Читать книгу The Unauthorized World Situation Report, 2nd Edition - Patrick Foy - Страница 2

Best wishes for the health required to face this new century, which seems to me to open onto a porch, beyond which stretches an endless avenue of abominations.

Joris-Karl Huysmans,

--31 December 1900

Over the decades since the Second World War, it has become increasingly fashionable for the President of the United States to make a spectacle of himself in any number of remarkable ways. The sending of an annual “State of the World” message to the Congress of the United States is a prime example.

On its own this State of the World message is nothing to lose sleep over. The document in question is packed with self-serving misinformation; it is routinely filed away and, in short order, forgotten about. Nonetheless, the implications of this “State of the World” message do merit our attention and at least five minutes of serious thought. Why? Because the implications are fantastic

Briefly stated, the President of the United States and the American Congress are presiding over the greatest free-for-all in recorded history, bar none, and yet they remain dissatisfied. They require something more—a bigger horizon, a new distraction, perhaps a crusade to justify their own existence. It is unclear what.

At the same time, it must be obvious that they are ignorant of many things. At the top of this list, I suggest, is the Confucian truth, a truth which Ezra Pound—arguably America’s greatest modern poet—attempted to hand-deliver to them just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Pound’s message was to the point: one must have order within oneself before one can bring order to others. Pound detected a profound problem with the north American republic.

Having rejected Pound’s message back in the late 1930’s, the politicians in Washington now act as if they were qualified to direct the affairs of the rest of planet as well their own. Such a conclusion is what an annual Presidential “State of the World” message must logically imply. Looking at the record, it is what many high-ranking officials in Washington D.C. have been working overtime to achieve. When Woodrow Wilson’s inner circle decided in 1917 to railroad America into the Great War on behalf of the tottering British Empire, the die was cast.

How did the gentlemen on the Potomac acquire such an unwarranted concept of their own responsibilities? To answer that question, we must turn the clock back prior to the Great War of 1914-1918. We must return to the long-forgotten year of Manifest Destiny, to wit, 1898.

That is when the American Republic—which in former times, as a colony of England, had thrown off the yoke of the British Empire—now decided to throw itself upon a near-defenseless Spain, and expropriated the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. It was an expand-your-horizon experience. I am referring to the Spanish-American War.

It is this war, a product of the Gilded Age following the Civil War, which inaugurated America’s road to world hegemony. The United States has been on a one-way trip ever since. At the end of the Twentieth Century, just passed, there was no end in sight. At the start of the Twenty-first Century, the mania has only intensified, and reached a new level of self-deception and self-destructiveness.

The birth of the American Empire and the defeat of Spain coincided with the arrival on the stage of a high-minded, bewhiskered diplomat named John Hay. Actually it was a return. At an earlier hour of the Republic, Hay had served as President Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary. Later he was Ambassador to Great Britain. Then he became a dynamic Secretary of State for President William McKinley.

John Hay’s diplomacy is linked with the Hague Tribunal, with the construction of the Panama Canal, and with the so-called “Open Door” policy regarding China—which meant equal and impartial trade rights by the great powers of Europe and Japan to the “Sick Man of the Far East”.

Secretary Hay had many imaginative ideas about America’s projected place in the grand scheme of history. What follows is a small, important sample, here quoted because it sums up a collective fixation across the American landscape at the dawn of the Twentieth Century...

There are many crosses and trials in the life of one who is endeavoring to serve the commonwealth, but there are also two permanent sources of comfort. One is the support and sympathy of honest and reasonable people. The other is the conviction dwelling forever, like a well of living water, in the hearts of all of us who have faith in the country, that all we do, in the fear of God and the love of the land, will somehow be overruled to the public good; and that even our errors and failures cannot greatly check the irresistible onward march of this mighty Republic, the consummate evolution of countless ages, called by divine voices to a destiny grander and brighter than we can conceive, and moving always, consciously or unconsciously, along lines of beneficent achievement whose constant aims and ultimate ends are peace and righteousness.

This must have sounded like a noble dream at the time. But as we glance backward from our current vantage, it may now seem less noble—taking into account the way intervening history has unfolded.

During the relatively brief time since John Hay spoke his optimistic words, his divinely-destined Republic has made a bloody mess of things for friend and foe alike. This suggests to me that the United States had no business taking upon the outsized role envisioned by Secretary of State Hay.

Notwithstanding the negative consequences of his outlook for U.S. foreign policy—for instance, both world wars—it is clear that Hay was an honest, idealistic human being.

Unfortunately, in more recent times, Americans and Europeans have become passive victims not of honest statesmen like John Hay but of frauds, airheads and opportunists. It is these recent calamities—like the two catastrophic world wars and the many smaller ones—brought about, consciously or unconsciously, by these frauds, airheads and opportunists, on both sides of the Atlantic, which merit our immediate attention.

In this happy land of equal opportunity—regardless of race, reason, religion, creed, place of origin, educational background, sex, sexual orientation, criminal record, or mental stability—it has long been understood that a solitary individual like myself possesses the exact same rights as the President of the United States.

I therefore intend—on behalf of America, Europe, and humanity at large—to exercise my prerogatives of free expression with respect to the above-mentioned calamities, starting now. How? By issuing my own unsolicited, uncensored, unauthorized and unapologetic “State of the World” message.

To get the ball rolling, all citizens of these United States would do well to understand that the finances of the U.S. Treasury are leveraged to the max and that the American Republic of 1789 is encumbered to the hilt. The forever expanding loan called the National Debt momently grows more colossal. The situation is so over the top that almost nobody worries about it anymore.

Despite the Wall Street explosion of the 1990’s and the high employment figures of that booming decade, the fact remains, even then in the midst of the boom, that the country was, according to accepted accounting principles, going bust. The ominous trend has only accelerated and become more evident in the wake of the startling Islamic terrorist strikes on lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in 2001, not to mention the Great Recession triggered by Wall Street in 2008.

When you add up all its public and private debt, on and off the books, the U.S. is the largest debtor nation in human history. And although the country is by far the largest exporter of armaments, accounting for more than 30% of the world’s total, the U.S. has been running a ferocious foreign trade deficit with the rest of the world for well over a quarter of a century. Such an imbalance, I am told by experts, cannot continue indefinitely.

The overall situation harks back to England during the closing years of the 19th Century—where the City of London remained the financial capital of the planet, as New York is today. Does any of this matter? It probably does.

The strength of a nation flows from within and expands outward. The success of its foreign policy will be in close symmetry to that inner strength or lack thereof. It follows that a nation as heavily indebted as the United States—while concurrently bedeviled by countless domestic problems—cannot long continue as a respected power in the world. That is, not unless an unanticipated miracle comes to pass inside its own borders, and soon.