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United States News Title: Tiger Blood and the American Paper Tiger America has gone completely to Hell in 2011. I am not referring to the Republican Party's failure to stop the Obama train wreck or to the continuing depression of the housing market and mounting unemployment or even to the zaniness of the Republican candidates' "debates." All of that's a bit too obvious. No, the real sign of our decadence is the replacement of Charlie Sheen by Ashton Kutcher on Two and a Half Men. Before my gentle readers exit this blog screaming, "Philistine," let me assure them I do not watch television except in hotel rooms. My antiquated Sony, ever since the digital revolution, is incapable of receiving a signal and is used only to play old movies. But over here in what used to be the Great 48 (before the admission of Alaska and Hawaii undermined our sense of national identity), Charlie's antics have been consistently big news. He has flouted every convention, outraged all our institutionalized hypocrisy, insulted his employers at CBS, and when caught in one outrageous screw-up after another, refused to back down, much less apologize. "I've got tiger blood," he exclaims repeatedly, adding "I'm high on a drug: It's called Charlie Sheen." Best of all, he refuses to go into therapy. I've only seen his show a few times, but I am Charlie's biggest fan. Charlie's America is the country I grew up in. I don't mean his drug habits, obsessive fornications, and paranoia, but his indifference to public opinion and the leftwing orthodoxy of minority sensitivy and the therapy industry. While it's true that American urban culture has always been timidly conventional, a few bold spirits always found the guts to light out for the territories, as Huck Finn once put it. They went seeking gold in California, oil in Texas, or real estate swindles in Florida. Gunslingers, flim flam artists, land speculators, suicidal hedge fund dealers—these were the real Americans, while Henry James and his proper Bostonians were, at best, third-rate Englishmen. James was appalled when two unkempt and decidedly unsober young Brits came to visit him: G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc apparently had not studied the genteel part they were supposed to play. What did James expect? We Americans got our wild and reckless ways from our British ancestors. As my former secretary (in South Carolina) used to say about someone who lived down to his family's bad reputation, "He come by it honest." So the substitution of Ashton Kutcher, a tame risk-aversive metrosexual, for the Wildman of Beverly Hills is a bad sign for a country that thinks it can rule the world. Far from sharing Charlie's "tiger blood," the current American political class rule over a paper tiger. If you want a Pakistani housing complex strafed by drones or a city bombed during rush hour we'll do the job and brag about the triumph of democracy. Just don't ask us to take risks or fight on equal terms. It is not that our politicians never tell the truth--of course they don't--but that their lies are so feeble. The only old-style American politician I can see in the world today is a Russian. Vladimir Putin may be a crook and a tyrant--rather, he is a crook and a tyrant--but at least he hunts tigers. If you have any doubts about the deterioration of the American character, consider the over 69 million frightened and guilt-ridden Americans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008. That is not too impressive when you consider the fact that there were 231 million people of voting age, but here in the land of the free, 30% represents a mandate from the people, a permit for revolution, a license to steal. But after three years of crisis, failure, and ineptitude, the best the Republicans can do is to whine about a tax on millionaires. In Charlie Sheen's America—the America of Daniel Boone, John Wesley Hardin, and Al Capone—the administration would be under serious fire. The opposition would stand up and denounce the President's policies for what they are, a recipe for defeat, failure, and self-loathing. Leftist Democrats would make him keep his promise to get out of two unwinnable wars, conservative Republicans would go after the defense and welfare budgets with a meat-axe. But in the soft-palmed and soft-soaped America of Ashton Kutcher, we dare not speak too harshly of our first President who is the half-white son of a non-American. A Presidential campaign, particularly one conducted in such a crisis, should be an occasion for serious debate about where the US is headed, about the principles in which our policies should be grounded. With the sterling exception of Ron Paul, no candidate so far has done anything but try to distance himself from Obama while claiming his rivals are really cut from the same cloth as the President. More on this in the coming weeks.
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#1. To: continental op (#0)
LOL!
"This is what economic policy in the West has become--a tool of the wealthy used to enrich themselves by spreading poverty among the rest of the population." Paul Craig Roberts
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