“[An upside down flag is] an international distress signal. It means ‘we’re in a whole lot of trouble, so come save our ass b’cause we don’t have a prayer in hell of saving ourselves.’” - Sgt Hank Deerfield, In the Valley of Elah.
Now that Barack Obama has been anointed as the leader to take America back into the community of nations, we, the people of the world, now live in dread of his assassination.
There have already been arrests of a couple of good old white trash boys over a planned attempt. Check out their mug shots: racists are almost invariably genetic garbage.
Umeruhca will not survive if Obama is assassinated. It may already be too late. After eight stolen years under George W. Bush, the country appears polarized beyond redemption. There are the larval, born yesterday Christian fundamentalist/nationalists who use god and flag to bolster their fear and hatred of The Other. And the rest of us.
The would-be assassins might as well give it a bye, though. No need to take time out from their usual occupations of wife-beating, fucking the kids and livestock. Obama will probably lose because: 1) he’s an orator with humanitarian ideals and the nation has felt relaxed and comfortable with a president who can barely speak English and who has the ideals of serial killer. 2) Michelle Obama. Umeruhcans don’t cotton to uppity women who know who they are, who refuse to be their drunken hubby’s doormat. 3) Well, he’s black.
Race and slavery are America’s original sin. The election of Obama would be, beyond question, one of the noblest gestures of historical redemption that Americans have ever been called upon to make. But that is precisely why it may not happen. - Martin Kettle, How McCain can win. (In that late, great Australian newspaper, The Age.)
Meanwhile, the War Chimp is begging for all out confrontation with Putin and his boy Dmitry Medvedev. Well, Dubya’s been pushing for Drive-In Christianity’s whoopee apocalypse for years now. He blew it in Iraq, a pushover of a blown state, but tough guy ex-KGB Putin will be calling the ignorant little dunce’s bluff from now on. The trouble with Bush and his neo-con cronies is they think everyone is as stupid as they are.
Looking at the rest of the world, we can plainly see that Globalization’s corporate behemoth is on a roll. Little by little the privateers are buying up everything but the air we breathe. And don’t think they haven’t tried to come up with a way to bill us for that.
Thanks to the U.S. and its salivating, deregulated Ownership Society economics, the rest of the world’s economies are taking terminal hits. The obese blimp of corporate avarice is about to explode like a corpse in the noonday sun on every last family’s pocketbook.
Global Warming? It will only be looked into if there is a buck to me made. Vested interests are even cheering the Arctic melt. Never mind rising seas, now they can drill for oil. The electric car was removed from the market to keep profits high for the gas-guzzler industry and the oil companies. Plans to deal with the worldwide shortage of water are being put into the hands of private companies, where water will be allotted to those who can pay. They frown on household water tanks because they can’t get any money from their contents, unless they buy up all the companies making the things and then double or triple the price. In the name of competition, of course.
Banks and other institutions record massive profit increases every year while gouging consumers, who have no choice but to do business with them. And working conditions are slowly returning to 19th century standards.
There isn’t a government on the planet worthy of respect. Not one will stand up for the citizens consumers who voted them into the power. Every politician is either in the corporate sector’s pocket, or owned indirectly by an enforced party line dictated by the corporation’s bought-and-paid-for pocket rocket.
While the United States collapses under the willful ignorance of its descent into a savage amorality, China and Russia are becoming the capitalist autocracies of the future. No meddlesome democracy for them. Let the consumers work and spend, just don’t give ‘em too many freedoms to spoil their obeisance. Hell, in democracies where they do have freedoms, the fools couldn’t care less. People want security, not freedom. They want to be told what to do from birth to death. Freedom demands awareness of that which is beyond the alarm system at the front door. It demands courage. Security, and its political wing, conservatism, is the stuff of cowards.
An interesting footnote to all this is the generation of children called Generation Z, which includes those born since 2001. These are the kids born with the internet at their fingertips. Simultaneously global and local, they may well be the generation that refuses to accept thousands of years of evolution-interfering war and its prerequisites, greed and the male lust for power.
Then again, theirs is the last letter of the alphabet. The times are indeed a-changin’. Maybe “the times,” as we have historically understood them, are ending. The question is, will we become an archaelogical dig for some interplanetary species in the far-flung future? Or are we about to evolve beyond the embarrassment of the weakling species we have always been.
I often wonder what alien archaelogists would think if they dug up things like Qld’s Big Pineapple.
The USA may hate Putin, but their politicians had a hand in his success. They gleefully patted each other on the back while the USSR crumbled. Now after years of control by kleptocrats, the Russians have turned back to authoritarianism to restore their national pride. It’s simply another Osama/Iraq/Ayatollah situation- America always seems to pay a heavy price for its interference in other nations’ affairs.