Second-Rate Power

I was listening to Noam Chomsky on KPFK today, good leftist radio, and Chomsky was talking about Iraq and the results of a US-sponsored poll that revealed that 87% of the Iraqi population wants the US to end its occupation on a set timetable.

Of course, the US regime could give a shit about this poll, even though Bush and his posse are committed to fostering democracy in Iraq. Democracy? Isn’t democracy concerned with the will of the majority? Not in Bush’s twisted Universe. Let’s not forget that Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000, but got bailed out by the Supreme Court and installed in the White House.

Chomsky went on and on, detailing US misdeeds, crimes, schemes, machinations, lies, mostly in connection with the Middle East and control of oil, the liquid that makes the global economy go round. If the US loses control of or access to oil, it could easily become a second-rate power, little better than Italy or France or Portugal; and how would Americans, encouraged by decades of official myth-making, deal psychologically with second-rate status?

That will be a hard pill to swallow, but it certainly seems that we are headed that direction. Sooner or later we will lose our ability to call the shots and rig the world for our own benefit. Then we’ll be like the San Francisco 49’s or the Oakland Raiders, once iconic teams that have fallen on lean times and can’t rise out of the cellar. Other nations will heap ridicule upon us the same way we have for decades heaped ridicule upon them. Hugo Chavez will drop his pants and piss on the White House steps.

Comeuppance is a terrible thing.

When did JFK’s New Frontier become this shit-train run and ruled by Bush and Cheney? What happened to our idealism? Or was all that stuff a hoax, a smokescreen, a big fucking lie? Camelot will not rise this time, not from the nuclear dust. Bush has set us on a collision course with disaster, and if you think there’s a savior in the wings, forget it. John Edwards is a fag, remember? Hillary has bigger balls than Barrack Obama. John McCain is a wingnut. Rudy G is impotent.

Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky drones on. I wish more people were listening.