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Saturday, November 20, 2004

American Eclipse

Simon Smith’s proud paean to his native Canada over on BH offers up reasons to be cheerful in dark times… as do the many recent reviews and discussions occasioned by the proximate publications of Jeremy Rifkin’s The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream and T.R. Reid’s The United States Of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy.

Know-nothing Americans are diddling themselves while the world burns, floating like pollen grains over ballooning bodies on foreign fields and ballooning debts at home. Here we remain drugged and delirious in a toxic swell of fast-food garbage, fast-news glossolalia, and fast-cars guzzling gas.

The citizens of the United States have been insulated by wealth, privilege, and geography (all accidents parading as destinies and desert) from the consequences of their stupidity, cruelty, and greed. Americans are scarcely more evil than other human mammals, none of whom are well equipped for benevolent rule, but the legacies of apparently endless frontiers, racist slave-trades and native American genocides, and an embrace of religious fundamentalism have flavored our own short-spanned imperialist episode in especially unfortunate ways.

I think the Democrats in a Kerry Presidency with a Democratic Senate majority would have softened but not circumvented the tire-screech of reckoning that’s waiting in the wings. And now when the bloody bills come due the scene will be uglier, costlier, and sooner than it otherwise would, but the world will surely be better off without another brainless bullying empire throwing its weight around. If indeed the most important election of our lives has been lost, then for now the reasonable left must concentrate its attentions (at least until the 2006 mid-terms, and subsequent preparations for the Boy-King’s Impeachment and ritual humiliation) on ending the death-cult Republican war adventuring in Iraq and Afghanistan, and stopping them from casting their murderous bedroom eyes onto Syria or Iran.

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