JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES

“President Obama’s great promise has been utterly wasted in policy-setting.”

Absolutely, and I have to believe he represented the last great hope of changing America’s course, Mr. Murray.

The entire planet breathed a sigh when Bush left office and this bright, charming young man entered.

But I cannot think of one area now where Obama has not disappointed, often greatly disappointed.

It does really seem that elections do not matter in the United States.

The pointless Afghan War goes on and on.

America is killing hundreds of civilians in Pakistan.

Iraq remains the mess America has made of it, millions reduced to hopeless lives for a generation.

America’s client, Israel, continues its brutal, bloody policies, never once making a genuine effort at peace, never once even acknowledging the inhumanity of its actions.

Internally, American politics are the same dog-fight they ever were. The Culture of Complaint prevails in everything, the Tea Party being just the latest change of costume for the same old play. No sense is heard anywhere on the national scene, at least from anyone of influence or even potential influence.

Sinking into old age as I am, it is exceedingly melancholy to consider the way virtually nothing in America has changed for the better since I was an angry young man over the horrors of Vietnam. American political rhetoric remains as utterly meaningless as 45 years ago.

The slaughter of innocents continues all over the globe, indeed, now is becoming computerized so that buzz-cut young men in secret rooms can play games at computer consoles, pumping their fists after sending a Hellfire missile into a home full of people.

I think it likely the only force now which will precipitate real change in America is its relative decline in the world, an unavoidable reality, which will cause many changes in attitudes and beliefs as it truly takes hold.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMESYes, exactly.

Whether in war or foreign affairs or economics or trade, the basic problem is the American attitude of “I want it all, and I want it now.”

Another word for this is entitlement.

I think there really is no cure for this sickness, just as it is virtually impossible to undo the damage to a person raised by parents who behaved as though they were his servants.

The only time we saw some deviation from this obsession was in the Great Depression, a learning experience comparable to repeatedly hitting one’s head into a wall.

But, as we’ve seen, even depressions have been banned in America now. You can buy your way out, and go back to just what you were doing.

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Yes, Wendell Murray, the American military expenditure is actually cancer-like in its growth, and only recently we were assured by the good Mr. Gates that there would be still more coming.

American politicians today sometimes harangue about China’s military expenditure, which at somewhere between 10 and 15% that of America’s (with four times the population), seems almost miniscule.

There is no rational explanation for this.

Consider the countless billions squandered in Vietnam – inflate it to present dollars and the sum is immense – and to what end?

Trillions were spent on the Cold War, almost all of it wasted. The Soviet Union finally collapsed based on the flaws in economics and logic embedded in its very foundation and structure, not owing to America’s military might.

I think the practice reflects a combination of the American entitlement syndrome (we are entitled to make all others fear our might) and the Moby Dick obsession with chasing the white whale.

There always seems to be a white whale for America.

Spain’s remaining North American Empire of the 1890s, Communism for decades going back to the 1920s (when Hoover first showed his obsession with getting rid of anyone who could be regarded as a Communist), to Islam in recent times.

Does that reflect a basic paranoid trait in a good portion of the population, the legacy of the horrible Puritans? I’ve long thought so. I think Australia was lucky to get the convicts rather than the Pilgrims.

I do believe the world needs seriously to start re-thinking the role of the American dollar as reserve currency in light of the county’s proved record of irresponsibility. That role for the currency leaves Americans with an option no one else has in paying for its lack of control. Look what it did after Vietnam.