A Lame Duck Nation on Steroids
It's not just the Tea Party that's lame (Toby Toons)
W.J. Astore
The more the United States has come to talk about dominance, the less dominant we've become.
To compensate, we've become a steroidal nation, to include the violent side effects associated with steroid use (just look at the latest stories out of the NFL about spousal and child abuse, or our steroidal police forces, including MRAPs and M-16s for school police). If the story of the last fifty years is the gradual decline of the U.S., most notably in the economic and political realms, the story of today is how we've compensated with militarized Viagra. We've reached "the age of knowing" that we've lost much of our potency as our country. To compensate, we’re forever popping pills and flexing our muscles. (Just look at John McCain’s enthusiasm for bombing.)
It's precisely those steroids that are weakening us as a country. As we've overcompensated with military weapons and bases, we've allowed our economy to slide. As we've sought domination overseas, we've weakened our country right here at home. We feverishly build and repair roads in Afghanistan but not here in the USA. Same with schools -- we'd rather build prisons, to include Gitmo, than colleges (since 1984, California has built 21 prisons but only one university).
Consider our binary debates on foreign policy. It’s the hawks versus the doves, militarized "engagement" versus isolationist “appeasers,” the implication being that the latter is wrong -- that minding one’s own business is not an option in a globalized world. But the world is not some “global village”: it’s a conglomeration of fragments. And U.S. efforts to dominate those fragments by military means are only accelerating that fragmentation. Just look at what our government did and is doing to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fragmentation facilitates dominance by multinational corporations even as the U.S. military is misused and overextended. The result is more global instability and a retreat (or a return) to ideologies that promise coherence and order. Witness the rise of militant Islam and ISIS. By attacking it, the U.S. is acting as an accelerant to it.
As the U.S. weakens itself as a country, as it accumulates debt by constantly fighting wars while passing the costs along to future generations, large multinational corporations grow in power. They are today's equivalent to the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, and similar entities of the past. Combine powerful multinationals with privatized mercenary outfits and you see echoes of the seventeenth century, to include wars over religion and resources. Three centuries ago, it was Catholics versus Protestants and wars over spices like pepper and nutmeg. Now it’s divisions within Islam and wars over oil.
We're witnessing the decline of Enlightenment ideals and community-based Democracy, as seen by the way in which the U.S. government routinely betrays those ideals. Any sense of shared, community-based, obligation is tainted by "socialism," meaning that a Darwinian capitalism based on selfish individualism is promoted instead, which only feeds the growth of multinationals competing to sell “product” to the masses.
Everything is becoming a consumable, including the most vital parts of life. As a consumable, it can be marketed, sold, and controlled by those same multinationals. Even education is now an ephemeral product, marketed and sold as a commodity.
Corporations think and act for short-term profit. But democracies are supposed to think strategically, over the long term. Now the quarterly business cycle controls all. Look at politics: A congressman is elected and instantly starts fund raising to win his next campaign. Obama wins a second term and is almost instantly branded a lame duck.
But it’s not Obama who is the lame duck – it’s America. And all the militarized steroids in the world won’t cure that lameness. Indeed, they just aggravate it.