Trinicenter.com - Blaming America First, Part I

by Tracy McLellan

I'm to the point I wished the whole rotten monster would come crashing to a halt. Depression, poverty, crushing military defeat, catastrophic effects of climate change, extreme crises of energy shortages. I welcome all of it as a means for human kind, and most especially, my compatriots, if such a term is applicable here, to come to their senses.

Five percent of the world's population and the United States consumes a quarter to a third of its resources; while half the world's population, three billion people survive on the equivalent of $2 US a day. Where's the justice in that? The freedom? The democracy? Yet we are led to believe freedom, democracy, and justice, thusly necessarily capitalism don't you know, are the values for which the United States stands.

The United States will spend $400 billion on its military this year, as much as all the other countries in the world combined, many of them allies. If the United States has any allies left. Consider, the United States was already operating on a $320 billion military budget in 2001, and couldn't even prevent an attack on its own headquarters. What was immediately and clamorously offered, without so much as pause to consider what the US may have done to provoke such an attack, as a solution? You have to wonder what kind of a genius general came up with this. Throw an extra $50 billion at the problem. That takes special genius, the kind that only finds career advancement in the Pentagon.

President Dufus says Iran should not develop nuculer weapons. Nor should Korea. But now that Korea has them, different problems are handled in different ways, says the presidential suit, scratching his armpits. Iraq didn't have them so they got attacked. Korea has them so it's hands off. The Profound Nobody doesn't say, neither does John Berry, but it's perfectly legitimate for Israel to have nucular weapons.

Why is it OK for Israel to have 200 nuclear weapons developed with US aid, as well as the missiles, F-16s and submarines to deliver them? That's not a problem? That's not a threat to world and national security? All these years, when the US could have led the way to nuclear disarmament it rather relied on the nuclear big stick. It still does – in spades. Did the demise of the Soviet Union compel the US to lead in divesting the world, our children and grandchildren of the threat of nuclear weapons? On the noble, democratic, freedom-loving contrary.

I've heard it said often lately that the United States should not cut and run in Iraq. We couldn't do that, it wouldn't be fair to the Iraqis. Why not? It would be the first time we, putting it politely, left that country alone. Maybe that would be an improvement. It undoubtedly would; and in any event, the US has so screwed things up in Iraq that it's the best of a very bad bunch of options.

Does nobody find it odd, least of all the mainstream media? The two most evil nemeses the United States has demonized in the last year, the last decade for that matter, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, it practically created with massive aid? Their murderous and thuggish ways were perfectly legitimate until they disobeyed their imperial, capitalist masters. Saddam attacked his own people with chemical weapons says Bush. He completely neglects to so much as intimate that he did so with US aid and support.

Does a lying oaf for an alleged leader strike pride deep too into your heart? Bush hypocrisy is enough to curdle water. He kneels down to pray, squinting eyes atremble, calling upon his Lord and Saviour; and then acts in complete contradistinction to everything for which Jesus' life stood. "Resist not evil, turn the other cheek," said Jesus; the key, said Nietzsche, to an understanding of the Gospels. That would have been the Christian response to 911. It may or may not have been honorable. It may or may not have been correct. But it would have been Christian. And at least you could have argued it on those terms. In the same way that had the Bush administration not lied about going to war in Iraq, but had said we want to oust an evil dictator, one could have argued on those terms. But honesty and integrity are as foreign to Bush as they are to most Christians.

The other day, leaving the grocery store, I saw a bright shining American flag decal on a Lexus, incribed "We will remember September 11, 2001." There's an implicit threat there can you sense it? Anybody try anything like that again, it was bad enough they tried it at all, and the same metal shaping this Lexus will be shaped another way for payback. And you know, the richer, the more likely you are to encounter this presumption, this gigantic and willful ignorance. I wanted to write a little note that said "Don't forget September 11, 1973 either; that was the day the CIA at the behest of Nixon and Kissinger, assassinated the duly elected socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile, and installed in his stead General Pinochet, who disappeared, strangely enough, 3,000 Chileans, tortured and imprisoned tens of thousands more, and ruled with an iron fist with US backing for three decades."

But you don't express those kind of things in the United States. Free speech extends only so far and stops well short of truth. Moreover, by definition our acts of terror, murder, and assassination are acts of innocence; "theirs" also, by definition, warrant reprisal and retaliation. When Israel, for example, after 37 years of violation, obeys a sliver of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and vacates a small fraction of the illegally occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank, leaving to Palestine 10% of their historic homeland, that is a courageous gesture for peace. It also exposes evidence, if any was needed, of Palestinian terror and deceit, and is cause to remove hat and bow reverently at the Christ-like man of peace, Ariel Sharon.

The United States lives a fantastic chimera of fat peace and insatiable consumption, dutiful drones and loyal consumers pursuing their appetites, knife and fork perpetually in hand, napkin tied around the neck, saliva frothing from the corners of the maws, with the intensity of the desert summer sun pounding on the pavement, while it dispenses to the rest of the world pain, agony, privation, and the gaping wounds of murderous wars. The only hope left is great pain: wars on these shores, pestilence, disease, depression, privations, the pains of hell. Perhaps that finally would awaken the United States from its somnambulistic fantasy and its boundlessly bestowing violence. Although I have my doubts.