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George Bush and Company have plunged the world into chaos. (part one)
From a pre-Bush world that had seen the steady fall of warfare and a slow but steady rise in the governments of the world finding ways to talk problems through, Bushco has reintroduced conflict….and the chaos and unintended consequences that accompanies it….back into fashion.
Now with Bushco nearing the end of The Republican Reign of Terror…what kind of World will emerge from the rubble?
As Georgie rides off (unimpeached) into the sunset, the next President will be sworn in….to a bloody fucking mess of a government that has been nearly destroyed by Republicanism. As many, many folks have pointed out, Republicans profess to hate big government, and have thus sought to destroy it.
Republicans are good at destroying things….it is the only thing they DO know how to do.
They have used up and broken the military and the National Guard….while creating new enemies where ever you look. They have destroyed the previous channels of diplomacy through their arrogance, our State Department is now known for having its own mercenary Army rather than for its efforts at finding peaceful solutions. Our economy is right now teetering on the edge of some new form of recession/depression, our dollar falling in value and people being put out in the street through foreclosure and debt….apparently the upside to this is that American goods will sell for cheaper overseas….except America no longer produces much in the way of goods.
We have in short, no economic power, no military power and no diplomatic power.
George Bush has reduced our nation from the worlds sole superpower that was respected and admired around the world for its freedom and leadership into an ugly and crippled behemoth, known now as the hypocritical bully of the world….more a laughingstock than a respected world leader.
via videosift.com
The world has slid into chaos….and the world blames George Bush….and thus America.
And this is the world that the next President inherits, in an America that has:
A broken and bankrupt militatry that is still fighting two wars.
A recession or depression with China and the Saudis holding huge chunks of debt (leverage) on America….while the dollar tanks.
A broken diplomatic corps.
A national government crippled by incompetence, corruption and Fundie moles.
No domestic manufacturing capability…especially none that is not based on oil.
And perhaps the most important for the long term….a scientific and research community that has been decimated and dispirited by Bushco’s anti-science/science as a political tool mentality.
Just as the effects of Climate Change really start to hit.
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As I said yesterday…a humbled and comparatively powerless America
To an extent not previously known….an America that is completely dependent on the rest of the world.
An America whose arrogance will no longer be tolerated….or enforceable.
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While it may seem that this is a bad thing…especially to jingoistic nationalists, it is actually one of the few good things that will come out of this nightmare.
For we are at…not coming to, but at…a time when the entire world needs to join together. A time in fact where it will be forced to come together…or perish.
Mother Nature bats last.
Mother Nature doesn’t recognize boundaries or nation states.
As the effects of catastrophic climate change manifest more and more forcefully in increasingly unquestionable forms, the only hope for the people of the world is to find new ways to work together.
The antithesis of all that the Republicans stand for.
As we face the REAL challenges of the twenty first century, which have very little to do with Islamo-Fascism, these worst aspects of America, as represented so ably by the philosophies of the Republican Party, will have to be repudiated. The world will demand it. And it will be in a position to do so for one main reason.
As peak oil hits and Climate Crisis hits, the solutions to the challenges of adapting to SURVIVING in this new world will NOT be coming from America. We will have to buy them from people and nations that have not destroyed their scientific communities. In short, America will be at the mercy of a world that it has just finished royally screwing over.
America will be forced to change from an empire into just another citizen of the world.
We here all want to see massive change…take heart, it IS coming. There is virtually no question of that.
The questions we face are:
What form will it take?
Will it be a planned change or a series of devastating reactive changes?
What will be the principles of the new America?
This is why it is vitally important for the Progressive (or just plain sane, if you don’t like the term progressive, lol) to have clear and cogent policies and principles to offer in place of the current reality.
As someone said on Dkos the other day, the New Deal wasn’t thought up on the fly. The ideas and principles of the New Deal had been around and were ready to be implemented when thing got so bad that change was FORCED on America.
We are coming up to another one of those times. America needs to reinvent itself for the new post oil, post imperial world. It will be forced to. It will need new ideas and policies to do this.
We have them…..sorta.
So while at the moment we seem to be headed into a long dark scary tunnel…and many of us are in despair….there IS a light.
That light is the complete failure and collapse of the old way of doing things, a way that so VERY demonstrably now just plain doesn’t work….leading to the implementation of the kind of ideas and policies we hold dear illuminating and enlightening the world.
If we survive this nasty era of the Death of Republicanism…we win!
It sucks that we always seem to have to go through a nasty and horrible period of darkness…where we are now….before we can change. But this is the nature of the world, this is downside of human nature.
It is up to us, the Progressive minded folks of the world to supply the upside, to create the new world out of the ashes of the old.
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I am still a bit shaky from being sick, so I apologize if this seems as rambling and disjointed to you as it does to me! I had to get it out of my head and down on the page though, lol.
as weird as that may seem..
i guess you’ve got the ‘some better explanation that makes more sense’ part of my comment…in spades…
well said, bd. i still dont have much hope, but at least i have the inspiration to keep working at it while it either gets better or worse….ill stay tuned…
if Bush voluntarily gives up power in ’09…
What sort of America will be born out of the ashes of the current -regime- administration?
1) The next four years will be rough, for all the reasons you list. The darkness will clear, giving us a clear look at what we have left, and what needs the most work.
2) Even though things will still be in the toilet, Constitutionally, environmentally, internationally, we’ll feel better about it than the last eight years. We’ll be able to transition from a period in which we’re trying to make America less bad, and actually try to make it better.
3) No matter who is elected president, and no matter what sort of majorities we take in Congress…it won’t be nearly enough to fix what has been destroyed quickly enough for us. We need to be patient, take small steps in the right direction, and not get back to blasting the new Democrats we elect for not making progress quickly enough.
(That being said, if we’re still on the bloody ground in Iraq in 2012, cut ’em loose.)
That doesn’t mean we should just sit on our hands until 2009, assuming that everything will miraculously fix itself. Keep applying pressure now, because I suspect this administration may be saving the worst for last. The end may be in sight, but let’s not ignore the present while we fantasize about the future.
< end of rant>
survive as a nation (our founders were pretty smart), but
there is no question we will not be the same nation. These
past years have drained the heart and soul out of us, but
as long as some of us are still willing to fight we can come
out the other side, abet in another shape. I think the first
healing thing to take place must be a ‘duck walk’ off to the
slammer for the bastards who tried to steal our country. We
have to start with Bu$hCo.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about impeachment and have
come to the conclusion that impeachment isn’t strong enough.
Jail with, no chance of parole, is much more fitting.
approach to issues. Too bad we won’t lead.
Question is how bad will things have to get?
America does not do humble very well. And that is what makes me just a teeny, tiny, little, bit worried about how folks will react to their diminished capacity for basking in influence and wielding it.
The capacity for a reactionary response resides within that.
that I would hope would be bound to happen.
The other day I did the cute little questionnaire linked with an ad at the top of the DK home page about how I am impacting the planet economically.
As I watched my score rack up, I was struck by the many things where, if it was strictly *my* choice, my “ecological footprint” was really small for an American.
Whereas, choices dictated by indirect things, like where I live, or the choices of the management of the place I live, were the things that drove up the score a lot.
We don’t live in a culture that helps and reinforces sane rational choices as far as sustainability is concerned. I need my car to live where I live (it’s a couple of miles to the nearest place you can get food, for example, and I live in a suburb), and the more I go on living, I don’t want to live where or how I live.
Many people live in suburban sprawl-cities that on the surface give people breathing space and yet at the same time create ecologies that will eventually have us all drowning in our own trash. Sprawl and the car culture and packaging and a philosophy of waste and throwing things away are not always totally personal choices.
People in the past used to live much more compactly and communally, and I hope that the economics of reality finally drive home that this was not a bad way to live. Perhaps economic dislocation will make that thought process more prominent among the people who design communities in the future.
In the meantime, that style of living is thought of (at least in the part of the country I live in) as “trendy” and therefore expensive. But hopefully, if I can get out of the economic leg trap I am caught in, I will have the opportunity to choose someplace more sane to live in in the future.
Give your body one extra day more than you think you need to fully recover. And stay with the brat diet. If you are getting the urge to eat more, try staying with easy on the tum foods, such as cooked carrots, boiled or slow-cooked chicken, yogurt (can you get good yogurt where you are?) and even the old, but wonderful, peanut butter toast.
Many people tolerate ginger as a soother, so if you have anything along the lines of ginger tea, ginger ale, ginger snaps, ginger drops (hard candy), candied ginger, etc., that might help, too.
Now to my observation: When you use “we”, I believe that you are referring to the old paradigm of a country whereby its citizens have a governmental voice via their elected representatives. This is no longer the case. There are two distinct “we’s”: we the people who are no longer represented in government and who are largely oppressed, and we, the elite – corporatists, lobbyists, government officials who rule over and oppress we the people, and who act independently of the people’s will and wishes.
It’s important to make that distinction and to define every use of “we” because the old rules no longer apply.
Hope you feel better soon, Buhdy.
I have found lately that the only hope I have these days is that the collapse of our current empire comes more like that of the Soviet Union.
And my one fear is that the next election will only cover up again the nature of that empire. Its been on open display for the last 7 years, but pretty well hidden before that.
Edger and I are having a bit of a conversation about this in my diary on Multipolarity (sorry for the pimp – not). In the comments he posted a documentary titled The War On Democracy that chronicles our activities in South America over the last 50 years or so. One scene that haunts me is of an American nun that was kidnapped, gang-raped and tortured in Guatemala with assistance from US personnel. Her question today is to ask how we can think Abu Ghraib is an isolated incident when we’ve been doing the same throughout our history.
That is I believe in part of the premise, but not per se necessarily in the conclusion.
The real challenge at least in the immediate future is a cultural and a lifestyle one, and, while science and technology helps, a lot of the necessary technology is here already and what isn’t, is relatively simple. We have to change from a consumer culture in to a sustainability culture. In each, there is not a fait accompli, neither is given to us on a platter, wholly formed from the outset. It’s a journey.
Making one washing machine that runs 24/7 is less expensive and less deleterious for the environment for example than making 10 washing machines that each run only occasionally. Yes, there is waste in each scenario. So we want to make a better washing machine that does not waste water, and the same amount of water would be wasted in each case, but ignoring the savings to be gotten from using existing technology more wisely is not to be wise either.
Our technological wherewithal has been geared toward making people live conveniently apart from one another, and not so much to making life more pleasant and sustainable living together. But this does not take excruciatingly high tech. It only takes a modicum of innovation.
What we will need to make this work is a different economic and cultural model.
…I don’t think bushco has managed to screw america’s science and engineering capabilities with his anti-science crap, so much as with his border controls and harassment of foriegn students. Or rather, its all of a piece. This was a centre of the world for education and discovery. It still is, but the people who will shape the next few scientific revolutions are increasingly choosing to be educated elsewhere. Of all the things Bush has done…indeed, every damn person who has applauded “security” has done…this is the one that will cost Americans the most, I think…
an iraqi war reparations act
Seriously. We need to think about planning for this one. It will go very far in soothing our national guilt – before we create a complete financial meltdown as self-punishment – and would start a very different renewed America.