To be an American.
To have such an enormous effect on the entire world.
Oh, America, the powerful!
We see your wonderful power in the wild environs in France where a bloody, bullet-flying gangland siege of American style violence and warfare is playing out its drama, the ongoing theater of the campaign against free express ala the takedown of Charlie Hedbo, a French accent to be sure, but so violently American.
Sure, the heavy artillery, the Kalashnikov (AK-47) assault rifle, are Russian-made but that just goes to show how great the influence of American thought and weaponry are. We showed the Russians -- and possibly the Chinese -- how wonderful the profits and marketability of weapons of mass destruction can be in the worldwide free and open market.
For $500 to $600, the Russian weapons -- sold under the name Saiga -- are half the price of most American-made semi-automatic rifles available to shooters in the United States.
They come equipped with 30-round magazines and can fire off 7.62x39mm rounds as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger.
And, to make us even prouder, we start them out really young in America:
A two-year-old takes out his mother with her own pistol in Idaho.
God Bless America!
Similarly, a toddler in Washington State takes out a sibling with a pistol Daddy conveniently has parked under a car seat.
God Bless America!
Guns and bullets can solve every problem in the world. And, I'll bet it was our all-American president, Teddy Roosevelt, who started this very American trend, in the Philippines, you remember, right, the little war started because he had glorious dreams of American expansion:
Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."
And, there almost on the American doorstop was Cuba:
.... By 1898, Cuban rebels had been fighting their Spanish conquerors for three years in an attempt to win independence. By that time, it was possible to create a national mood for intervention.
And, a mysterious explosion on the American battleship Maine provided a wonderful excuse to declare war on Spain. The war took only three months and then:
Americans began taking over railroad, mine, and sugar properties when the war ended. In a few years, $30 million of American capital was invested. United Fruit moved into the Cuban sugar industry. It bought 1,900,000 acres of land for about twenty cents an acre. The American Tobacco Company arrived. By the end of the occupation, in 1901, Foner estimates that at least 80 percent of the export of Cuba's minerals were in American hands, mostly Bethlehem Steel.
The sweet stench of Empire!:
At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States moved to expand its formal empire, annexing lands in Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Samoa, and the Philippines following the end of the Spanish-American War.
And, my reason for introducing the topic of the short brutal war involving Cuba is the even more brutal massacre in the Philippines involving a wonderful new invention, the Gatling machine gun, which was gleefully used in the
mass slaughter of a reported 900 Moros trapped in an extinct crater, where they were taken out like shooting fish in a barrel.
Well over a century ago, we Americans were setting the standard for mass murder -- and by God, we invented the weaponry for it too.
Like they're saying about Paris:
The killing was very methodical, very professional.
And, so very American.