The Beast*: A Symbol of Modern America
Obama is driven around in a great, hulking limo equipped with so many security precautions and devices that it is a security nut's/techno freak's wet dream. It even has its own oxygen supply, for God's sake. Yet it cannot even clear a simple ramp in the road.
Which, in a sense, sums up modern America**. As a country, it is big, ostentatious, leading the world in technology but also spectacularly unable to win wars against much less capable or well-armed adversaries, and also seemingly unable to get its own economy - that many in the US see as the model for the world as a whole - to work properly again. And despite all its advanced technology, vast swathes of the country still believe in the invisible sky fairy and the country as a whole ends up more interested in where their President was born rather than what he is actually doing. America, the giant, technological behemoth of the world, unable to get over even the smallest of speed-bumps.
*According to the US Security people, the car that got stuck wasn't the Beast, but some sort of back-up limo. Then again, they would say that as it is mightily embarrassing that their car designed to protect the President from all manner of attack actually can't get over a simple ramp.
**And this is not just a jibe against the Obama era America; the rot set in far earlier, and was given a massive boost by the utterly inept administrations of one George W. Bush, a man not fit to tie his own shoelaces, let alone lead a world super-power.
posted by The Nameless Libertarian @ 11:01 am
4 Comments
4 Comments:
If it weren't for us you'd be writing this blog in German, etc, etc
Are you American, Timac?
Furthermore, this post is referring to the recent history of the USA - say, from Clinton onwards. Now, I'll check this, but I'm pretty sure that the US hasn't been fighting Germany in the couple of decades, right? In which case, what I'm saying has nothing to do with the US that fought WWII. However, the US I'm writing about is the one that, with collusion from that triple-fried idiot Tony Blair, dragged us into unwinnable conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
America was once an inspirational nation. It is really struggling to continue to be one now.
TNL
I'm Half American and am in the States on business at the moment.
This place is still an inspiration. It's the can do attitude and entrepreneurial spirit that you really see missing in the UK. Plus what the government does has very little real impact on people's lives unlike the all-controlling UK one. People just get on with it, making money, raising families and sticking 2 fingers (or 1 in the states) to the man. I can only speak from the experience of the one US city that I know but the positive changes over the last decade to this place couldn't happen in the UK which to me seems about as moribund as it is possible for a civic society to be. Where's the innovation? The dragging yourself up by your bootlaces? The community action that halves the crime rate in a decade? We lost that sometime around the creation of the welfare state in the UK and it aint coming back. So go easy on America. You'd love it here. It is in so many ways a Libertarian paradise.
But at no point am I saying that Britain is better than the US, so a direct comparison between the two countries is hardly going to change my mind.
I speak as someone who has been to the US on a number of occasions and also as a seasoned observer of US politics. And from what I have seen the place sure as hell isn't a Libertarian paradise. Rather, it has become a permanent battleground between the progressives and the Christian fundamentalists. It is also the empty politics based on name-calling and vacuous insult throwing - as the whole kerfuffle over Obama's birth certificate shows. And the few moments of real politics that make it through the miasma of meaningless bullshit tend to be in favour of the state, like the patriot act and the Obama medical reforms. And, lest we forget, this is the country that led the invasion of Iraq for no good reason.
I'll concede that parts of the US may have a more positive outlook than the US. But as far as I can see, it has precious little to do with Libertarianism on the whole.
TNL
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home