Curmudgeon's Corner
A semi-regular editorial from the staff at Humor Is Dead

8/16/03 - Well, I think it’s about time to say a done deal is a done deal. The American people have exercised their hard-earned freedoms and decided to collectively drop their drawers to their knees, bend over, and stick their heads in the sands of history.

A limbless boy whose family members were blown to pieces by American bombs smiles as his prosthetic limbs become new advertising medium… three teenagers decide to play a game of hide and seek on the runways of JFK – and no security system detects them… 600 billion dollars – the amount allotted to fight the War On Terror – is now the estimation for continued occupation of a country that has no proven connections to Al-Qaeda until we started bombing there.

Bin Laden runs free. An unintelligible Nazi son runs for governor. A mentally unstable woman publishes a book calling Joe McCarthy a great man and cracks the NY Times bestseller list, Condi Rice compares the invasion of Iraq to America’s civil rights struggle, Kobe Bryant’s cock pierces unknown and very possibly illegal terrain.

Welcome to the New America.

When the Spanish invaded the Incan Empire in the 16th century, they knew things would be easier if they enlisted the aid of the locals who “had a problem” with Incan rule. Whether the Incans were oppressive, bloodthirsty dictators (as the Spanish portrayed them) or a benevolent socialist regime that provided universal healthcare and housing to every one of its citizens (as any native Peruvian will say) is irrelevant to our story and was irrelevant to the Spanish conquistadors.

So, with promises of liberation, the underlings of the Andean empire helped the Spanish annul Incan rule - and the area remained divided and embroiled in official guerrilla warfare for 7 years - most likely 6 years and some odd months after the liberated realized that “liberation” referred to the massive gold and silver deposits on the continent, if not the liberation of their hell-bound souls to the hands of Christ.

Well then - we all know this talk about liberation – from King Ferdinand V, George Bush II, or from the pages of American newspapers - is a lot of nonsense. To have anyone with a slight understanding of human history swallow that one, you’d have to convince them that the air floating above the United States causes some sort of genetic mutation that turns people in power – for the first time in history - into fairy godmothers who sprinkle the planet with sparkling heaps of selfless goodness everywhere they go – just because.

History broadcasts a continuous parade of “legal” and “illegal” conquests – from slave labor in West Africa to cheap labor in Bangladesh today; from the conquests of the Huns to the conquests of Bechtel; from Hammurabi to Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan to the Ottomans to the British and beyond in Iraq. But America is different than those old colonial empires. First of all, Americans – old-style conservatives especially – like to steer an isolationist foreign policy boat - but the neo-conservatives claim that this philosophy can be overthrown now since - well damn - the world would just collapse without us! We like to stay out of “nation-building” exercises and we like to stay out of other nations – at least overtly (that is, with the public knowing about it). But what was once covert is now quite overt - which may anger some of our allies, but hey - at least it’s an honest policy.

America is not a colonial empire. It has been said in such places as in the pages of periodicals as Foreign Affairs that the United States is different because her "new" foreign policy has a grounding in morality – not just in appearance but in practice. This is something new, we’re told. No other government in history really gave a flying fuck whether their actions abroad were “right” or “wrong” – and they certainly never consulted with their populaces about it. After all, converting barbarians to Christianity was indisputably, categorically accepted as an imperative to Christian populations, just as converting barbaric economic systems to global capitalism is a moral imperative today, apparently. No need to discuss this issue, even if the Church of yesteryear and the transnational corporations of today are really just agents of colonial expansion by definition – once by political boundaries and today by economic ones.

America is not an imperial empire. The boundary between Bolivia and Brazil is untouched - just as the boundary between Iraq and Iran has not had anything at all to do with American behavior.

But the “real world” - the global economy - is not really made up of political boundaries. The globe should be redrawn, in fact, in economic terms. We could take the world’s total land mass (around 57 million square miles) and divide that up in terms of GDP. Or – better yet - we can remove the countries altogether, and allot those square miles to corporations and governments – call them square dollars instead. Isn’t this a truer modern globe? What would the planet look like then?

OK…so what? Empire it is, maybe. Is that so bad? Some might say so. But that depends. After all, maybe you’re getting a nice check from Georgie Boy, and now you’re able to afford that plasma TV you’ve been eyeing. Pretty sweet, huh? So it’s all good. So don’t bother thinking about it. We’re goodies, they’re baddies. We liberate, they kill. Besides, as Jack Nicholson said in "A Few Good Men" - "You can't handle the truth!"

But I can.

The truth is that every person and every group of people is destined not to love his neighbor but to control him (to paraphrase Freud) – to take his stuff, fuck his wife, make him work for him, and kick his ass when he gets out of line. Why do you think we have those 10 commandments? Capitalism is the economic system that best fits our social instincts – and it’s the only one that gives us true political freedom. Even when we’re being fucked there are plenty of opportunities to one day be giving and not receiving.

We may look like we’re better than the animals but we’re not. The whole purpose of language is to cloud this reality. The whole purpose of custom and culture is to draw a distinction between us (the fuckers) and them (those we want to fuck). Art is generally puerile nonsense relegated to those powerless to fuck, and education is only a mechanism to teach either how to fuck others (in the good schools) or how to be fucked your whole life and accept it (the rest of the schools.)

So hit me with it, Mr. President. What's on the agenda? Too many tech jobs going to India so you're going to inspire a limited nuclear war over there to bring the jobs back home?
Sounds like a fuckin’ plan.

Oil is paramount to our survival as a nation of wasteful gas-guzzling environmental miscreants?
Agreed. Should we start driving around in tiny electric cars and try to cut back?

Ha!

Let's fuckin take that oil. It's sitting right there - and shit - we can engineer enough of a moral argument for the rest of these sheeple to swallow, eh?

Drugs and crime a problem on the streets? Indeed they are. Let's keep it that way sir - a divided populace is the least dangerous one. Besides, I like my llello cheap and available as much as you do – and you can’t run on the “tough on crime/drugs/violence” platform if there isn’t any, huh?

Damn right.

I live in a democracy and I just want my shot at helping make the decisions around here. That’s really all I ask, sir.

Bring on the Pinochets, The Docs (Papa & baby) the Chiang Kai-Sheks, the new Muhajideens, the Saddams and the Drug Lords and swindlers with Harvard MBAs to run the planet to our liking! I’m with you, Mr. President!

As FDR said in 1935 about our murderous friend in Nicaragua, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

Indeed.