Thug Life

It occurs to me that our nation is a bit schizophrenic. We want cheap stuff. We want WallyWorld to sell us all sorts of merchandise made in various “emerging” countries. We want our military/diplomatic corps to ensure that the supply line of cheap stuff stays open. The most important ingredient to having cheap stuff is cheap oil. Of course it was not always cheap oil, read GEN (R) Smedley Butler here to find out what we have been wrangling about the world to get cheap since 1898.

So we want cheap stuff, but to get cheap stuff you have to buy cheap resources or have cheap resources available to those that manufacture the stuff for you. Throughout the 20th and into the 21st century we have been ensuring the access to cheap resources by mucking around in others business. Other empires that did this were fairly honest with themselves that this mucking was self-interested and so they did not really apologize for it. We seem to feel that we must apologize for our self-interest; the latest exhibit was the Obama Penance Tour conducted around the world. This is akin to saying your sorry to some guy whose teeth you just kicked in. Most folks the world over don’t buy it.

But we do even worse than just apologize. We are so remorseful that we feel that we must do surgery on the guy’s teeth to try to make him all better. Not because we actually care for him, but because it makes us think more highly of ourselves. Of course we are not much for dentistry, so we do a horrible job, and it hurts our victim even more than if we had just left him with his broken teeth. I think that I have taken this analogy about as far as it can go; so putting the bottom line in the middle, I wish we would decide if we want to be an empire. If we do want to be an empire, and it seems that we do, then lets have done with all of the mercy and get thuggish.

President Obama is preparing to expand our nation building in Afghanistan. There is nothing to be had in Afghanistan but a bit of self-righteousness. The “country” was a shambles when we got there. It was ruled by a gang of lunatics that dearly needed to be treated to the working end of a tire iron. We are very effective at that sort of thing. Having administered the appropriate beat down, we should have left. By doing so, we would have shown the Taliban that they need to find other outlets for their frustration than targeting US interests with their terrorist buddies. As it is, we have tried to rebuild the country and in the process managed to empower the Taliban to the point that they are now a significant threat to Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. Now we are going to try the strategy that seems to have worked in Iraq in the short term. The Obama administration has borrowed every play from George Bush’s play book from the time they got into office; so why not a surge? It seems that the Democrats are really Republicans with a healthy dose of guilt.

The point is that if you are going to run an empire, you must do it the old fashioned way. Fear is what motivates other countries to give up their stuff at less than market price so that we can have cheap stuff. Fear is what drives the capitulator. To run an empire, you have to raze Carthage and Jerusalem to the ground. You have to make it so that all others capitulate when you politely ask them to because they are scared.

We want to be an empire of love. There is no such thing. No one ever loves you when you come and require them to give up their stuff so that you can have a new flat screen TV. Even if you have a great propaganda machine that tells them that you are helping them; they only see you stealing their stuff and trying to foist your “way” upon them.

This schizophrenic strategy of helping those that we take from is doomed to failure. The US empire will fall unless we look ourselves in the mirror and decide that we are going to act like what we are. We are an empire, so we ought to act like one or give up the game altogether. I am all for giving up the game, but that is not realistic given the insatiable thirst for power that attends central governments. So let us stop this double mindedness and get our thug life on. At least we would have a chance at being successful.

Suburbiaurbia

I rediscovered this quote from Fred Reed today:

"Few precisely like what we have, I suppose, but how does one escape it?
Perhaps they don’t sense exactly what it is they want to escape, and anyway
there is nowhere else to go. In noise-ridden cities smelling of exhaust,
crowded, where the stars languish obscured by smoke, the rivers run
semi-poisonous and much of the populace can barely read, how can anyone think
beyond the stock market and the next empty copulation?"

If you don't read Fred you really should. If everyone read one article by Fred Reed everyday, folks would understand what is going on in our brainwashed PC world. The only thing better would be reading one chapter of the Bible daily. Which I have so far failed to do, and I am more motivated than most. Anyhow I digress. Back to the above quote.

It expresses perfectly what I think of "Urban" and "Suburban." I am sick of it. I really yearn for rural. I am tired of the nattering nabobs pretentiously pulling out their iPhones and texting their tawdry lives to the other posturing punks masquerading as men. I want to be around bubba. Folks who will compliment me when I crank one. Men who can actually explain the general way that an internal combustion engine works.

As I navigate the suburban Norfolk region, with its gangrene of blubbering feminized yet self-esteeming soccer boys being begged for obedience by their Blue-Tooth clad metrosexual Brads, I feel slimed by the disgusting ooze of the urban/suburban world. It sticks to me. I so long to hear just one man say "Boy, you better shut up!" The only ones allowed to say that today, apparently, are black single mothers from the hood. Somehow black women are the most manly men out there now. As a man from the middle class on the other hand, you are fully expected to get your ass handed to you daily by a four year old. All of suburbia needs to be slapped.

I have to mention a few heroes of rurality (no, I don't know if it really is a word) before I get so irritated that punch my computer.

Hero 1. The guy that rents my farm. This man drives a 2-wheel drive F350 with nauga-hyde seats because he knows that real trucks do work. He recognizes that leather in a truck is a pretentious ornament that screams that you bought the truck to affirm that you really are a man since you secretly question that basic fact given that your man-parts remain safely tucked as you hamster wheel your existence in Cubicle World. He knows how to drive in mud without 4-wheel drive, whereas there are apparently many around my town that seem to think it a necessity on asphalt. I guess they think that one day they might take that Mercedes SUV muddin'.

Hero 2. Bob Summers. This man showed that at 60+, he could still pitch hay right alongside me when I was 16. He showed me how to get out of the way of a monster Santa Gertrudis bull. He allowed my family to hunt his property and asked nothing. Yet, when we would cut a little firewood for him or fix the dam on his pond, he still tried to pay us. He knew how to grow the sweetest watermelons and made gallons of homemade cider out of apples that he squeezed from a cider press that looked over hundred years old. The guy had a law degree but chucked that life so that he could live the rurality rather than work for partner. Oh yeah, I never heard him lie or equivocate either. I never got to thank him right; I wish he was still alive.... Fred talked about Milne and Donne in the above quoted article, but Bob's life was poetry.

Hero 3. My real estate agent. I know what you are thinking. How could one have a real estate agent for a hero? That is like having a used car salesman or a Pakistani telemarketer as a hero. I was providentially brought to the only honest real estate agent I have ever met when I bought my farm. The guy is actually honest. He is neighborly. Nearly everytime I see him, he tells me to go in his barn and use his tractor if mine breaks down. He tried to do all the real estate work when I purchased my houses for free. His reasoning was that I was in Iraq at the time; and he didn't really need the money; and anyway I was a neighbor. He tells people not to buy houses that he is selling if he sees that they don't have the money, even if the republicratic ownership society subprime Alt-A variable rate loan comes through. He also has the capability to explain the general way that an internal combustion engine works.

Fred Reed doesn't beleive that our society can recover from our current path of degeneration. I am not really that optimistic either. I am certain that if it does, we are going to have to look to places like West Tennessee and South Georgia to find decent brood stock. It isn't going to come from the urban/suburban Parents Magazine digitized group therapy session that is going on amongst those in the population centers.

(I was informed by one who read my previous post that I poorly punctuated it. If any of you English majors want to critique this one feel free. I have tried to rightly write the Kings English but I may have missed the mark.)

Britney-Paris = Obama-Biden

If I knew that the media types were going to be this fawning over our soon to be President; I would have voted against him just so that I did not have to hear about how great he is. To listen to CNN et al. one would think that we were being given the opportunity to coronate some combination of Ghandi, Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, MLK and Abe Lincoln as the tyrant du jour. We are told in breathless tones that he slept a couple of nights at the Hay-Adams Hotel since there was no room at the Blair House. That his kids will go to private school somewhere. That his dog has been picked out and a host of other useless stuff. It is the same type of sludge that is trotted out about Britney and Paris. Should the news media stoop to level the playing field between the President and Paris? Especially JFKMLKGhandiRooseveltLincoln? Initially I said no. Certainly in a culture that was healthy at all, a President would be held at a higher level. At least Mr Obama with his impending canonization would be. Then I began to think about what this said about our culture. This is a culture that has T-Shirts with the "score" of the victory in the form of electoral votes emblazoned on them. I guess that the presidential election has taken on the same importance as the annual Georgia-Georgia Tech clash. My guess is that our actions speak what we will not ever say. Namely, that Obama's election was about as important as the aforementioned football game.

Will there be a substantive difference between Obama and George Bush? I doubt it. The master of change has presented us with a cabinet of Washington insiders. He has asked the current President to pass out the other $350B for TARP which was passed with the support of Bush/McCain/Obama/Clinton. The apparent central component to his "novel" economic plan is a grotesque orgy of public spending. He is going to change the primary front of the War from Iraq to Afghanistan something so much in the works by the previous administration that the Iraq SOFA approved before Mr Obama takes office has all combat troops out of Iraqi cities by June 2009. What in the above is the difference between Obama and Republicans? I can't see anything other than which drunken crew gets to say "We're NUMBER ONE!" Sounds like our culture has been apropos in signaling that the latest about Britney and Paris is eqivalent to the latest about Obama.