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The Empire Is Over
By Charley Reese
09/29/07 "Lew
Rockwell" --- - The American government has come
to resemble the characters in The Wizard of Oz. We have the
Cowardly Congress, a president without a brain, and a
foreign-policy establishment without a heart.
Our politicians are still trying to play the empire game long
after the age of empires has ended. Blinded by arrogance, they
cannot see that with every passing day, the world needs us less
and less and hates us more and more. We are passing through that
phase when the grandeur of the empire exists only in the minds
of politicians who have insulated themselves from reality.
A friend of mine, a classical scholar, sometimes tells his
students, "No one woke up one morning in 476 A.D. and said,
'Gee, I'm in the Dark Ages.'" The transition from the heyday of
Roman power to a stage of barbarism was a gradual process. We
are in a process of change. No one is going to announce on TV
that the U.S. is no longer a superpower.
Nevertheless, the signs are there if you look for them. A nation
that was able to help crush the Axis powers in three and a half
years hasn't won a war since then. We have had four years of
struggling with an insurgency in a small, poor and broken
country. Our economy is shaky under mountains of debt. Half of
our people make less than 42,000 inflated dollars a year.
Where we were once the arsenal of democracy, today there is
hardly a major weapons system that doesn't rely on imports of
one kind or another. Much of the industry that is left is
foreign-owned. Japan, which once lay prostrate, dominates the
American car market. It is extremely difficult to find anything
today that is not made in China or some other cheap-labor
country.
In the meantime, the cowardly Congress doesn't have the guts to
tackle any of the major problems confronting the American
people. Our president continues to embarrass us practically
every time he opens his mouth in public. The foreign-policy
establishment is riddled with aging draft dodgers agitating for
more wars – against small countries, of course.
True, we still have lots of nuclear weapons, but do you think
any American president would want to get into a nuclear shooting
match with China or Russia? Look at how we reacted to two
airplanes crashing into two office buildings. What do you think
we would do if San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco became
radioactive ruins with millions of casualties? We are not
prepared mentally, spiritually or materially to deal with a
nuclear war.
We are like all empires in their final stages. We have grown
soft. We like our comforts. We don't wish to be inconvenienced.
We like poor Mexicans to do our stoop work and poor Americans to
do our fighting, provided they do it far away so we won't be
disturbed by explosions and screams. We enjoy our decadence, and
there are always people in the media who can rationalize
anything, no matter how sick and revolting it is.
As for trying to understand the world, we are just too busy
being amused and following the adventures of Britney Spears and
other celebrities. We like to let the TV and the politicians do
our thinking for us. It saves energy. They tell us whom to hate.
The only way to avoid a bad end is to find some realists and put
them in public office. We need a brave Congress, not a pack of
cowards. We desperately need a president with a brain. We need
to retire the warmongers in the foreign-policy establishment.
Otherwise, we will join the other third-rate countries, once
empires, on history's discard pile.
Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years.
© 2007 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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