It is not our place to tell Americans how they should vote. Their concerns are
health plans, taxes and, suddenly, socialism. That's their business. We can
however tell them what America looks like to us, and it's our business, because
America is a 800-pound gorilla in our patch of jungle. We need the gorilla
because it helps sustain our ecosystem by consuming stuff we make but can't use
ourselves. But for the past eight years our gorilla has been acting like a
crazed thing, bringing wars and economic catastrophe. Its antics have made it a
pariah and worse - a laughing stock. It's a gorilla that wears a big red nose,
a frizzy wig and oversize shoes.
It looks to us like the gorilla has been trained by a bunch of clowns whose
goal is universal domination rather than universal
good. Power for its own sake, at any price. It doesn't seem to us that even
Americans have benefited from their rule - we see your financial ruin, your war
dead (the dead they don't let you see), the wars you are still waging at
monstrous cost and without a chance of winning, and we ask: Who has benefited?
We see only a growing troop of militant Islamists, chittering with glee, a clan
of America's business elite whose greed and excesses have been rewarded with a
free lunch, for which you are paying, and a tribe of military industrialists,
enriched by your taxes.
These clowns are not stupid. They are experts in the arts of bamboozlement.
They won and held power by cleverly manipulating you through sophisticated use
of your media and political trickery. Fear and greed: they gave you the former
and satisfied the latter, instilling in you fear of a bogeyman under your bed
and allowing asset bubbles to inflate to bursting point. Having taken power,
they understood they could lie to you with impunity, and so they threw in a few
whoppers like Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
Now they are telling you that only they and their ilk can save you from the
results of their own hubris. They have given you something new to fear: Barack
Obama is a socialist! As if they themselves had not abandoned their free
market doctrine when it no longer suited them and are now busy using their
remaining time to redistribute wealth - giving your wealth to their buddies.
The frightening thing, to us, is that so many of you are still listening to
them without asking yourselves whether the trainers who cracked the whip at
George W Bush are not the same ones who will crack it at John McCain.
Our plea from our patch of jungle to you is: Please look at the big picture. We
are part of that big picture, and we need a sane, healthy gorilla, not a
pathetic megalomaniac. It looks to us like you do, too.
Allen Quicke is Editor of atimes.com
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