I want to comment on the current global situation that is grossly overburdening the world with a propensity towards benevolent violence that should wrench us all from our sanity.
The Bush administration has succeeded in convincing itself that it is going to rescue the world by making it more like America and less like it is. This entails convincing the rest of the world that it needs to adopt democratic principles and Christian values and puritanical ideals such as capitalism (Maximize your returns by reducing your expenditures).
This should all be easy enough since it does seem like the first world nations live particularly well compared to the rest of us. They have more cars, more televisions, freedom of the press, freedom of expression and the ability to know what is better for others in an invasive sort of way.
I live in a third world country, Colombia, spelled just like it sounds and not to be confused with Columbia as it often is. Living in third world countries has its merits; we don’t have the military capability to mount a sustainable war effort against other countries. We don’t have the ability to influence world opinion so we let the European Union and the United States think what they may; and have not ever attempted to change their national ideals, from sea to shiny sea and one Europe all the way to the Baltics, stop at the Russian front.
Of course we do produce a lot of cocaine and marijuana, which appears to have many effects on musicians and European and American policy; as it regards to their consummate war against drugs within our borders, but not in their own backyard where there appear to be no great and mighty drug kingpins, they all reside outside of American borders and the logistics are all managed by brilliant Latin America enterprising master minds. Hence the reason why all drug wars have to be waged outside of American borders.
In America the enemy is always externalized, the problem can never be resolved within. You can very much figure that Colombia is not going to war against anyone but itself, as for the last forty or so years it has been brother against brother, with our home founded Guerrilla movements, which depending on how you count amount to three significant militant groups, that all want to liberate us from our government and most often instead succeed in liberating our souls from our carnal bodies.
It is the inherent tendency of societies that don’t have the capability to destroy others to destroy themselves. Colombians are just as aggressive as Americans; we are just introverted with our aggression due to a lack of military and organizational capability. We have never managed to conquer much of our own country; about sixty percent of our economy is concentrated in Bogotá the capital. Colombian business managers don’t imagine that there is a market worth pursuing outside of it since most of the country suffers energy shortages and unmanaged roads. Medellin our next closest city-state is an industrial might, inhabited by two million aggressive and organized business centric peoples but of incestuous mentalities. Meaning that Medellin is a country onto itself, wholly confident that it could also operate the entire country if it could take control of Bogotá but it can not do that because they don’t have enough relatives there, yet!
I think it was Freud that said that aggression was a natural constitution of humanity, and so the option was merely if that aggression would be externalized or internalized. Third world countries are largely self-destrucitive because they are closed societies, they are not extroverted nor do they derive their self-confidence from being able to convince others that they have the best and only peanut butter in the world. First world nations have a need to externalized their desires and ideals, they have to win the most medals at the Olympics, they have to have the greatest number of Nobel Prize winners, they must succeed at deploying their ideals, music and culture unto the minds and hearts of the rest of the world. There is no doubt in the American, German or French psyche that the world would be a much better place if it were more like them, shall we say civilized. Perhaps the most striking aspect of being civilized is the need to spread the message across nationalities so that we can all become yuppies and successful single mothers.
Today, the Americans are in Iraq in an obvious way attempting to redo and reshape that society right. Surely, if women had the right to drive on Iraqi roads that would mean that they are free and happy. Freedom to Americans means the ability to drive your own car and to own guns and to say anything you want to say no matter if it offends others or not.
That Iraq needed to be liberated and especially by the same people that liberated Iran with the Westernized and liberal Shah, is suspect, but you are not going to tell the Americans that the rest of the world may not want to me made in their image. The fact that the concepts of republic and capitalism took root over many centuries and that they were molded from European and American longings for such things does not strike the other plausible fact, that Islamic theocracies and Latin American dictators arouse out of the hearts and minds of those cultures as well.
It is difficult, perhaps even implausible for most Americans to imagine freedom any other way but there is such other freedom. As I mentioned earlier I live in Colombia a fairly lawless country where most crime goes unpunished and there aren’t to many social safety nets, and you have to watch when you cross the street because people who own cars here think that they have accomplished something great and unique. And yet I feel freer than perhaps an American. This is because here we are not always trying to improve and perfect ourselves so as to be ready for all the magnificent stuff that is going to happen to us in the future. We are no thinking that technology and medicine are going to solve any of our problems; more important we don’t have to worry about the world hating us because we can’t attack that world with our consumerism or our do-gooder Christian army.
Yes there are Mormons and Baptists preachers, and the IMF and the World Bank trying to help us civilized ourselves, but they wont be successful because we don’t know how to be that anxious to change; it takes so much energy and dedication to be successful that we just don’t have it in us; given the choice of getting another degree, a higher paying job, a face lift or drinking and dancing, we will go dancing and drinking. Productivity for us is being with friends and family, we have the highest number of holidays second only to I think France. But I am optimistic that we can beat them soon, as the EU will force France to be more productive.
But in all I want to say one thing, unlike many of my fellow third world citizens I am not opposed to Bush the aggressor king, I am not oppose to Bush the preemptive prevention oppressor, I am actually liking the guy. Of course he is not Bill Clinton the likable guy, but I don’t dislike Bush because I believe that he has done more for the rest of the world than for his own country; and we peoples of the rest of the world should be grateful to him for taking it upon himself to demonstrate to the world that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts completely.
Given his position as sole world empire America could have easily enjoyed the good will of the rest of the world and it could have been benevolent. But Bush decided not to be a diplomat, he opted not to hide his intentions, he opted instead to be honest and to say, America wants the entire world to be made in its image, America wants women to be able to drive in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and America wants women to be able to show their faces and wear miniskirts, and America wants the world to be democratic and to have freedom of the press like the New York Times has the freedom to say what it wants about the Bush administration.
It is a rare and remarkable man that is so candid. It is rare for a superpower not to hide under the guise of diplomacy and global altruism; today Bush’s America is telling the rest of the world honestly where it stands, “my enemies enemy is my friend and you want to be like me or don’t you!”
Clearly hitherto no American president has done more introverted damage to the image and to the cause of his own country. No president before him has fought harder to destroy American greatness! Bush is the first American president to internalize America’s destructive tendencies, and while it might seem that Bush is out of control or in control the truth is that neither is correct. Bush is merely the last destined emperor of what was an empire based on the duality, dichotomy and dialectic embodied in the special relationship of the USSR and the USA during the formidable asynchronously balanced cold war. The fact is that neither country could do without the other; it was never going to be in America’s interest that the Soviet Union collapsed, it was their chess game that kept the world under their mutual control. When the USSR collapsed it was a sign that America would too collapse, a country without a natural enemy is bound to suffer from runaway evolution, the checks and balances removed would have to give rise to the Last Emperor, a man that would know not his limits, a man willing to stand alone in the world, such a man has done what Osaman Bin Laden could only have wished to do: He has imploded American restraint and exposed its every weakness.
Again Americans should be aghast at the their president, but the rest of the world should be grateful for Bush is single-handedly slaying the arrogance of Goliath.
RC
