Columnist - John Sammon Yeah man! Gas prices, higher, higher, higher.
I’m lovin’ it!
The higher the better!
What this will do is cause more Americans to cease being mass consumption glutinous hogs, and will ultimately help to save the North Pole from melting.
Let me explain. I know full well this will result in my branding as a left-wing traitor by right wing mass consuming racist nuts (I’m actually a former conservative who left the Republican Party because of their lying and cheating and lack of morality).
You might also try and call me a “negativist” who enjoys the misfortune of others. I on the other hand view myself as a “positivist,” a person who can see great possibilities in supposed dire situations.
Oh, I almost forgot. Gas prices may also help Americans to reclaim the lost soul of their country, a country evolved into greed, of feeling superior to other less abundant countries because of our material possessions, and our frequent purchase of “things.”
Let’s say you’re a typical greedy fat upper middle class guy who buys a new car every year because you discard the old car like a toy you’ve suddenly grown tired of, and you currently drive a huge, gas guzzling four-wheel-drive Hummer, a vehicle as big as the German tank that invaded Poland in World War Two. You smoke cigarettes and discard the butts. You carelessly toss trash at the beach and eat rich calorie-laden junk food like a hog at a trough. You have a three-story house that burns more energy than the entire consumption of Nigeria (that’s a country in Africa for those of you right wingers who are mad at this piece).
You’re a gas guzzling hog.
Rising prices huh? You can’t afford to be a pig anymore like two years ago. You have to actually put yourself on a budget. To conserve. The C word. Not the C word. Not that! Oh the pain of it.
You drive less, which causes less freeway congestion and less greenhouse emission melting the Polar Icecap (our natural air conditioning down here). You’re forced to cancel that automatic yearly Hawaiian vacation which in turn puts less pollution pressure there.
The irony here is, and it’s a supreme irony, is you’re forced into becoming a conservationist kicking and screaming even though you don’t like it by the very same people who made you an oil addict in the first place…..the oil companies and their secret cartels and their Saudi Arabian robber barons and their Washington lobbyists.
You’re forced to cut back on your lavish lifestyle you hog. To you, more is always better. The things you purchase make you feel worthy, temporarily, until you have to buy more things, and the money. There’s never enough, even though you have more than you need.
Right now, there’s a Chinaman who used to ride a bike in Beijing, but who now drives a car. He also wants to be a glutinous hog like you.
In fairness, I drive a car, though I’ve always left personally a very small ecologic footprint. I seldom buy anything. You might describe my lifestyle as that of an “esthete,” or “Spartan,” or “Ghandiesk.” For those of you right wing haters who never read a book, Mahatmas Gandhi was an Indian leader who stressed morality and restraint.
All I can say to those to whom any form of idealism and not just thinking only of themselves is real hell……welcome to my world.
Some people will lose their jobs because of oil prices, but they were probably jobs centered around addiction to oil which was wrong in the first place. Jobs can be retooled to meet the new demand for conservation and ecologically friendly living.
Rising oil prices will force Americans to seek alternative travel, mass transit, fuel efficient and hybrid and eventually electric cars, which will improve air quality and slow global warming. It will also teach you, the glutinous hog, that the world isn’t your private oyster to be abused any way you see fit. That every little you thing you do has an impact. Ultimately, it will also force you to become more humane, more aware of others who are less fortunate.
Being forced to walk a little more may help stall that heart attack you the hog are now working towards.
Rising oil prices will also help end the economic-political strangle hold the Saudis and others have over us because we won’t need their oil. It will end their outsourced power and put them in their proper place among the community of nations.
I’m lovin’ it!
I hope gas goes up to $10 a gallon.
Like we used to yell at the football game, “hit ‘em again, hit ‘em again..harder…harder!”
…..Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”
It is hard to find the words to express what a fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy President Bush’s new plan is…..[MORE]
Columnist - John Sammon You know what bothers me, apart from the ethics, who’s right and who’s wrong? (America is always right, right or wrong).
America only attacks small, poor countries. Look at the list of our opponents over the past thirty years or so, Vietnam, Granada, Iraq, Afghanistan, The Balkans, Lebanon, and Cuba (oops, we didn’t attack Cuba, we almost did).
Always in the name of freedom.
It makes me yearn for World War Two, the good war, where we fought competent powerful enemies worthy of the name. Now, I know because we’re America we’re always right no matter what. I know we have right on our side in every case. That we’re infallible, incapable of error.
But do we always have to fight countries much smaller than ourselves?
This will get me labeled as unpatriotic, and not one of the my-country-right-or-wrong-God-likes-me-and-not-you crowd. But it makes me uncomfortable that we’re always beating up (in the name of right) on poor small countries, countries whose gross national product is a fraction of our own.
These are people who don’t have refrigerators like we do.
To be invaded by the United States, you have to be small, poor, and have no navy and no air force like we do.
We never take on big countries like China.
Here’s a partial list of countries that because of their size and poverty can consider themselves under risk of attack from Bombs Away John McCain if they don’t conform to the American lifestyle, and fail to provide us with raw materials, or do what we want when we want, or pattern themselves after us, or seek nuclear power (that right is reserved for America and its friends like India).
And most of all, not attack their neighbors. The right to attack is reserved for America. Here’s the list:
Chad – This tiny Central African country, named for a voting stub (chad), would be easy for the United States to defeat. Hell, they don’t have anything except sand and flies. In fact, their chief commodity export are gnats.
Switzerland – If we run out of milk, we know where we can get it (lots of cows). The only problem here are the mountains (we have specialized troops that can climb those), and the sexy blondes in the villages who might prove a distraction. It can be overcome by our modern technology.
Yemen – This is a plumb ready for the taking. Think of it. Oil rich. On the ocean where the Red Sea meets the Arabian Sea. Beautiful waterfront condos overlooking the sea. Prime real estate. No air force to speak of. Navy? Can Arabs sail? Hell no. The only problem is, it’s a republic. That’s okay, we can blame 9-11 on ‘em. Yemen has another advantage. Many different tribes. We can get them to warring with each other.
Djibouti – Another Arab country in the Horn of Africa. Once again, potential oil and ocean views. We could overrun them in three days. It’s a Moslem country so this would figure in with our remaking the Middle East. But the main reason is it would give our hip soldiers (who love slang) the chance to wear tee shirts that say, “you bet Djibouti (your booty).”
Netherlands Antilles – This tiny island off the coast of Venezuela, I can’t think of one good reason to invade. Except maybe, it’s close to South America and would give us more of a presence there. We’ve always tried to boss South America.
This is only a partial list.
There are many more such countries that can be taught freedom.
When the Democratic nomination was still unresolved, all eyes were on Hillary and Obama, and John McCain was virtually ignored by the press.
A couple of weeks ago In a desperate attempt to garner media coverage, McCain invited Obama to visit Iraq with him. This wasn’t a sincere request, McCain couched his invitation in condescending terms, explaining that it would give him an opportunity to teach Obama about the facts on the ground in Iraq.
McCain likes to brag that he’s visited Iraq eight times, but how much can a presidential candidate really learn about that country by going there? To protect him from terrorists, McCain has yet to visit any of the hot spots. How much of the war zone can McCain see when he’s surrounded by bodyguards, and escorted to heavily protected American enclaves?
How should Obama respond to McCain’s publicity stunt? I think that Obama should accept McCain’s invitation for the following reasons:
First of all, it would serve as a teaching opportunity: McCain has a lot to learn about Iraq and the Middle East. Obama can start by teaching McCain the difference between Sunni and Shiite insurgents. Obama could also point out to McCain that their flack jackets, armed escorts and helicopters flying overhead is proof that everything isn’t hunky dory.
In the second place, it would boost troop morale if our brave warriors saw that both presidential candidates care about their safety and well being. Support for our troops shouldn’t be a partisan issue, all of us need to show them that we love and admire them.
And finally it would give McCain and Obama a chance to bond, and get to know each other. After a few days together in that hellish part of the world, they might return to America and wage a civil and courteous campaign.
Obama has invited McCain to visit inner cities with him, stand in gas lines, wait in ER’s, to get a feel of what the average American feels. Turnabout is fair play, McCain should visit a few inner cities with Obama.
Now that Obama has clinched the nomination and Hillary will soon be out of the picture (hopefully), McCain will be getting plenty of attention from the press and he won’t have to resort to publicity stunts.
The United States is one of the last remaining land empires. That it is made the butt of opprobrium and odium is hardly surprising, or unprecedented. Empires - Rome, the British, the Ottomans - were always targeted by the disgruntled, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed and by their self-appointed delegates, the intelligentsia.
Yet, even by historical standards, America seems to be provoking blanket repulsion.
The Pew Research Center published in December 2002 a report titled “What the World Thinks in 2002″. “The World”, was reduced by the pollsters to 44 countries and 38,000 interviewees. Two other surveys published last year - by the German Marshall Fund and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations - largely supported Pew’s findings.
The most startling and unambiguous revelation was the extent of anti-American groundswell everywhere: among America’s NATO allies, in developing countries, Muslim nations and even in eastern Europe where Americans, only a decade ago, were lionized as much-adulated liberators.
Four years later, things have gotten even worse.
Between March and May 2006, Pew surveyed 16,710 people in Britain, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the United States.
Only 23% of Spaniards had a positive opinion of the USA, down from 41% the year before. A similar drop was evinced in India (from 71% to 56%), Russia (from 52% o 43%), Indonesia (from 38% to 30%), and Turkey (from 23% to 12%). In Britain, America’s putative ally, support was down by one third from 2002, to 50% or so. Declines were noted in France, Germany, and Jordan, somewhat offset by marginal rises in China and Pakistan.
Two thirds of Russians and overwhelming majorities in 13 out of 15 countries regarded the conduct of the USA in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace that Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The distinction formerly made between the American people and the Bush administration is also eroding. Majorities in only 7 of 14 countries had favorable views of Americans.
“People around the world embrace things American and, at the same time, decry U.S. influence on their societies. Similarly, pluralities in most of the nations surveyed complain about American unilateralism.”- expounded the year 2002 Pew report.
Yet, even this “embrace of things American” is ambiguous.
Violently “independent”, inanely litigious and quarrelsome, solipsistically provincial, and fatuously ignorant - this nation of video clips and sound bites, the United States, is often perceived as trying to impose its narcissistic pseudo-culture upon a world exhausted by wars hot and cold and corrupted by vacuous materialism.
Recent accounting scandals, crumbling markets, political scams, human rights violations, technological setbacks, and rising social tensions have revealed how rotten and inherently contradictory the US edifice is and how concerned are Americans with appearances rather than substance.
To religious fundamentalists, America is the Great Satan, a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah, a cesspool of immorality and spiritual decay. To many European liberals, the United states is a throwback to darker ages of religious zealotry, pernicious bigotry, virulent nationalism, and the capricious misrule of the mighty.
According to most recent surveys by Gallup, MORI, the Council for Secular Humanism, the US Census Bureau, and others - the vast majority of Americans are chauvinistic, moralizing, bible-thumping, cantankerous, and trigger-happy. About half of them believe that Satan exists - not as a metaphor, but as a real physical entity.
America has a record defense spending per head, a vertiginous rate of incarceration, among the highest numbers of legal executions and gun-related deaths. It is still engaged in atavistic debates about abortion, the role of religion, and whether to teach the theory of evolution.
According to a series of special feature articles in The Economist, America is generally well-liked in Europe, but less so than before. It is utterly detested by the Muslim street, even in “progressive” Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan. Everyone - Europeans and Arabs, Asians and Africans - think that “the spread of American ideas and customs is a bad thing.”
Admittedly, we typically devalue most that which we have formerly idealized and idolized.
To the liberal-minded, the United States of America reified the most noble, lofty, and worthy values, ideals, and causes. It was a dream in the throes of becoming, a vision of liberty, peace, justice, prosperity, and progress. Its system, though far from flawless, was considered superior - both morally and functionally - to anything ever conceived by Man.
Such unrealistic expectations inevitably and invariably lead to disenchantment, disillusionment, bitter disappointment, seething anger, and a sense of humiliation for having been thus deluded, or, rather, self-deceived. This backlash is further exacerbated by the haughty hectoring of the ubiquitous American missionaries of the “free-market-cum-democracy” church.
Americans everywhere aggressively preach the superior virtues of their homeland. Edward K. Thompson, managing editor of “Life” (1949-1961) warned against this propensity to feign omniscience and omnipotence: “Life (the magazine) must be curious, alert, erudite and moral, but it must achieve this without being holier-than-thou, a cynic, a know-it-all, or a Peeping Tom.”
Thus, America’s foreign policy - i.e., its presence and actions abroad - is, by far, its foremost vulnerability.
According to the Pew study, the image of the Unites States as a benign world power slipped dramatically in the space of two years in Slovakia (down 14 percent), in Poland (-7), in the Czech Republic (-6) and even in fervently pro-Western Bulgaria (-4 percent). It rose exponentially in Ukraine (up 10 percent) and, most astoundingly, in Russia (+24 percent) - but from a very low base.
The crux may be that the USA maintains one set of sanctimonious standards at home while egregiously and nonchalantly flouting them far and wide. Hence the fervid demonstrations against its military presence in places as disparate as South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.
In January 2000, Staff Sergeant Frank J. Ronghi sexually molested, forcibly sodomized (”indecent acts with a child”) and then murdered an 11-years old girl in the basement of her drab building in Kosovo, when her father went to market to do some shopping. His is by no means the most atrocious link in a long chain of brutalities inflicted by American soldiers overseas, the latest of which are taking place in Iraq. In all these cases, the perpetrators were removed from the scene to face justice - or, more often, a travesty thereof - back home.
Americans - officials, scholars, peacemakers, non-government organizations - maintain a colonial state of mind. Backward natives come cheap, their lives dispensable, their systems of governance and economies inherently inferior. The white man’s burden must not be encumbered by the vagaries of primitive indigenous jurisprudence. Hence America’s fierce resistance to and indefatigable obstruction of the International Criminal Court.
Opportunistic multilateralism notwithstanding, the USA still owes the poorer nations of the world close to $200 million - its arrears to the UN peacekeeping operations, usually asked to mop up after an American invasion or bombing. It not only refuses to subject its soldiers to the jurisdiction of the World Criminal Court - but also its facilities to the inspectors of the Chemical Weapons Convention, its military to the sanctions of the (anti) land mines treaty and the provisions of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, and its industry to the environmental constraints of the Kyoto Protocol, the rulings of the World Trade Organization, and the rigors of global intellectual property rights.
Despite its instinctual unilateralism, the United States is never averse to exploiting multilateral institutions to its ends. It is the only shareholder with a veto power in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by now widely considered to have degenerated into a long arm of the American administration. The United Nations Security Council, raucous protestations aside, has rubber-stamped American martial exploits from Panama to Iraq.
It seems as though America uses - and thus, perforce, abuses - the international system for its own, ever changing, ends. International law is invoked by it when convenient - ignored when importune.
In short, America is a bully. It is a law unto itself and it legislates on the fly, twisting arms and breaking bones when faced with opposition and ignoring the very edicts it promulgates at its convenience. Its soldiers and peacekeepers, its bankers and businessmen, its traders and diplomats are its long arms, an embodiment of this potent and malignant mixture of supremacy and contempt.
But why is America being singled out?
In politics and even more so in geopolitics, double standards and bullying are common. Apartheid South Africa, colonial France, mainland China, post-1967 Israel - and virtually every other polity - were at one time or another characterized by both. But while these countries usually mistreated only their own subjects - the USA does so also exterritorialy.
Even as it never ceases to hector, preach, chastise, and instruct - it does not recoil from violating its own decrees and ignoring its own teachings. It is, therefore, not the USA’s intrinsic nature, nor its self-perception, or social model that I find most reprehensible - but its actions, particularly its foreign policy.
America’s manifest hypocrisy, its moral talk and often immoral walk, its persistent application of double standards, irks and grates. I firmly believe that it is better to face a forthright villain than a masquerading saint. It is easy to confront a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Mao, vile and bloodied, irredeemably depraved, worthy only of annihilation. The subtleties of coping with the United States are far more demanding and far less rewarding.
This self-proclaimed champion of human rights has aided and abetted countless murderous dictatorships. This alleged sponsor of free trade is the most protectionist of rich nations. This ostensible beacon of charity contributes less than 0.1% of its GDP to foreign aid (compared to Scandinavia’s 0.6%, for instance). This upright proponent of international law (under whose aegis it bombed and invaded half a dozen countries this past decade alone) is in avowed opposition to crucial pillars of the international order.
Naturally, America’s enemies and critics are envious of its might and wealth. They would have probably acted the same as the United States, if they only could. But America’s haughtiness and obtuse refusal to engage in soul searching and house cleaning do little to ameliorate this antagonism.
To the peoples of the poor world, America is both a colonial power and a mercantilist exploiter. To further its geopolitical and economic goals from Central Asia to the Middle East, it persists in buttressing regimes with scant regard for human rights, in cahoots with venal and sometimes homicidal indigenous politicians. And it drains the developing world of its brains, its labour, and its raw materials, giving little in return.
All powers are self-interested - but America is narcissistic. It is bent on exploiting and, having exploited, on discarding. It is a global Dr. Frankenstein, spawning mutated monsters in its wake. Its “drain and dump” policies consistently boomerang to haunt it.
Both Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega - two acknowledged monsters - were aided and abetted by the CIA and the US military. America had to invade Panama to depose the latter and to molest Iraq for the second time in order to force the removal of the former.
The Kosovo Liberation Army, an American anti-Milosevic pet, provoked a civil war in Macedonia tin 2001. Osama bin-Laden, another CIA golem, restored to the USA, on September 11, 2001 some of the materiel it so generously bestowed on him in his anti-Russian days.
Normally the outcomes of expedience, the Ugly American’s alliances and allegiances shift kaleidoscopically. Pakistan and Libya were transmuted from foes to allies in the fortnight prior to the Afghan campaign. Milosevic has metamorphosed from staunch ally to rabid foe in days.
This capricious inconsistency casts in grave doubt America’s sincerity - and in sharp relief its unreliability and disloyalty, its short term thinking, truncated attention span, soundbite mentality, and dangerous, “black and white”, simplism.
In its heartland, America is isolationist. Its denizens erroneously believe that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is an economically self-sufficient and self-contained continent. Yet, it is not what Americans trust or wish that matters to others. It is what they do. And what they do is meddle, often unilaterally, always ignorantly, sometimes forcefully.
Elsewhere, inevitable unilateralism is mitigated by inclusive cosmopolitanism. It is exacerbated by provincialism - and American decision-makers are mostly provincials, popularly elected by provincials. As opposed to Rome, or Great Britain, America is ill-suited and ill-equipped to micromanage the world.
It is too puerile, too abrasive, too arrogant and it has a lot to learn. Its refusal to acknowledge its shortcomings, its confusion of brain with brawn (i.e., money or bombs), its legalistic-litigious character, its culture of instant gratification and one-dimensional over-simplification, its heartless lack of empathy, and bloated sense of entitlement are detrimental to world peace and stability.
America is often called by others to intervene. Many initiate conflicts or prolong them with the express purpose of dragging America into the quagmire. It then is either castigated for not having responded to such calls - or reprimanded for having responded. It seems that it cannot win. Abstention and involvement alike garner it only ill-will.
But people call upon America to get involved because they know it rises to the challenge. America should make it unequivocally and unambiguously clear that - with the exception of the Americas - its sole interests rest in commerce. It should make it equally known that it will protect its citizens and defend its assets, if need be by force.
Indeed, America’s - and the world’s - best bet are a reversion to the Monroe and (technologically updated) Mahan doctrines. Wilson’s Fourteen Points brought the USA nothing but two World Wars and a Cold War thereafter. It is time to disengage.
Note - America the Narcissist
The majority of worldwide respondents to the last two global Pew enter surveys (in 2002 and 2006) regarded the United States as the greatest menace to world peace - far greater than the likes of Iraq or China. Thinkers and scholars as diverse as Christopher Lasch in “The Cultural Narcissist” and Theodore Millon in “Personality Disorders of Everyday Life” have singled out the United States as the quintessential narcissistic society.
The “American Dream” in itself is benign. It involves materialistic self-realization, the belief in the ideal of equal opportunities and equal access to the system, and in just rewards for hard work, merit, and natural gifts. But the Dream has been rendered nightmarish by the confluence with America’s narcissistic traits.
America’s internal ethos is universally-accepted by all Americans. It incorporates the American Dream and the conviction that America stands for everything that is good and right. Consequently, as the reification of goodness, the United States is in constant battle with evil and its ever-changing demonic emissaries - from Hitler to Saddam Hussein.
There is no national consensus about America’s external ethos. Some Americans are isolationists, others interventionists. Both groups are hypervigilant, paranoid, and self-righteous - but isolationists are introverted and schizoid. Theirs is siege mentality. Interventionists are missionary. They feel omnipotent and invincible. They are extroverted and psychopathic.
This pathology can be traced back and attributed to a confluence of historical events and processes, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an individual’s early childhood.
The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.
The inhabitants of the colonies defended against their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Victims frequently internalize their abusers and themselves become bullies. Hence the rough, immutable kernel of American narcissism.
The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) and still is, in some important respects, a
pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and
ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized “enemies”, both political and cultural.
The Civil War was fought between 2 America’s: the South, a perverted rendition of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the North, a harbinger of modern, multicultural immigrant societies. The North and the American Dream prevailed, the slaves were freed, and the Southern way of life, that of “gentlemen with leisure”, was replaced by a workaholic society where everyone is a slave to money and leisure is an ever rarer commodity.
Americans’ religion is a manifestation of their “Chosen People Syndrome”. They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is especially discernible in the double-speak and double-standard that underlies American foreign policy.
Narcissism is frequently comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit well with their adherence to social Darwinism (natural selection of the fittest, let the weaker fall by the wayside, might is right, etc.).
Consequently, the United States always finds itself in company with the least palatable regimes in the world: together with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics program (the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi sterilization law were modeled after American anti-miscegenation and sterilization statutes), together with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted official apartheid in a vast swathe of its territory.
Add to this volatile mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism both latent and overt, a trampling, “no holds barred” ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-based morality, and proud simple-mindedness - and an ominous portrait of the United States as a deeply disturbed polity emerges.
Yeah man! Gas prices, higher, higher, higher.
When the Democratic nomination was still unresolved, all eyes were on Hillary and Obama, and John McCain was virtually ignored by the press.
