A Developing Nation

Tags: , , Posted 2006-02-25 00:29 4 Comments

Good to see more evi­dence that America is now a third-world/developing nation (albeit with toys on credit). Social ser­vices con­tinue on the brink of col­lapse, the gov­ern­ment vio­lates its own laws in the name of “secu­rity from ter­ror­ists,” wealthy cor­po­ra­tions with tight con­nec­tions to the gov­ern­ment get bid-less con­tracts while the coun­try accu­mu­lates ever larger for­eign debts. The poor are told to save them­selves in a nat­ural dis­as­ter, prices of food­stuffs are on the rise, and a cor­po­ra­tion owned by a for­eign monar­chy gets to pur­chase a large chunk of the country’s infra­struc­ture out­right. Oh yeah, and there’s a totally dum­b­assed war killing thou­sands in the background.

About the only thing miss­ing is the Army man­ning check­points and throw­ing dis­si­dents out of air­planes. They’re already patrolling the air­ports now, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the next ter­ror­ist attack for posse comi­ta­tus to go com­pletely out the window.

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Comments

  • J. Alva Scruggs says:
    2006-02-26 at 6:25 pm

    They have mil­i­tary patrols in some of the rail­way sta­tions, too, and cops with machine guns in city parks.

  • James Cape says:
    2006-02-27 at 6:56 pm

    In all my “not totally fucked yet” moments I keep for­get­ting about the para­mil­i­ta­riza­tion of ever-larger seg­ments of law enforcement.

    It was also tempt­ing to throw California’s brownouts in there too, but you can only put so many things in a comma-separated list before it gets unweildy.

  • J. Alva Scruggs says:
    2006-02-28 at 12:11 am

    I find the pre­tense more threat­en­ing than the real­ity. What peo­ple can con­vince them­selves they’re not doing seems like a big­ger deal to me. There’s a qual­ity of sadis­tic long­ing to peo­ple who want to hurt oth­ers badly and find them­selves unable to achieve the sup­port­ive jus­ti­fi­ca­tions that would let them think they’re still good people.

    For the “not totally fucked” file: that there is a pre­tense, how­ever hack­neyed and uncon­vinc­ing, indi­cates those desirous of a lock­down secu­rity state aren’t sure how far they can push it. Destruction of moral sens­bil­ity takes a lot of effort, even in a couch potato coun­try. The bul­ly­ing and the chick­en­shit char­ac­ter of the high rank­ing dudes cre­ates resent­ment. They have to watch their backs too against oppor­tunists seek­ing to replace them.

  • James Cape says:
    2006-03-01 at 12:26 am

    To be sure, even Hitler and Stalin main­tained their pre­tenses: the Nazis weren’t really gassing peo­ple in those Happy Fun Camps, and all Stalin’s vic­tims were counter-revolutionaries seek­ing to rein­stall the long-dead Czar or the arch-traitor-Fascist, Trotsky.

    Plausible deni­a­bil­ity writ large: it’s about giv­ing peo­ple just enough of a fig-leaf to salve their consciences.

    A few years ago I watched some TV show where they went through the Gestapo records for Munich. Apparently there were only 48 offi­cers in that Chicago-sized city, and they were try­ing to fig­ure out how less than fifty peo­ple could round up thou­sands of peo­ple and ter­ror­ize the remain­ing millions.

    It turned out that they didn’t ter­ror­ize the remain­ing mil­lions, because most of the peo­ple sent to the camps were sent there by their neigh­bors. They actu­ally took the file of a “sus­pected les­bian” who lived in a shack at the edge of some neigh­bor­hood or othe, and tracked down the per­son who first dropped this “sus­pected lesbian’s” name to the Gestapo. When ques­tioned about it, the infor­mant only whined about how “it’s such a shame that peo­ple are drag­ging this up again, I heard about this on tele­vi­sion.” Her eyes told a dif­fer­ent story, one aparently scream­ing to get out, but her pride refused to let her just con­fess that she’d been respon­si­ble for hav­ing a woman killed in order to (my guess) raise her prop­erty values.

    So the end result is a mass move­ment to find sociopaths who’re will­ing to do the dirty work for them. Which puts “Boondock Saints” and all the other reac­tionary comic books-turned-movies out there into a whole other perspective.

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