The Yen
We heard this talk before. Back in the 1970s — Ford — Carter years, the question was “Is American power declining?” Are we losing “it”? Some schaudenfreude* abounded. Soon enough, it would become clear that whatever was ailing America, (a few fresh coats of paint during the Reagan and Clinton administrations masked the problem) it didn’t matter too much — the Soviet Union was much further into the thralls of collapse.
Today, the Bush Backers will tell you that we just reshaped the entire Middle East. Or that we’re reshaping it quickly. Jon Stewart says that his entire worldview is in collapse. The Berlin Wall is falling! The Berlin Wall is falling!
But, you know… the entire scene is incredibly brittle.
No sooner had the President arrived in Europe than an economic trapdoor seemed briefly to open beneath his feet when the South Korean Central Bank stated that it intended to move some of its holdings from the dollar to other currencies, causing a 174-point drop in the Dow Jones average. The next day, the bank disavowed its report and the dollar recovered, but not before the fragility of America’s economic position in the world had been revealed.
You return back to the late 1980s / early 1990s, before the tech-boom of the Clinton era and before the Asian Financial Crisis showed that they weren’t entirely on the up and up, when everyone thought that Japan was pretty much crushing us. The Yen was all set to bury the dollar.
Our psyches are perpetually paranoid. But with good enough reason. (You notice that the changes in Bankruptcy is about to pass the Congress and get signed into law… Perhaps the International System is about to draw up the same sort of law for the governing body that ties us down.)
In his meeting with Putin, Bush seemed almost obsequious, repeatedly referring chummily to an unresponding, scowling Putin (it’s an expression that settles naturally on his face) as “my friend Vladimir.” As for democracy in Russia, the man who would “end tyranny” everywhere in the world could only muster, “I was able to share my concerns about Russia’s commitment in fulfilling these universal principles.”
I imagine Putin explaining to Bush (whose administration has been expressing their concerns about his power grabs and crushing of democracy) by explaining it in terms of a “War on Terror”. And Bush nodding his head, and offering to pass in a Patriot Act for his consideration.
This European Visit, incidentally, was glorified in rose colors of “Triumph!” on Fox News.
Its military has been stretched to the breaking point by the occupation of a single weak country, Iraq.
I found a solution to this, said beneath the words spoken by a Pentagon spokesperson, on the trouble of Recruitment.
That’s a factor, that we’re a nation at war,” Lawrence Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, told reporters on Thursday. “If it’s a young kid who’s in high school and contemplating his future, what are his parents advising him?”
Mr. Di Rita added, “I mean, without question, when there’s the kind of coverage that there has been about casualties – and we certainly mourn all the casualties, but they are covered, there’s prominent media coverage of casualties in Iraq – parents factor those kinds of things in to what they want their children doing.”
What we need, therefore, is to replace the Media with The Pengagon Channel, and then re-educate the parents of America on the need for a more Spartan Society.
* My god. I spelled that word correctly on first blush!