Staying Drunk

And it is this reality that makes it perilous for nations, such as Canada, to ally themselves too closely with the US. We are at a disadvantage in that they live next door and the walls are so thin we can hear them breathing. But it is time that we stopped trying to live with the pretense that these are nice honorable people who are our friends: the US is nobody’s friend. When Ronald Reagan referred to the former Soviet Union during the 1980s as the ‘evil empire’, he must have been trying to be funny. And we all missed the joke, because it should be very clear where the evil empire really resides: just a little south of us. Notwithstanding the shrill crudeness of Carolyn Parrish, her point about our southern neighbour is well taken. The US claims to be a nation of peace lovers but since the end of the Second World War, it has been at war with: China (1945-46); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954 and again 1967-69); Cuba (1959-60); Belgian Congo (1964); Dominican Republic (1965); Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (1959-75); Lebanon (1976 and again 1982-1984); Iran (1980); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980-92); Nicaragua (1981-90); Panamá (1989); Iraq (1991); Somalia (1993); Haiti (1994-1995); Bosnia-Herzegovina (1995); Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999); Afghanistan (2001-02); Iraq (2003-2???). Have I missed any? In the same period, the US has attempted to overthrow or displace more than 40 foreign governments; they have conducted unprovoked military assaults on some 20 nations; they have crushed more than 30 populist movements which were fighting against US-sanctioned dictatorial regimes. The US provided indispensable support to a small army of brutal dictatorships: Mobutu in Zaïre, Pinochet in Chile, Duvalier in Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Greek junta, Marcos in the Philippines, Rhee in Korea, the Shah in Iran, 40 years of military dictators in Guatemala, Suharto in Indonesia, Hussein in Iraq (remember him?), the Brazilian junta, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and others. As well, they dropped powerful bombs on the people of about 25 countries, including 40 consecutive days and nights in Iraq, 78 days and nights in the former Yugoslavia, and a few months in Afghanistan. These latter three countries met the primary requirement for an American bombing target — they were utterly defenseless. Not content with conventional warfare, they have also ramped up an increased use of depleted uranium, a truly despicable weapon which produces grossly deformed babies and a long slow death amongst those unfortunate enough not to actually be standing at ground zero. This weaponry, by the way, meets every US criteria for a so-called ‘weapon of mass destruction’; it is clear that while the US might not care for other countries even thinking about WMDs, they are quite willing to take those same weapons out for a test drive themselves. And as an added bonus, they happily drop cluster bombs willy-nilly and refuse to ban landmines. There have been assassination attempts on the lives of about 40 foreign political leaders, and there is no secret about the US being behind theses attempts. At the same time, they have interfered in dozens of foreign democratic elections, manipulated trade union movements, manufactured news. There is credible evidence of America supplying handbooks, materials and encouragement for the practice of torture, chemical or biological warfare along with the testing of these weapons, and the use of powerful herbicides causing terrible damage to people and environments in China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Panamá, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia and elsewhere. The CIA has encouraged and aided drug trafficking in various parts of the world when it served their purposes, and supported death squads, particularly in Latin America. And the US has caused terrible harm to the health and well-being of the world's masses by tightening the screws of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and other international financial institutions, and by imposing unmerciful sanctions and embargoes. Gratefully, the Americans are peace lovers or this could be a much longer list. The current president calls himself a ‘war president’. Presumably that is meant to excuse him from taking responsibility for the domestic and international messes he has created because in wartime it is always the other guy’s fault. It is hard to know what to make of Bush. Most thinking people (and, unfortunately, that eliminates about half of his fellow Americans) consider him to be the personification of stupidity at best, Satan at worst. But he poses the familiar problem of the optimist/pessimist conundrum … is Bush’s head half empty, or is he half full of it. It is amazing that America has any friends left, although it must be pretty clear that the few remaining friends are merely fawning sycophants making nice with the school-yard bully to avoid getting beat up. Still, it is risky for anyone to hitch their wagon to this dying horse. For America is surely dying and Canada would be well-served by finding other markets for our goods, by finding other suppliers of those things we must import, of protecting our assets and our resources before our rapacious neighbours come hunting for them. Most Americans seem to think that the United States has been a monumental success. Even those who are disaffected would hesitate to say the country is failing. But it is. Perhaps it needs the eyes of people outside its borders to see more clearly what it has become and that what it purported to be was rarely achieved. Americans have deluded themselves into an inability to see the disaster they have wrought and the nightmare that is to come. The most common refrain I hear from Americans I have met abroad or who have written to tell me of their experiences outside the United States is that they had no idea what a failure the US has become until they stepped outside their country and considered the other guy’s perspective. The United States is in decline, it is a society in an advanced state of decay. Its great experiment at participatory democracy no longer excites its people, who stay home on election days in vast numbers. Its love of freedom has been used over and again as the excuse for military engagements on the soil of many other countries with countless deaths among those foreign citizens. Its pursuit of personal freedom at all costs has resulted in a violent and morally bankrupt society. In its quest for power, it has blundered and blustered across the world like a colossus, always with the self-assurance of the Godly and with complete lack of concern for other people’s wishes and needs. America began with the genocide inflicted on native North Americans; it enslaved its own people and nearly tore itself apart in a cataclysmic war fought, in part, about that slavery. It has since spread its good works and its good will around the globe, but it has spread even more mayhem. Even when being generous and compassionate to other nations there is a casual disregard for what those others might truly want or need. The US remains a highly polarized society grouped together only by a collective fear of everyone else; within its own borders, groups of various sizes adhere only out of fear of other Americans. It was interesting to note in the recent elections that the states who voted for Bush are the same states who supported slavery: attitudes haven’t changed much. The United States has relentlessly chased after the ability to annihilate its enemies with firepower beyond belief and convinced itself that it is right and just to do so. But America has degenerated into a puppet state and its citizens have mostly failed to notice. It is a puppet for the few special interest and corporate groups who long ago usurped power from the masses. We know from the experience of the 2000 elections that the will of the people is easily subverted, but this is not the first time a President has come to office under such clouded circumstances. Read about the Electoral College, the courts, and the state of Florida in relation to the disputed election of the nineteenth American President, Rutherford B. Hayes. Richard Nixon was urged to contest what appeared to be voter fraud in the election that brought John Kennedy to power. But, to his credit, Nixon considered the potential harm to the nation from such a challenge to be too great a risk. And as the country prepared for the 2004 elections and yet another pretence at democracy, it was busy jeopardizing the entire world with its assault upon Iraq and bragging that it is bringing democracy to that benighted land. America doesn’t have any democracy to export. We also know that the American government rarely works for a more perfect union, or to establish justice and insure domestic tranquility, or to promote the general welfare as its Constitution promises. Significant effort, however, goes into securing the blessings of liberty for those in high places. Elected officials have as their only goal success in the next election and for that, they need to toady up to the special interest and corporate groups who can fill their pockets. America’s Founding Fathers called their dream ‘the great experiment’ and perhaps that is because they understood this was a gamble; it might be the last conceivable untried form of government. Perhaps they knew that the illusion of ‘people power’ was just that, an illusion. Perhaps they also knew that if the great experiment failed, there was nothing left to try; mankind would have proved once and for all that it was incapable of governing itself in a manner that is worthy of being called ‘civilized’. Well, the experiment is failing, so what do we get next? At the moment, it appears that we get only the American Empire, spreading its good and its evil without regard for the consequences. It’s easy enough to say that the American people aren’t responsible for their nation’s behaviour, that they are as horribly shocked as the rest of us and there is little they can do. Their nation is in the grip of corporatists and dishonest politicos against whom the people are virtually impotent. But in this cradle of the world’s democracies where the government is allegedly of, by, and for the people, those excuses ring very hollow. This is a nation of people who conducted a revolution against what was then the most powerful empire on earth … and they did it because they didn’t like a tax on teabags. If they could work up that sort of outrage in 1776, surely they can awaken their consciences, ever so slightly, to consider the monumental balls-up they are allowing their leaders to make of the whole world. And maybe, just maybe, they could actually exercise some moral courage and rise up against the viciousness that has come to symbolize America. Otherwise, the US is doomed and will utterly fail … maybe not today, or next week, or even during what’s left of my life. But the world will not tolerate these brutal people for much longer. At least one part of the world has already started to rebel against America and rather than putting down that rebellion with the so-called ‘war on terror’, the result will simply be more terror against the US, from more sources. Perhaps it is time to consider if the ‘good guys’ might not actually be the ‘bad guys’. It is time that Canada stopped trying to be America’s best buddy and got on with developing our place in the world, outside of their realm of influence. Laurier might have been wrong about the twentieth century but it is not too late for Canada to become the model for the rest of the world instead of the little brother of the world’s biggest jerk. Let them die on their own.