It is a depressing fact that no major nation-state has ever pulled back from the brink of fiscal ruin and restored sanity during its bread-and-circuses phase. It has always ended, at minimum, in debt monetization or repudiation. It usually gets worse from there, if the nation in question is the world leader.
I still retain enough faith in American exceptionalism to believe that we’ll get through the next decade without being chased into the woods by the Visigoths. The rest of the world better hope so, because it’s Reavers, not Vandals, coming this time, and they’ll eat Americans last.
Only Americans in all the civilized world have the capability to repel the barbarian tribes. The rest of the West has become weak under the umbrella of the American military welfare state.
As long as our technological infrastructure survives, Americans will accelerate kill ratios in our favor by an order of magnitude or two whenever we feel like turning the dial.
If technology dies, as in Bye Bye Miss American Pie, Americans still have really big oceans as Reaver buffers. Europe will be dry toast and longing for the days when Hitler was their biggest problem.
A lot of people I know have been thinking about getting the hell out of America. Costa Rica seems nice. In several worst case scenarios, getting the hell out of the USA is the right thing to do. I’m not ready yet to believe in the end of Western civilization. But, hell, a few months ago, I wasn’t ready to believe in the end of the dollar and the fall of the US federal government. But these things are now virtual certainties. Please, don’t believe me about this. Every day of your denial is a silver dollar in my pocket.
I was in favor of George Bush’s wars for humanitarian reasons. I was wrong. Fuck humanity. Seriously, most people in the rest of the world, if they lived in this country, we’d jail them in short order or wouldn’t invite them a second time to a barbecue. Look to your left, look to your right–as pissed off as you might be at your neighbors, they are pretty awesome human beings, as human beings go. This is the underpinning of American exceptionalism. This is why the right worships the Founding Fathers and the Left doesn’t move to France no matter how disappointing the last election was. However it came to be, there’s an ideological DNA in America that is exceptional. We really are all that and a bag of chips too.
300 million Americans out of 5 billion humans produce a quarter of the world’s wealth, most of the world’s pop culture and scientific innovation, have more than half the guns, and ours work better than yours, and if you have good guns, we sold them to you. We are front and center, all eyes on us, to fix every disaster and fuckup that goes on in the other 90% of the human world. These facts are not about us being lucky but about us being better.
I don’t care if French food is better (it wasn’t till an American woman made it so). I don’t care if Swedish girls are hotter (really? been to California or Utah lately?). Doesn’t matter if Chinese kids play the piano better (fuck it, we invented auto-tune–we can fix our mistakes without everyone needing actual skill, and your little piano-plinking brats are sneaking out to watch that Friday girl on YouTube no matter how much you Tiger Mom them.) It’s not about being better, it’s about dominating and disseminating what everyone else is emulating. We’re even better at stupid rhymes, with our rap stars and Jesse Jackson. We may be corrupting, crass and creepy, but it’s our world and the rest of the world is just fucking lucky they’re living in it.
As for George Bush’s neo-con humanitarian wars–they were a noble try. I regret backing them, but I’m not ashamed of it. We tried to give Middle Eastern Muslim Morons a sprinkling of American magic dust. We didn’t want their fucking oil, we wanted them to be happy, to flourish. We shouldn’t call the Iraq War the Bush war, but the Oprah war. It was all about using the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to raise their self-efucking-steem and get terrorists to Stay In School.
Where was I?
Oh, yeah. I still think you should bet on America. Not on the dollar, not on the federal government, but on America still being large and in charge when this is all over.
I’m done with conventional politics. The Republicans have proven that they’re part of the problem. We gave them 3 last chances and they’ve blown them all.
John Hinderaker, who blogs at Powerline.com, has the best metaphor/chart of anyone.
Imagine the proposed federal budget is a Big Mac meal. The Republicans are proposing cutting out 3 french fries. The Democrats are proposing cutting out 1/3 of one french fry.
Fucking fat fucks. This is going to end with American institutions as we know them exploded, revamped, disappearing.
Novus ordo seclorum, but not like Boehner and Pelosi and Buffett and Obama think it will be.