Empire for Slackers

While America fantasizes Empire, veteran international correspondent/columnist Georgie Anne Geyer (who usually runs with interventionists of the Right) muses:

... as Afghanistan dissolves before Washington's oddly unseeing eyes and Iraq stubbornly refuses to behave as it never has in its entire bloody history, the questioners are coming out of the woodwork ...

All this empire stuff on the part of the illuminati of this administration is serious in getting people killed, but barely serious in any planning for the long run. It is heedless, random expansionism without any base. Is this what Americans really want?

At the Nation [thx, theologicus] Anatol Lievent observes:

Bush is driving toward empire, but the domestic political fuel being fed into the engine is that of a wounded and vengeful nationalism ... a sense of righteous victimhood.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jay Bookman [thx, MaxSpeak] says Let's just say it's not an empire

... Rumsfeld, asked back in April whether the United States was building a global empire, responded in typical Rumsfeld fashion:"We don't seek empires. We're not imperialistic. We never have been. I can't imagine why you'd even ask the question." ...

[but] "The presence of American forces in critical regions around the world is the visible expression of the extent of America's status as a superpower and as the guarantor of liberty, peace and stability," said the PNAC report.

... We are, in other words, implementing a global policy of military expansion, and we are doing so without truly acknowledging what it means ... This is a commitment that will define this nation's future, and yet we as a people refuse to even contemplate it. ...

"The United States is the empire that dares not speak its name," says Niall Ferguson, the British author of "Empire" and an advocate of U.S. imperialism."It is an empire in denial ... An empire that doesn't recognize its own power is a dangerous one."

Ferguson emphasizes that if you want to "do" empire, a lot of your citizens have to spend whole lives "out there" ... places that are not as comfy as home.

We think we want Empire, but we don't want to think about what it takes.

We subscribe to nothing. We have no attention span, no sense of history, no sense of posterity.

Arrogant, indifferent, disconnected, aimless, self-absorbed, our lives are arranged around familiar pastimes ... and the occasional search for new pastimes.

When the going gets tough, we wait ... hoping the going will just go away. If it doesn't, we eventually reach for the remote.

RonK, Seattle

Posted June 25, 2003 08:30 AM | Comments (53)