Descend into the Maelstrom

Official declaration: the United States is now at its lowest point in my lifetime.  Today, this minute, we are
witnessing a monumental decline in the greatness of this country and its
standing in the world.   One can tangibly feel that people from left
to right are not as happy with the direction we are going in these days as we once
were, and I find this to be an outrage. We
may still be the world’s only superpower, but the country is reeling,
rudderless and rancid. 

When I was born in 1979, America was in the middle of a hostage crisis where a bunch of Iranian revolutionaries
staged a coup against the guy we installed in power, grabbed Americans working
there and held them for a long time.  It was definitely a tense period that
shook the nation’s confidence.  Soon after, the hostages were
released.  Then, through the 80s and 90s, we continued to kick major ass
in different ways.  We toppled the USSR and its communist vassals, we easily won the first Gulf War in 1991 with most
of the world’s support, we took out Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkans a few
years later without much trouble, and our economy chugged along, not least
because of a growing edge in high technology.  Things were looking good
even though the dot.com bubble burst early in the new millennium.  And we
did it without creating an empire in other parts of the world, which was something
we were never good at.  Trying to colonize Cuba,
the Philippines,
Korea, or Vietnam didn’t turn out so well in the past, either.  If Europe’s
current state is any indication, it didn’t turn out too well for any of the
racist bastards who tried it. The United States, born of revolution, was a model for
much of the world’s nations who threw off the oppressive colonial yoke
throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin
America.

But today, we are on a severe backward trajectory for the first time,
perhaps in all history.  9/11 happened, showing the world that we too
could feel vulnerable and get shit-scared by a handful of cowardly suicide
bombers.  The two oceans didn’t seem so big and protecting after all in a
more interconnected world.  The results are frightening.  We have
thrown due process out the window, resorting to secret torture prisons, Abu
Ghraib, and Guantanamo, where we
detain hundreds of people without charging them of a crime. We are spying on American citizens, secretly
tracking library book checkouts, and preventing people with skill sets that we
need in our workforce from emigrating to our country.  The administration
and Congress are both rotten and corrupt to the core, unable to achieve any
real change for the country.  Our military apparatus is crumbling.
Those same Iranian revolutionaries who wore bell bottoms and broke stuff in Tehran
in 1979 are now the biggest threat to Middle Eastern peace, and we haven’t
figured out how to deal with them, even though they kidnapped our best friend’s
troops and are openly working on a nuclear arsenal.  Hizballah, a
straight-up terrorist organization fought our second-best friend, an Israel
armed to the hilt, to a standstill.  We have lost over 3,000 soldiers and
killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq.
The Taliban increases in strength in Afghanistan. 
Nuclear warheads proliferate in the Middle East, South
Asia, and North Korea:
enemy countries or regions housing enemy elements. The worst possible scenarios come to mind
when I think of all that loose nuclear material.  The greatest crime in
American history, the murder of 3,000 civilians on 9/11 in my hometown
continues to go unpunished, as we have not convincingly captured or neutralized
its masterminds, let alone the threat Al-Qaeda still represents to us.  China
will soon join the U.S.
as a superpower; based on my trip there a few months ago, I give it 20 years
before they join the club.  Russia
continues to cancel democracy apace. The
world is more dangerous for us than ever before, and our military is not
keeping up due to its current commitments to catastrophe. 

We are in the midst of a housing price crash which is quite possibly going
to represent the largest loss of wealth in American history.  Global
warming appears to be so horrid and real a threat, that dealing with the
specter of Al-Qaeda could start looking like a game of canasta (jokers and
deuces are wild), not only for us but for them too (actually, the image of
Al-Qaeda terrorists drowning in the Red Sea as it floods the deserts,
desperately holding onto their AK-47’s as they gasp for breath and scream, is a
happy one to me).  Global warming could kill or displace tens of millions
of us.  It could turn the human race into a desperate, lawless band of
thugs.

Not too long ago, America was the light of the world: a bastion of democracy, culture, morality, free
speech, freedom of religion, equality, feminism, capitalism, sugar and spice,
and most other things I think are nice.  Now we are reviled
by reasonable and educated people around the world for our violent tendencies,
our embarrassingly low quality of education and popular culture, and our
incompetent leadership.  We are resented for exploiting the world, robbing
other countries of their resources, spewing back Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, reality
TV and carbon dioxide emissions, while arrogantly thinking of ourselves as
God’s gift to the world even though we are the leading contributors to the
planet’s demise.

Turn on the TV and you will see the worst campus shooting in U.S. history, Don Imus being pimp-slapped for exactly the misogynistic behavior displayed
in our chart-busting pop music that makes the media industry billions of
dollars, and strippers falsely accusing people of rape.  America
today is a polarized, segregated place where news shows consist of people
yelling at each other just for the sake of hearing themselves preach to their
own pathetic little closed-minded choir.

One reason for the downward spiral is our lack of real leadership.  I
mean a leader of the caliber of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, or even
Ronald Reagan.  I honestly believe that
we are now represented by a cabal of people who care more about themselves and
special interests than the country at large and its ordinary citizens.
The politicians are shaped by their narrow bases, and spend their days in power
pandering to them instead of working on making society better.  However,
all is not lost.  Halliburton probably will not outlast this corrupt
administration by very much- as the reality of doing business in a world where
the Vice President doesn’t protect you sets in.  As I look at the field of candidates for President in 2008, I see a real
opportunity for positive change.  Things have gotten so bad that they can
only get better, and it will happen through the election of a candidate who is quite distant from the Bush camp, neocons, and their type.

Most of the names in the ring would only provide more of the
same. We have McCain who is intent on
making Iraq an
even grander failure than it already is. We have Giuliani, in whose administration I used to work, who will beat
his supposed crime-fighting prowess and 9/11 horses to death to deflect attention to the failures of his personal life.  Then there is Hillary, who will say anything
her pollsters and focus groups tell her to say. Do not forget Edwards, the Southern-accented man who couldn’t deliver a
single southern state in 2004 when the country was already beginning to fall
apart along red and blue lines. Finally, there are the Vilsacks
and Romneys of the race, about whom I’ll admit I don’t have a goddam clue, and don’t care
to learn about because they aren’t going to win their party’s nomination
anyway.

I’m talking about Al Gore and Barack Hussein Obama. For the first time in recent memory emerges a
pair of strong leaders who can make us proud to be American again.  Do you remember how good that used to
feel? The guy who rightly won the 2000
presidential election, and the rising star of the Democratic party, joining
together to lead the country out of its malaise. Fate has dealt us a lucky hand folks: Joe
Lieberman may have legitimately won the Vice Presidency in 2000, but what a
schmuck he has turned out to be, rejected by his own party and a Bush-kisser to boot.  It’s a good thing that he never became part
of the White House.

With one fell swoop, we have two politicians who balance one
another out, complementing one another like a power couple ought to do. You have the policy wonk Gore and the policy
lightweight Obama. It could be the very
best speaker of our time, Obama, working alongside monotone, ice-cold science
professor Gore. Al comes up with
policies to save the world on his powerpoint, and Obama effectively convinces
the rest of Washington, the
country, and the world that it’s the right way to do so. Two honorable, honest men who do what they do
because they care about the country more than special interests.

I’ve already heard the naysayers. Gore did “An Inconvenient Truth” just for
another shot at the presidency. I say,
good. Obama doesn’t have enough
experience. Again, that’s a bloody good
thing. Since when have years of
corruption and incompetence inside and outside the Beltway been a prerequisite
to become President? The answer is, for
altogether too long. There are also
those who will say that these two are the same as any of the others, that they
are just as beholden to corporate donors and lobbyist scum as anyone else who
can come to power. This may be true, but
whenever I have seen Gore or Obama speak, I know that they have successfully transcended
the ordinary trappings of the American political machine. Call it my gut feeling, which is what is
going to get these guys elected by the ignorant American masses anyway,
certainly more so than so-called platforms.

In fact, there is only one thing that really matters in this
god-forsaken 26-month presidential campaign marathon: were you for or against
the invasion of Iraq before March 2003?  Because Iraq
is the perfect synopsis of what has gone wrong with our country’s direction:
incompetence, partisanship, corruption, polarization, deceit, death, and a loss of standing
in the world. My guys, the future President and Vice-President of the United States of America, were right on the only
issue in American politics today that matters one single iota.

No, Gore and Obama will not undo 8 years of destructive
behavior overnight.  But let us not make it seem more complicated than it has to be. They could certainly
get us back on the right track, through focusing on an effective disengagement
from the Middle East and the thirst for fossil fuels
that keeps us mired there, and a real plan for reversing climate change.  Other positive effects can only follow, especially
after we inaugurate a more experienced Barack in 2016.