Sunday 2 December 2007

Global rottweiler

A huffy comment on my Open Letter to Yankee Doodle taxed me with ignorance of "what America is all about". America is, of course, about many things: one of them, it would seem from this item in today's Sunday Times, is a delusional belief that the USA's government and laws are above those of all other countries so that reciprocity in international relations does not apply.

Apparently it is now the US government's contention that because bounty-hunting 'rendition' [a euphemism for kidnapping] is a good ol' American custom dating back to 19th century Wild West frontier days, their agents are entitled to kidnap anyone anywhere in the world who is 'wanted' by the US courts, regardless of whether or not extradition treaties exist.

And then they plaintively enquire why the rest of the world doesn't love them! Perhaps if they watched fewer Hollywood movies in which the Good Guy is always American, and always comes out on top, they might catch a glimpse of the real world. Only that would be far too painful.

7 comments:

Richard W. Symonds said...

This monster US regime also believes it has the right to KILL, not just KIDNAP.

Bodwyn Wook said...

THIS Is the late-historical problem in a nutshell:

THERE Statistically are so many sociopaths running around loose.

'BIG' Government provides an avalanche of unsupervised employment for these morally-insane persons, in what C Wright Mills called, over fifty years ago (!), "the [late-modern nation-state] system of organised irresponsibility."

THIS More than anything is why I vote for the Libertarian party, here:

LIBERTY Can only hopr to survive now, perhaps, if we cut ruthlessly & at every point of the compass all subsidies, it is indeed just that bad in some quarters.

RADICAL?

WELL, As matters now stand, the very roots of our constitutional are just about rotten.

Bodwyn Wook said...

AS Well, there are unlooked-for benefits to any 'clash of cultures' as the following will attest:

http://bodwyn.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/worth-worthlessness/

Anonymous said...

The problem is that US's governments' actions are extrapolated to the public in general. Every time more and more Americans seem to be turning their eyes towards the Libertarian Party, which if success for that party is attained will turn the American politics inside out.

Something the US, in my opinion, needs so much as things go.

Bodwyn Wook said...

TO Be truthful, Jose, I am not sanguine about the Libertarian idea; success would require much more of a nineteenth-century sort of community feeling, here; and /that/ samrmy atmosphere, as should be well-remembered, was always fraught with local elitism and sneers at anyone different, the poor or sexually imaginative, Catholics and/or the presbyterian. Yet if you do not now have government providing all from some sort of prebendary teat under citified conditions of mass epidemics of VD & seasonal influenzas, then the /ennui/ of mass urban life becomes just hideous. Gangs consequently are drummed up to re-invent both /community/ and 'governance', all of this on sub-parliamentary levels directly accessible to neighbourhoods. In any case, the city-public managerial & 'helping' professionalists have exactly & objectively /nothing/ to contribute (except by spending their big pay on their lavish share of econmically stimulatory carbon-emissions!)

Bodwyn Wook said...

WOOPS...wrong blog!

Jose said...

True, Emmett. Lack of original ideas is the expression maybe. Lack of connecting with the population in a safe and prudent way without resorting to highfalluting mentions of country and God. It seems not only the States but the rest of the world is subsumed in a sub-world with deja-vu patterns.

The threshold to revolution, generalised revolution?

Who knows?