As BP’s hole in our Mother Earth gushes the life out of Her---and us---our nation plunges over the Greek/tragic abyss of military oblivion.
Only Obama’s demand for taxpayer handouts to fund new nuclear plants surpasses the madness.
But scum-timed leaks of gargantuan Afghani mineral deposits come close.
News of a “trillion-dollar trove” of precious metals like lithium now adorn our on-going burial in the Graveyard of Empires.
As BP’s hole in our Mother Earth gushes the life out of Her---and us---our nation plunges over the Greek/tragic abyss of military oblivion.
Only Obama’s demand for taxpayer handouts to fund new nuclear plants surpasses the madness.
But scum-timed leaks of gargantuan Afghani mineral deposits come close.
News of a “trillion-dollar trove” of precious metals like lithium now adorn our on-going burial in the Graveyard of Empires.
As the Gulf Gusher, bank bankruptcies, jobless plague and so much more deepen our bottomless debt, Obama administers the ultimate coup d’grace---unlimited military spending in pursuit of the undefined and unattainable.
Back in LBJ’s Vietnam, there were constant hints of huge deposits of tungsten and tin, if only we were bold enough to grab them. Peace advocates warned these were the REAL reasons we were there, not our stalwart “commitment to bringing democracy to Southeast Asia.” Lyndon Johnson denied it, but the prospect affirmed the corporate commitment.
Johnson was our American Pericles. Pericles, the Herald of Greek Democracy, gave Athens the Parthenon, and a Golden Age filled with art and poetry, genius and learning.
But his love of war prompted one with Sparta that was as unnecessary as it was futile. His strategy relied on Athenian naval supremacy. He pulled all citizens inside a fortified port that degenerated into an unsanitary and unsustainable hell-hole. Plague soon killed Pericles and at least a third of Athens. The war bankrupted the city, destroying its humanity and its greatness.
The schizophrenic LBJ did the same to America. The 1964 peace candidate, his Great Society visions made him a pathbreaker in civil rights and social justice at home. But his Periclean inability to quit a war he was elected to end, and which he clearly sensed to be catastrophic, cost us our treasure, sanity and moral stature. Its legacy is the decayed infrastructure, wrecked economy and twisted body politic that torments us today.
Yet the professor in the Oval Office exhibits no sense of history, ancient or recent. Even AVATAR, the top grossing film of all time, seems to have escaped his notice.
In James Cameron’s eco-classic, a corporate/military machine comes to take a precious metal---unobtainium---from a remote planet whose “primitive” residents seem a pushover.
Like the Spartans, the Vietnamese, the Afghans….we know what happens when a Great Power fights a foe with Mother Nature on its side.
Obama’s empty-suit non-response to BP’s Gulf apocalypse evokes sheer terror among those of us who fear even more what might be done by a disaster at a nuclear plant.
But in terms of pure suicidal psychosis, it is also matched by Obama’s relentless escalation in Afghanistan. All of history, from Athens to the Soviet Union, from Tet to Kabul, screams that this is another tar-baby loser, bound to put the final touches on our national bankruptcy---financial, moral, ecological and spiritual.
This administration has taken its unholy LBJ/Periclean obsession beyond even the madness of war. There is in Afghanistan no meaningful strategy or reason, goal or victory. Attempting to install democracy in a place that has never known or wanted it means it will disappear from the invading crusader. Attempting to grab all that unobtainium guarantees its return to poisonous, useless dust.
This invasion is, in reality, a hubris-laden national suicide, the evil twin of the Gulf Gusher.
Despair is not the answer. In nature, thankfully, there is always an antidote somewhere near the poison.
But those of us who wish to live had better find it for our nation…quick.