I hate to be the one to tell you this but the dear old U.S. of A. is the biggest shop of horrors on this planet. For all the greatness spawned here in the past -- and still some things to this day -- we are also the major producers and purveyors (and exporters) of guns, war products, alcohol, air pollution, water pollution, chemical and biological weapons, raped and empty-calorie food products, sugar-fizz drinks, aspartame-fizz drinks, filthy and violent music and movies, war toys, pharmaceuticals for children, pornography, Godless psychology, mind control programs, government surveillance (domestic and foreign), tobacco products and Tom Green films.

But none of that stops people from looking up from reading their Better Homes and Gardens or Maxim magazines and saying things like, “Is this a great country or what?!” (I'm starting to lean towards "or what".) Or putting all those stickers and flags on their cars. Or voting for the politicians who most shamelessly push their patriotic buttons.




Most Americans, befogged as they are by their own pursuits, as well as the Bush Administration's patriotic prattle, don't even recognize who these guys are who are running the country and threatening the world with their pro-pollution, pro-corporations, pro-military con jobs. Maybe this will help.

Dick Cheney is the real estate developer who makes his nature-despoiling deals at the country club with the other fat cats, and if you asked him in the street for the time, he’d snarl and blow right past you.

Donald Rumsfeld is the banker who prefers to deal with the big businesses, and if he finds on your loan application that you had a spot of trouble 12 years ago he'll turn you down.

George W. Bush is the somewhat dull-brained and smarmy guy who inherited the big car lot from his father. He doesn't care much for people but pretends to, because that's good business.

And Colin Powell is the minority-hire Chief-of-Police who smooths things out between the mayor and the newspaper people. He’s loyal and persuasive and knows who butters his bread.




It's an old joke, but worth repeating. The U.S. is only 4 men away from renewed greatness. Unfortunately, those men are George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.




To the extent that a country's people is gung ho "My country right or wrong," that nation is susceptible to making grave errors of judgment, especially in its foreign policy and actions abroad. The best example, as in many things, is Nazi Germany, but virtually all national leaders of powerful countries have the grand egos that are requisite to evil adventurism (to have gotten to the top in the first place) and without the restraints of a soberly discerning public, their most rapacious objectives might graduate from temptation to deployment.

Let’s do a “compare and contrast” between the U.S. and the old Soviet Union, where the government controlled the information and could lie at will. When they went to war in Afghanistan — a purely territorial, acquisitive venture -- the people were told it was a war of liberation. Only later, after many casualties and enormous cost, was the truth discovered. (The attendant demoralization that this incurred in the populace became a factor in the USSR’s fall.)

In the case of the U.S. going into Iraq, another instance of a superpower invading a smaller nation for stated reasons later found to be suspect (not to fully equate the two; there was no dangerous madman in Afghanistan) the American people had access to the full truth, if you include the Internet, the texts of U.N. deliberations and the work of independent journalists.

But these sources were overwhelmed by a White House barrage of misinformation, which the mainstream media went along with, and a population heavily distracted by a combination of their own survival, the pursuit of personal pleasures and a fixation on non-news entertainment.