The US is starting to look uglier and uglier to me. The more I read about history, the more I realize that modern America is not a good place. By any standard of morality that I can think of, I live in an immoral, or at best amoral, country.
The easiest thing to point to is the office of the President: the lies, the killing, the big-business corruption, the bankrupting of the treasury, etc. That part is the easiest to see, and fortunately it seems like more and more people are starting to realize it.
But George Bush is not the only one to blame. There's also mainstream media, which mindlessly repeats the administration's propaganda with merely a facade of skepticism. There's also the congress, which gives explicit consent for the worst of these crimes. And of course there's the voters, who were apparently so buried in denial that they re-elected a president that I cannot see as anything other than truly evil.
America refuses to sign the ICCC, solely so that our military can continue to torture people. The citizens hear that this is happening, but they ignore it.
America responds to global warming and the exhaustion of oil reserves by continuing the tax break for low-mileage SUVs, refusing to sign the Kyoto treaty, exacerbating the oil addiction by trying to increase production, and increasing funding for roads instead of public transportation.
America proclaims a policy of global pre-emptive war and invades two poor countries, leaving them poorer than they started. The citizens respond with "support our troops" yellow ribbons. The crime here is not the irony of supporting troops fighting a war for oil by putting a magnet on your car. The crime is that these troops have been turned into a beligerent army of invasion, and the people cheer them on, like a bunch of fascists.
America gets dangerously into debt, to the point where the IMF starts issuing dire warnings. The banks respond by increasing the number of interest-only and no-documentation home loans.
America is threating both its own sustainability and the safety of other nations. The people are responding with jingoistic, consumerist, drunken glee.
Posted on August 28, 2005 12:17 PM
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The one spark of hope I see is Camp Casey down in Crawford, TX.
Posted by: Patrick Logan at August 28, 2005 07:29 PMDo you ever feel like running down the street yelling "wake up America"?
Camp Caseuy is looking good but has already been labled as a bunch of crazy librials by the media. A small group of people with crazy ideas
Posted by: Zach Cone at August 29, 2005 08:40 PMBut for all the awfulness that you mention, the worst bit is this: most people still believe unquestioningly that the US is the best country ever, and that bad things can't happen here because This Is A Free Country. The election may have been stolen in Ohio (and Florida in 2000), but people just aren't willing to believe that the republicans would do such a thing, because "they'd never get away with it"... which is exactly why they do. And then there's the religious belief that democracy is the right system for everyone and that Democracy Will Prevail, which I see a lot in debates about the future of, say, China. And I don't see democracy prevailing. China is a grand experiment, to see whether it's possible to have economic freedome without political freedom. And I think the local corporations are watching eagerly, because corporate feudalism is just so much more convenient, and profitable, than democracy when those pesky people have the freedom to criticize corporations and such. Somehow, I don't think that democracy will magically prevail, and if it does, then it will only happen if we fight for it, and people believing in the magic powers of democracy doesn't help that at all. Wow am I a pessimist.
Posted by: crzwdjk at August 31, 2005 06:45 PMIt is ironic that given the popularity of reality-based television, so many Americans make their political decisions based on how a candidate makes them feel instead of whether that candidate will do things that they agree with. Not only does intelligence no longer seem to be a virtue among a significant portion of the voting population, it appears to have become a handicap. Thus we have Bush, Intelligent Design, etc., etc.
Posted by: Alec Wysoker at September 1, 2005 08:06 AMAs far as the media goes, I have several conservative friends that *swear* that the media is too liberal. I also know some people that have served in Iraq and again, they report that the US media present a much darker view of the war than what *they themselves* have witnessed (I'm not trying to justify the Iraqi war here, by the way). The media doesn't report what it *right*, it reports *what will sell*. And from what I can see, that means the left calls the media conversative, while the right call the media liberals.
Kyoto was a bad treaty to begin with---too little (http://talkshowamerica.blogspot.com/2004_12_12_talkshowamerica_archive.html) at too high a cost. Even Clinton didn't want anything to do with it. (http://www.globalclimate.org/climecon/news.htm). Besides, we don't know for sure if it's CO2 that's the primary factor in global warming; for all we know, it could be the Sun (http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/ixnewstop.html and http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age_031208.html). Also, spending money on public transportation only works past a certain population density, which I suspect only happens in certain urban centers like New York, Boston and Chicago. Here in South Florida public transporation is a sick joke and no amount of spending will fix that (but hey, if you have any realistic ideas for public transportation in an area 10 miles by 120 miles, no subways at all (can't have one actually), only one rail (along the 120 mile axis, near one side) please, tell me, I would love to hear it).
If by the two poor countries you mean Afghanistan and Iraq, well, we had the U.N. blessing on Afghanistan (which not only has had free elections, but women voting to boot!) so it's a bit disengenious to count that one (also, see above for the media not bothering to report good news).
I've read up on US history, and in my mind, Bush isn't the worst President we've had; he's certainly bad, but far from the worst. He reminds me as a mixture of Regan and McKinley (turn of the century, pro-big business, got us mired in Cuba (on false pretenses---go figure) and the Philipines (which was just as bad, if not worse, than our involvement in Vietnam)) (the worst would surprise most people, but this one forced a war, censored newspapers, arrested war protestors, suspended the writ of habeus corpus and vastly expanded the power of the Federal Government).
The debt thing ... well ... people are stupid, what can I say? You can force a kid to school but you can't make him drink and all that. I'm just glad I'm debt free (and have always been so, avoiding the whole credit card scheme my entire life) and that I live well within my means.
So, given your druthers, *where* would you live?
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