s decision to volunteer for three tours of duty back in Vietnam, but I would never wish upon him the Agent Orange-induced leukemia that he currently dying from!
Our way of living is certainly cushy but democracy has very little to do with the issue. The Founding Fathers were (let’s face it) a moneyed cadre of slave-owners who shared a very unoriginal disdain for taxes that transcends the entire course of recorded human history. Their philosophy was lifted more from the French than it was original. Nevertheless, the American political model did yield some good things. We live in a far freer society than others but that freedom has its limits, far more than most think or even are willing to believe. We should not be so trusting of our leaders or popularized accounts of our history to ignore the fact that our modern “Republic” has used democracy as a superficial premise of for militaristic invasions that ultimately serve no other benefit but to further enrich the business interests of a select few. It is true, we as Americans are often very ungrateful for the bounty that we are blessed with. But, we are also sedated by the ease with which it is carried to excess, and through that sedation we are failing to recognize that our greed for unnecessary material items is amplified on the international stage, guiding our sense of diplomacy into making convenient alliances with dangerous people. If our government keeps this up, there just might be another terrorist attack on the scale of 11 September. Paranoia will run rampant and airports will shut down, but more frightening than anything else, Banana Republic will probably close early that day!
2 comments:
Well done
Where do we go now...do you have anymore of those wonderful insights of yours to share with the intellects of the world...
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