Hey, you. Yeah. You.
I got a tip for ya': careful starting your car.
The United States is coming across as just too friggin' annoying, having done nothing to assuage the world's virtually unanimous concerns about what ails it, starting with the biggies like a thoroughly destabilized middle east and a thoroughly destabilized climate, to say nothing of just being a swaggering, destabilizing, obnoxious bully in general. Led by the swaggering, destabilizing, obnoxious bully-in-general George "Dude, Where's My Codpiece?" Bush, this nation is cruisin' for a bruisin', an internationally funded coup d'ta-ta that finally lances the boil of America (read: Neo-Conservativism) throbbing on the global community's neck.
It's not so hard to ponder. America doesn't corner the market in mob hits or covert ops to take out a person or persons or organizations that have gone too far. Every country worth its salt has some covert corps smearing burnt cork on their faces, wearing stealth balaclavas and practicing killshots on watermelons. Each patriarchal nation has its Rambos, its Bonds, its Nick Fury: Agent of Shields. And each has a sense of their own place in the scheme of Things International. And their patience might be coming to, let's say, an end.
This is by no means an advocation of such executive action. Nor am I saying I myself would immediately roll over onto my back exposing my three rows of nipples and give permission to any real threat to my liberty to tickle my soft, pink belly while they rape and consume all I hold dear. It's merely a hypothetical postulation. But it can't be an idea that hasn't been floated by governments both friendly and unfriendly: to terminate us with extreme prejudice. It's had to be an option placed on the proverbial table. After all, if the increasingly tenuous balance is upset, if potential profits are hindered by the out of control, cut-and-run behavior of one of the corporation's key players, then all alternatives must be considered. It isn't personal. It's business.
What's even more distressing is that along with the naturally occurring bloat of intoxicating arrogance that comes with being a super power, its certain demise is most probably counted on, indeed a basic element of the plan formulated by its current leaders, who pride themselves in seeing clarity in chaos, profit in instability. It allows the said profiteers the opportunity to escape out the back while everyone else is frantically forming a bucket brigade.
9/11, Katrina, Osama, Global Warming: for Neo-Conservaties these events couldn't have come at a better time. Like Dr. Frankenstein flying giant kites to harness the lightning of an approaching storm, these men were ready, patiently waiting for the inevitable. And their patience paid off, successfully animating an unholy creation, a stitched-together terror of the worst pieces of human nature: war without end, profit without pause, intellect invalidated. Not that America has the corner on that market either. There are plenty of other societies that are far more brutal and far less subtle. But this country was always supposed to be better than that. It left such cynical acts to the despots and tyrants it professed to despise. It was born to set itself apart from the all too common temptations to control destiny, and the only way to do that was to wrest people's hopes for freedom and peace from the fists of the merciless and the arrogant (see "The United States Constitution").
But there are some who simply don't see it that way, who in fact feel the urge to control at all costs. It's not the so-called Islamo-fascists that hate our freedom, it's the Neo-Conmen who do. Because without a people enslaved by doubt and fear, their outdated but nonetheless effective manifest destiny tactics have little traction. Which is why they relish force majeure. God is their ultimate back-up plan. And since it's quite possible they have Him in the bag, too (the jury's still out but it ain't looking so good), then we might as well get used to the idea that the destructive actions of the few of them will have dire consequences for the compliant rest of us. And to look over our shoulders.
