Are We Getting Alarmed Yet?
Ah, it's that time of the semester: grading hell. A time when I've become disconnected from absolutely everything--including politics, family, the world in general, and even, it sometimes seems, hope itself. Hence also a time when I sometimes feel an overwhelming urge to talk about sh*t that I know nothing about and haven't been paying much attention to, anyway.
Is this a great internets or what?
So, from my vantage point of living in my office and not having time to read anything and not being able to read anything online in particular because Stopzilla has apparently turned my formerly zippy Dell desktop into something with all the speed and memory of my old Commodore-64...anyway, from that vantage point...I have concluded:
People aren't currently quite pissed off/worried enough about Bush.
I know, I know, you still have your frothy fringe. But I mean average folks like us. Since the election I've just felt...exhausted. Like well, there (dusts hands off). He got his comeuppance. We gave him what for. Thank God that's over.
But...it ain't over. Iraq seems to be in a nosedive, it sounds like our military--which, by the way (or so I thought) was supposed to be capable of fighting two major wars at the same time--is sounding more and more depleted...
Oh, and the Putin may be murdering British citizens.
And there's at least one Genocide going on.
And...
And...
And the guy who got us into this mess through a mixture of dishonesty and incompetence is still in charge.
And, in fact, the rhetorical deck has somehow been stacked in such a way that if you suggest that--maybejustmaybe--this demonstrably incompetent and dishonest person not only does not deserve to be president anymore, but--maybejustmaybe--deserves to not be president anymore...then you, my friend are a kook. A kook!
That's fairly astounding when you think about it for in excess of five seconds.
Look, things are sounding so bad that I'd be worried sick EVEN IF WE HAD A COMPETENT PRESIDENT. Even if we had a Clinton, an Eisenhower, a Bush '41 (or a Gore or a McCain or...or...), I'd still be worried that basically one more bad move or stroke of bad luck could send us into a tailspin.
Oh, and al Qaeda's still trying to kill us all. Remember them? Al Qaeda? OBL? Tall guy, white hat, AK-47? Guy who brutally murdered 3,000 Americans? 'member him? This president of whom I write decided that it wasn't terribly important to get him. (Dead or alive or, you know, whatever...)
So anyways, even if we had a competent president who knew, ya know, something, I'd still be quite concerned.
But what we have is the single most incompetent and intellectually dishonest president of any living person's lifetime, and possibly of ever.
What we have, by way of just picking out an example I just saw, is this guy.
We are negotiating a mine field, and the guy telling us how to get through it is...well, you know his characteristics. I try not to list them in detail too often out of respect for the office.
This is a guy who has made a career out of doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the worst time. This is the guy leading us through the minefield.
This is a guy who would be dangerous even if the world were stable. He is leading the world's sole remaining superpower (um, are we still a superpower, by the way?) through a world that would be dangerous even if said superpower were being led by someone honest and competent.
Dear lord, when I do read the papers I feel like those meteorologists at the beginning of A Perfect Storm, looking at the radar screens, saying things like "Jeez, if this one happens to go that way, and that other one stays the way it is [er, stays the course?], this could turn into a complete catastrophe."
I mean, what I'm saying is that I've gone past being (makes stern, serious face) concerned about (repeat face) world affairs to being (looks around rather furtively, as if wondering whether he's becoming One Of Those People, You Know, The Loony Ones), well...alarmed.
Am I over-reacting?
Somebody please tell me I'm over-reacting.
Ah, it's that time of the semester: grading hell. A time when I've become disconnected from absolutely everything--including politics, family, the world in general, and even, it sometimes seems, hope itself. Hence also a time when I sometimes feel an overwhelming urge to talk about sh*t that I know nothing about and haven't been paying much attention to, anyway.
Is this a great internets or what?
So, from my vantage point of living in my office and not having time to read anything and not being able to read anything online in particular because Stopzilla has apparently turned my formerly zippy Dell desktop into something with all the speed and memory of my old Commodore-64...anyway, from that vantage point...I have concluded:
People aren't currently quite pissed off/worried enough about Bush.
I know, I know, you still have your frothy fringe. But I mean average folks like us. Since the election I've just felt...exhausted. Like well, there (dusts hands off). He got his comeuppance. We gave him what for. Thank God that's over.
But...it ain't over. Iraq seems to be in a nosedive, it sounds like our military--which, by the way (or so I thought) was supposed to be capable of fighting two major wars at the same time--is sounding more and more depleted...
Oh, and the Putin may be murdering British citizens.
And there's at least one Genocide going on.
And...
And...
And the guy who got us into this mess through a mixture of dishonesty and incompetence is still in charge.
And, in fact, the rhetorical deck has somehow been stacked in such a way that if you suggest that--maybejustmaybe--this demonstrably incompetent and dishonest person not only does not deserve to be president anymore, but--maybejustmaybe--deserves to not be president anymore...then you, my friend are a kook. A kook!
That's fairly astounding when you think about it for in excess of five seconds.
Look, things are sounding so bad that I'd be worried sick EVEN IF WE HAD A COMPETENT PRESIDENT. Even if we had a Clinton, an Eisenhower, a Bush '41 (or a Gore or a McCain or...or...), I'd still be worried that basically one more bad move or stroke of bad luck could send us into a tailspin.
Oh, and al Qaeda's still trying to kill us all. Remember them? Al Qaeda? OBL? Tall guy, white hat, AK-47? Guy who brutally murdered 3,000 Americans? 'member him? This president of whom I write decided that it wasn't terribly important to get him. (Dead or alive or, you know, whatever...)
So anyways, even if we had a competent president who knew, ya know, something, I'd still be quite concerned.
But what we have is the single most incompetent and intellectually dishonest president of any living person's lifetime, and possibly of ever.
What we have, by way of just picking out an example I just saw, is this guy.
We are negotiating a mine field, and the guy telling us how to get through it is...well, you know his characteristics. I try not to list them in detail too often out of respect for the office.
This is a guy who has made a career out of doing exactly the wrong thing at exactly the worst time. This is the guy leading us through the minefield.
This is a guy who would be dangerous even if the world were stable. He is leading the world's sole remaining superpower (um, are we still a superpower, by the way?) through a world that would be dangerous even if said superpower were being led by someone honest and competent.
Dear lord, when I do read the papers I feel like those meteorologists at the beginning of A Perfect Storm, looking at the radar screens, saying things like "Jeez, if this one happens to go that way, and that other one stays the way it is [er, stays the course?], this could turn into a complete catastrophe."
I mean, what I'm saying is that I've gone past being (makes stern, serious face) concerned about (repeat face) world affairs to being (looks around rather furtively, as if wondering whether he's becoming One Of Those People, You Know, The Loony Ones), well...alarmed.
Am I over-reacting?
Somebody please tell me I'm over-reacting.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:53 AM
8 Comments:
No, you nailed it. We're pretty much boned.
To quote Futurama: "Ask not for whom the bone bones... it bones for thee"
It was Teresa Nielsen Hayden who said it back in 2003 on her blog.
It was true then, and it's true now.
"I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist."
It was Christian Slater who said it back in 1990 in "Pump up the Volume."
It was true then and it's true now.
"Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up."
You're not crazy, WS. The world is.
What we're witnessing is the fall of an empire. It happens to all empires eventually but to ours rather soon, mostly due to the acceleration of change in a shrinking global society.
The irony is that America may have been imperial - we were about liberal political ideas instead of exploitation - but we were never an empire until the Bushists adopted the neocon PNAC agenda. The Iraq misadventure exposed a hollow core, a post-Periclean decadence, that Duhbya embraced instead of working to repair.
The source is the pre-Duhbya economic challenge of Asia. Japan, Inc., was only a precursor. It's too high-wage to administer the coup d'grace. The real challenges come from China and India. Russia is busy reincarnating decadent czarism. Duhbya likes the Putin model; we could be next, absent the polonium. Econ 101 may say that mercantilism doesn't work; the facts of today require new theories.
Without a strong economy, sustaining military power is impossible. The Bush Administration's unwillingness to account with any reasonable honesty for military expenses in Iraq and the Congress's bipartisan $45 billion lame duck, unaffordable tax cut are symptomatic of an adolescent society that won't take responsibility for its wants. Soon, we won't be able to provide for our needs.
The spirit of Jiminy Cricket infects the private decisions of Americans, too. We are swimming in a storm surge of debt, much of it financed by the housing bubble. Reliance on that source of unsustainable affluence is going to bring radical changes in American wealth when the bill comes due. It exists due to monetary policy that encourages leveraging and promises last-resort insurance of risk by a government that at the worst possible time will not have the money for social insurance.
When the PRC takes Taiwan and we don't do anything more than use mildly harsh language, you'll know.
What can we do? Choose the European post-colonial economic model that abjures the ideological strategy of free trade for tactical self-interest? Can we do that without the historical process of a depression and a world war? Let's hope for a less horrific scenario.
The last thirty years that we frittered away (energy policy, now that the bill for oil-dependence is coming due - again, for example) aren't coming back. But we have to figure out a way to make things; selling each other hamburgers (or even houses) won't build anything. Software gets classified as a service, but it actually creates capital in a way that conventional services don't. Of course, our tax policy rewards shipping high value jobs overseas - even though there's little real payoff. And the superstitious zealots of the christian right refuse to let us jump into bio.
Maybe that doesn't matter; ideas travel pretty fast anyway, and they're hard to charge for in emerging economies. Our intellectual property law winds up cost-inhibiting new enterprises here; over there, not so much, since our sales people realize you can't get full price out of the Asian emerging boom, so they take what they can get and charge full price at home.
Dying empires usually come apart in a mess. Obviously, the centripetal forces in America are great; regional polarization rivals the run-up to the Civil War. Will I need a visa to visit my birthplace before I die?
If the Republicans write the history of this end, they will prefigure it with Sodom and Gomorrah. It's idiotic to blame sex for the end of an empire, but it has convinced people before. The real corruption pervades the population; it's essentially the unwillingness to defer economic gratification, not any other.
Bummer!
On the other hand, it's December, and there's not much sunlight. Maybe I just need to find someone to prescribe an SSRI for me.
LL: "but we were never an empire until the Bushists adopted the neocon PNAC agenda"
Shit, that would come as a shit of a surprise to Emiliano Aguinaldo...or Sitting Bull, for that matter.
Bush is horrifyingly bad none the less.
Ah, so the good news is that I'm not crazy.
But the bad news is that the United States of America, the country I love and revere, the icon of democratic liberalism for which so many men--better men than me, incidentally--fought and died...is boned.
Well, that's certainly a relief.
Ah, Matthew...ha! ha! Very droll!
We don't count our wars of conquest, territorial expansion and genocide against the American Indians when discussing such things! I mean those people weren't EUROPEAN, you foolish man...
Even good Ls like LL (and me) forget to count 'em...
Yeah, good point, MC. I guess I would distinguish the world-wide nature of classical European imperialism from the relatively local expansionism of European-Americans here. But for the conquered peoples, that looks a lot like a distinction without a difference. What do they care about our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. We still look like overseas invaders.
Manifest destiny was basically our Zionism - God gave us this land, and too damn bad about its current occupants. Our forebears flooded west practicing ethnic cleansing and genocide, justified by their own religious and racial exceptionalism. At least the Zionists only practiced ethnic cleansing! (Note: I'm construing genocide as requiring mass killing, though the dictionary sets the bar much lower, including extirpation of culture.)
So I guess upon further reflection I was thinking about the 20th century, when we could have built an empire the sun never set on. Militarily and economically, we did, but not territorially.
Why do you hate America so much, LL?
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