The Empire Strikes Out

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I read an article this morning by Chalmers Johnson’s widow about her late husband and the fierce intellectual honesty and curiosity that drove him to write his seminal books on the follies of American empire as he struggled against a debilitating disease.

Crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, “Chal” produced the great trilogy on the American Raj starting with “Blowback”, as he fought both the pain of the disease and the cruel irony that the worst president in American history, George W. Bush was accelerating America’s demise and foreclosing any hope for a change of direction. 

Had he lived a little longer he might be experiencing a little pleasure in the pain of our Gulliver-like empire, tied down by its tentacles of hubris, writhing in irrelevance as the world passes us by.  The sorrows of empire indeed; but even worse we are trapped in our own contradictions as democratic eruptions in the Middle East, inspired by our values, leave us sidelined as history is being made by others. 

The inconsistencies are stark as we were caught by surprise by the Tunisian uprising, struggled to catch up with the Egyptian revolution, fumbled the Libyan revolt, tried to have it both ways in Bahrain and now don’t really want the Syrian dictator toppled.

Perhaps we are having the soul searching that Chalmers Johnson had hoped for, but our entrenched and metastasized military industrial complex and its global network of bases is on autopilot, just as the Afghanistan war is, and while billions are poured down the drain, there is little evidence the American people are paying attention.

Except of course for Ron Paul and now the game show politician Donald Trump, who point out the folly of filling potholes in Kabul and not on Main Street U.S.A. 

Perhaps there could be a bottom line awakening that we are wasting money on ungrateful people who hate us while our own people are being downsized as their jobs are outsourced, but that conversation would require focusing on Wall Street.  And since Wall Street clearly owns both political parties, and the Supreme Court has accelerated the total capture of our politics by big money, there seems little hope for improvement there. 

But just as the Berlin Wall fell, the wall of ignorance we have built up about the outside world is slowly crumbling and while we are learning that Arabs want democracy just like us, we might also learn that Europeans and other democracies actually take better care of their own people than we do. 

Even though there is an example right next door with Canada, one would think the intrusion of reality about their better standard of living would be inevitable.  But don’t underestimate the power of the enforcers of myth and the plutocracy of greed. 

America’s oligarchs will not stop until they have squeezed every last dollar of public money into private hands and unless the people act soon to reclaim their government, there won’t be anything left of the American dream, or of America the beautiful.