Category: News and Views
The American government has come to resemble the characters in The Wizard of Oz. We have the Cowardly Congress, a president without a brain, and a foreign-policy establishment without a heart.
Our politicians are still trying to play the empire game long after the age of empires has ended. Blinded by arrogance, they cannot see that with every passing day, the world needs us less and less and hates us more and more. We are passing through that
phase when the grandeur of the empire exists only in the minds of politicians who have insulated themselves from reality.
A friend of mine, a classical scholar, sometimes tells his students, "No one woke up one morning in 476 A.D. and said, 'Gee, I'm in the Dark Ages.'" The transition from the heyday of
Roman power to a stage of barbarism was a gradual process. We are in a process of change. No one is going to announce on TV that the U.S. is no longer a superpower.
Nevertheless, the signs are there if you look for them. A nation that was able to help crush the Axis powers in three and a half years hasn't won a war since then. We have had four years of
struggling with an insurgency in a small, poor and broken country. Our economy is shaky under mountains of debt. Half of our people make less than 42,000 inflated dollars a year.
Where we were once the arsenal of democracy, today there is hardly a major weapons system that doesn't rely on imports of one kind or another. Much of the industry that is left is
foreign-owned. Japan, which once lay prostrate, dominates the American car market. It is extremely difficult to find anything today that is not made in China or some other cheap-labor
country.
In the meantime, the cowardly Congress doesn't have the guts to tackle any of the major problems confronting the American people. Our president continues to embarrass us practically
every time he opens his mouth in public. The foreign-policy establishment is riddled with aging draft dodgers agitating for more wars – against small countries, of course.
True, we still have lots of nuclear weapons, but do you think any American president would want to get into a nuclear shooting match with China or Russia? Look at how we reacted to two
airplanes crashing into two office buildings. What do you think we would do if San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco became
radioactive ruins with millions of casualties? We are not
prepared mentally, spiritually or materially to deal with a nuclear war.
We are like all empires in their final stages. We have grown soft. We like our comforts. We don't wish to be inconvenienced.
We like poor Mexicans to do our stoop work and poor Americans to do our fighting, provided they do it far away so we won't be disturbed by explosions and screams. We enjoy our decadence, and
there are always people in the media who can rationalize anything, no matter how sick and revolting it is.
As for trying to understand the world, we are just too busy being amused and following the adventures of Britney Spears and other celebrities. We like to let the TV and the politicians do
our thinking for us. It saves energy. They tell us whom to hate.
The only way to avoid a bad end is to find some realists and put them in public office. We need a brave Congress, not a pack of cowards. We desperately need a president with a brain. We need
to retire the warmongers in the foreign-policy establishment. Otherwise, we will join the other third-rate countries, once empires, on history's discard pile.
Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.
An excellent piece. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is any hope for change as long as Americans accept the idea that the intellectually and morally bankrupt Republican and Democratic parties are our only choices, and as long as our pathetic news media continue to limit their coverage of American political dialogue to a contest between the elephant and the donkey. I am very pessimistic right now.
I find it interesting that that particular journalist basically said that the American government sucked, but didn't provide a solution/alternative. Sounds like bitching and wining without the will to do anything about it to me.
I'll agree that these are frightening times, but...
I think these same arguments could have been presented (and probably were) throughout our history. Try to pick a time in history, Vietnam? Korean war? either world war? civil war? and ask yourself if these same arguments couldn't have been waged then. They could have been, and they were.
I think welshgeordie has an excellent point in his post. Where are the solutions? generalities like a stronger congress, a smarter president, etc. just don't cut it.
Bob
What I see here is a glaring example of why the problem is so hopeless. Americans have been so thoroughly conditioned to believe in the fantasy of American exceptionalism and the virtue of American patriotism that it has become unacceptable to criticize the American political scene unless the criticism is watered down with some dumb-ass happytalk.