Will the stupiding of America make it a candidate to be "taken out"?
What's to stop some great power or Coalition of the Revolted to eliminate with extreme prejudice the once great, now dangerously idiotic nut, making trouble within and without its borders?
Its military might? Well, recent engagements seem to indicate that this bloated heavyweight is fighting nothing but stewbums and pugs. The style of battle is changing faster than the military industrial complex can build insufficiently armored transports and pay for overpriced cold war era jets.
Its economic power? With productivity nowhere near its international rivals, the country is less an industrial powerhouse and more a repository for cheap exports from China, like a continental-scaled episode of "Hoarders". We Are Become Walmart, Consumer of Worlds.
Its culture? Europe and Asia have had more than their share of dumbass TV shows and god-awful pop music, with a bewildering variety of gum-cracking, rabble-rousing putzes to suit every nation's innate taste for the garish and grotesque. Yet they manage to support and respect millennia of art and cultural history without the one terminally polluting the other as is seemingly the case in these dis-United States. We've gone from "Maude" to "Snooki". Do the math.
Its statesmanship? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sarah Palin.
When not crafting preposterously jumbled decrees even the clarity of a 140 character limitation of Twitter would ensure, the Numbskull from Nome is the farcically de facto face for the relentlessly rabid Right Wing. That she has been derelict in her duties as an elected official, continuously comports herself with the grace and erudition of a mall rat after huffing a can of Redi-Whip or exhorting her shallow acolytes to detest an intelligent, progressive, assertive, innovative leader and damning all possibility of righting the ship of state which was run aground by 8+ years of blatant right wing tomfoolery, is merely the tip of the melting iceberg of the ruin that America's international political standing has become.
Because the current America, which is the result of the unholy alliance of radical Christianity, corporate fascism, low brow media and low aiming education, will of course never detect such a stealthy operation. And if it did, what with its haughty sense of entitlement, it would laugh it off with all the flip arrogance of a drunken frat-boy general who, despite a spate of high profile military losses, still would not brook the possibility of defeat. Take us out? Roflmao!
The relentless airplay given to crackpot pathology is not because it's an amusing carny midway of hilarious freaks that gets more eyeballs, it's the message promulgated by those who pull the strings, a message that somehow makes their ultimate goal -- profit -- more expedient.
Take the Obama presidency.
It has been basically treated like many black men have been treated in American history, especially after Jim Crow and civil rights: shit on with a nod and a wink, followed by the smirking chorus of outraged "Who, me???"'s coming from the media and the unified righties; a chorus of soiled angels, herpes on the rims of their lips as they sing a soaring refrain of "Dixie".
The attack on him is no less an attack on sense, hope, wisdom, civility -- you know, all the things that were once considered valuable but which now get nary a mention. It looks like entertainment but it ain't really.
And Allah knows it's hard to ignore or even turn off a flickering info-saturated screen. One does not need an IPhone or IPad or ordinary flatscreen to pick up the digitized info on the ethereal bandwidths that encase each Western head like a digital turban. I said turban! Uh oh!
Creating a dumbed down consumer mass isn't the bosses' only intention, though that certainly is a main one. Because such an approach is uncharacteristically limited; it knows no regulation nor would it ever embrace the idea of stemming the thirst for More. Hell, the Others (i.e., the rest of the globe -- all those places that America either laughed at, cut deals with or ravaged) might be ripe to receive the one American product it has in abundance and is ready to export:
Stoopid.
And the rest of the globe, corrupt and complicit (as some may be or have been) might not be inclined to take it. Because they already have their own. And this batch has a stink on it, a putrescence that indicates even the massive amounts of good ol' American Stoopid that is sitting on pallets waiting to cross the ocean, is laced with the cultural equivalent of salmonella.
The Americans will protest, the Others will demur. The Americans will rage and roar and flex and fart.
And then the order will be given, the agents dispatched and blammo. Or zap. Or pffft. Or whatever the sound a societal/cultural assassination makes.
And then history begins anew, with new heroes, new villains and new cycles to be repeated and the same lessons gone unheeded.
But that couldn't happen. We're America. Now, back to that Ground Zero mosque story.