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Entry: America: An Empire? Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/america_an_empire#12766 Post contents: Sid, ever the cheerful Holy Roman Monarchist.........To agree and disagree with you in the span of six paragraphs is the type of entertainment one gets with, say.....Chainsaw sculpting or Competition Train Wrecking. One enjoys the quixotic show but does not question why for fear of breaking the spell. As to Mr. Coulombe's essay, a great sweeping ride but it would appear that he countenances our slapdash ride into Imperialism if only we were better at it. Perhaps I'm wrong but it seems very white of him to suggest that the only "downside" of the historical North American Anglo Saxon march of empire is the occasional bout of guilt experienced by the supplanting population over their various and sundry exterminations. It would appear by this that the guilt of the colonizer is a far greater tragedy than is the loss of multiple indigenous cultures, spiritual cultures whose spirituality ran like a freshet through their every action. As with but one example, the Mandans of the upper Missouri River who were universally described as gracious and interestingly diverse hosts only to see them wiped out by us reluctant imperialists. Today, a tiny band of them run a few hardscrabble casinos with the Hidatsa and I think it safe to say we've disabused them of the effectiveness of their spirituality.... if we have not christianized them, an essentially similar thing. No matter how one wishes to cut the foot cheese, this American Amateur Hour of Imperial Hubris , an armed and dangerous and consumptively expensive surrender to base instincts is without doubt, bad, as in the absurdly futile brand of bad. It is a roundhouse wind-up haymaker to one's own nose, a continuous drowning of ones new shoes with one's own piss. It is a living evocation of why there are anti-racketeering laws. The rapid wall we've hit is the most spectacularly clear demonstration of this. Past empires declined over centuries while ours gets winded in less than a decade. Radical Islam is but one of the many dysfunctions of the American Have A Nice Day Empire. K Street is another, their two-party syndicate another and military bases from hell to breakfast another. Every good idea and deed we have had since the nineteenth century, including our education and health systems has been subsumed by the enervations of our Crusading Imperial Desires....our urges to go west....to conquer and "improve" and "enrich" and ...ahem, "democratize" at the end of a gun or a truncheon or blockade de jeur. I do not think Mr. Coulombe suggests this but if one wishes to continue arming the globe to the teeth for a final Mexican Standoff over the remnants of a plundered paradise, then I suppose an empire is a good thing for you. Coulombe accurately makes a distinction between the rhetoric and actions of the American Government. We talk freedom and democracy but leave something altogether different in our wake....a kind of industrial comic book version of reality where consumption is the State Religion but it's monks are Smiling Christians or Officious Bureaucrats. Cheap and abundant oil with the syringe of the internal combustion engine has brought us many remarkable things and nearly freed us from the constraints of biology and time but at this juncture, when confronted with ample evidence of dysfunction and self abuse, we find ourselves enmeshed in jingoism and an idea that technology IS energy. Detroit keeps a governor clamped down on their trusty engine block of Congress and we get an Energy Bill that trumpets it's great success for something that Detroit should have been doing for simple prudent business reasons two decades ago. This is but another of the dysfunctions of our Gomer Pyle Goes Baghdad Byzantine Empire. Perhaps we'll simply begin conducting ourselves like rust belt counties and begin the farming of waste, taking on the refuse of both the occident and the orient, landfilling off the Pacific Coast to our hearts content and completing the circle of the land bridge that opened this continent up in the first place. We can keep on a-westering over the garbage of our discontent. Sid's right in one respect, empires are shakedown rackets and what is most interesting about this current one, this Sole Superpower With a Flat Tire is that it has taken to shaking down not only the Wogs of outer Woggery but her very own people.....a people that seem to like singing hymns to self destruction. We are living the best seminar on the hazards of empire in history and we still think we need a government to "save us" through "leadership". There is a popular culture of empire and the authentic culture of individuals in this nation who are unduly influenced by the counter-intuitive blandishments of popular culture. If the individual were to wake up to the farrago, we are capable of great things and could make the rhetoric of the Revolution and Republic real. Until that time, we'll continue imbibing that rotgut bottle of Empire Gin and hew to that old course of the gutter-side tough guy, showing all comers that if they think they're bad, they should just watch as he kicks his own ass. We are at a point in human history where the limitations of the orb require a little cost benefit analysis. We have gotten great things and abject failures out of the imperial experiments of the past but if we think we can somehow improve upon them, think again kimosabe because it may just come to pass that the Lakota are doing the smartest thing they have ever done by checking out of the American Empire and telling the Great White Father to kiss it's red ass. Those who want to cast insults my way by calling me a Marxist Injun or Injun loving dreamer, think again, I aint that good. I'm just a the Affirmative Action Bureaucrat's Nightmare, a Non-Mormon From Utah Lapsed Catholic Adopted New English Yankee Anarcho Capitalist Anti-Big Pagan.....Neo, paleo , all rights reserved. Happily, an ending...thanks Mr. Coulombe. Sent at: 2009 01 07