the accidental empire theme

THE ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE THEME

I tried to read the book “The Next Decade” by George Friedman, both because I bought the damn thing and because it purported to be about geopolitics which is usually the buzzword that gets my wallet open and my nipples tingling. Alas, after getting through the new edition update and the introduction, I was told in no uncertain terms and in no uncertain puffed up pride that this was going to mainly be about how America needed to come to terms with its “accidental empire” and how that would sway events around the world. Now, pardon me for being a dick and not gracefully allowing a self proclaimed policy expert to enrich himself off the ignorance of over educated college attended twats, but every time I run across this overused blatantly false propaganda point I vomit bile and blood all over the page it is printed on and as you can imagine this ruins a perfectly good $15 book. I only make $8.25 an hour and that is only because I live in a state that slightly nudged up its minimum wage which is really swell of them considering that at the time they had the highest housing cost outside California and a few other equally toxic crapholes and was most likely done on the behest of the construction industry- at the time probably one of the more powerful even compared to mining or gaming- which needed more sucker/buyers, and so two hours of wages is considered to me to be a bit of an investment and even if the book is putrid offal it is still a physical embodiment of a chunk of my life force and hence not to be trifled with.

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I used to hate, detest, loathe and be offended by the term “accidental empire” because it implied an insult to my intelligence. The author which used that term assumed I was ignorant of history to the point I had only retained public school cleaned up and sanitized state sponsored story telling where Lincoln was a hero and FDR was a savior and Teddy never embarked on empire stealing from Spain but was merely giving those dark skinned heathens a good skinning to atone for their rashness in sinking one of our ships. Is it because we have different definitions of Empire? Is an empire only an occupied subjected territory sending treasure back to the conquered? Because if it is, then those savages we decimated with smallpox were certainly not an imperial possession. Why, we had to send a few thousand of them preserved meat crawling with maggots and barrels of flour infested with weevils. That was money out of our very own pockets, certainly not tribute. And boy did we begrudge even that, as if millions of acres of farmland and forests and many pockets of precious metal ores were not worth even that small amount. So we’ll just go with the notion the continent was empty and we just stumbled in. And we won’t count Mexico. Just one big desert nobody could do anything with. Why, we did them a favor taking it and building it up. No empire there, either. We might have gotten more minerals than we knew what to do with, but we found and exploited them, right? No imperial tribute there. So what am I crying about?

Continued next time.

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