We expect too much from America.
We expect America to do things no other country would be expected to do.
No superpower has ever acted in anyones' interest but its own.
That America has acted the way it does should surprise nobody.
With its hodge podge of genius and madness we became quickly smitten. It has captivated us since, I suppose, the Second World War. It was the beacon to the rest of us. Rightly or wrongly people saw America as the good. Western Europeans certainly, we were guiltier than most. America had saved us one way or another and the more honest of us acknowledged this.
Bush has done something though. He has torn away the rose tinted glasses. We have suddenly realised that America is like us. It acts like we do. We all should stand up now and look around because the last hundred years were the same show on a larger scale as the hundred before that. So going by that rationale we are in for some fun this century.
The world has always had superpowers and it always will. Do we think our world is different, better?
We in Europe need to ask ourselves who do we love??
Russia that unloving romantic? China the reactionary flower? India maybe? We cannot have it both ways.
Europe flounces around these days frilly and frothy. France mumbling to itself, Germany still sulking, Italy squealing and England an island off the coast of its former self.
Europe imagines a future that has already gone, one as imagined and distorted as anything from the Bush Boys.
We act as if everything has nothing to do with us. Bart Simpson foreign policy creates a vacuum. If it is not our fault than whose is it. We have allowed Bush the center stage for too long. We need to stop crying.
The world has always been like this. Take 100year photographs and you will see the same players just different garb and tongues.
We need to decide what we want i.e. poverty and all its affiliates eradicated. Look at what is i.e. a world that is made up of extremes. A world that can do all the old things much quicker: make, break, mate, multiply, live, kill, eat, grow, invent, die.
We need to try to bring the What Is closer to the What Should Be and stop screaming our previous glories off a cliff and go and rejoin the fray. Now.
"There is nothing more baffling to the reformer than the patience of the people with wrongs, except their impatience when they are roused to a sense of their wrongs"
David Lloyd George