O tempora! O mores!

Some of my American friends have described me as an honorary American and at times I've thought of myself this way too. My remarks today will offend and alienate some, perhaps most or all of these friends.

In 1964-65 Wendy and I decided after a few months in the lovely little New England university city of Burlington, Vermont, that beautiful though it was and with many delightful people who became our friends, nothing would induce us to settle permanently there or indeed anywhere in the USA. Even then it was clear that the nation was headed in the wrong direction. Despite its vast wealth, squandering it on pointless foreign wars fomented by paranoid fantasies would lead ultimately to economic ruin. I don't recall ever meeting an American who recognized the war in Vietnam as the war of liberation from foreign domination that the Vietnamese and fair-minded Europeans and others perceived it to be. (The same must be said of the war in Afghanistan). I've discussed before in this blog other, more important, factors related to culture and values that led us to choose the University of Edinburgh rather than Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore. The Iraq war, launched on another paranoid fantasy (or on lies) plunged the nation deeper into debt. Americans have squandered their riches, spilled much blood, wasted the natural wealth and despoiled much of the natural beauty of their country with total disregard for future generations. But it's the immature political system, its corruption by "lobbyists" and its total subservience to money that unnerves me most. The bizarre and juvenile "Tea Party" movement spent over $1 billion on a campaign based on its fantasy that lower taxes and "less" government would solve their problems; and of course they won massively because the ill-informed and poorly educated American masses believed this claptrap. But the USA's trouble is older and deeper than the little turbulence of the latest elections (parenthetically, part of the trouble with the USA is frequency of elections: planning with a time horizon of decades is an impossible dream in a nation that plays musical chairs with elected policy-makers every 2 years!). Greedy stockholders seeking instant wealth and conniving boards of directors who dismantled thriving American industries, exported jobs to countries with lax or non-existent labour and environmental laws in order to boost quarterly dividends, and corrupt incompetent banks eager for quick profits today with no thought for tomorrow, have combined to ruin the USA. Its industries have been dismantled and exported to China and elsewhere; its skilled workforce has to make do with poorly paid part-time McJobs and no benefits. Meantime legislators were bribed by lobbyists to dismantle safeguards against irresponsible home loans and several million who lost their jobs have lost their homes too. So of course they are angry, but instead of blaming the corrupt and incompetent politicians who created these fiascoes, the incumbent president and his party get the blame. An evil subtext, never spoken aloud, is the colour of this president's skin. (The far right wing Tea Party is overwhelmingly white. And it is covertly racist as well as against gays, freedom of choice for women and other progressive causes). I hope enough Canadians are savvy enough so Canadian politics can't be dragged down to the gutter level of the Tea Party.