The Accidental Empire
I always feel uncomfortable at the American
embassy in London. I don’t like it when
I have to go there even though there is a really nice proper café owned by an
Italian family who make a toasted sandwich with corn beef and a pickle around
the corner. They they put in pickle, a
salty limb English pickle, in the sandwich and toad it with the pastrami and
mustard. They call it the New York,
which was misleading to me as it is not on Rye and is rather small, but it is a
nice sandwich.
In the park in front of the embassy are
three statues to American Presidents: FDR, Eisenhower, and Reagan. The FDR and Ike statues are obvious being
London. The Reagan one is there to piss
people off. Unlike the other two that
you can get up close to and touch the Reagan one sites beyond reach of vandals
on his platform. In front of him is a
long bit text that looks like a long unrolled bronze toilet paper role. The text goes in to why Reagan is a great
man. The other statues don’t have to
explain why FDR and Ike are great men. I
even imagine the Soviets didn’t have to plaster the statues of Lenin and Stalin
they put up in Hungary and Poland with explanatory text. A statue should look heroic. Ike looks like a right proper hero in his
uniform there.
One time my wife was covering a protest
against the Keystone XL pipeline and I came out with her to get some fresh air
and because I like to watch her shot.
She gets right in people’s faces and its fun to watch. I was not up to date on the Keystone XL
pipeline and I had no idea if it was a good idea or a bad idea so the protest
left me a bit bored. A Hari Krishna food
bike was there and I got some rice with chickpea doll. The protest formed a cardboard black pipe
between the US and Canada embassy. It
was real fun to hear English leftist protesting against Canada, with the
Keystone XL pipeline they are more made at Canada. One time in Trafalgar Square, I saw Syrians
burn a Russian and Chinese flag. Normally people burn American flags in
London. In front of the Canadian embassy
I tried to flirt with a black woman who was reading Green Mars. She was polite enough but she was not having
any of it.
Next time I went to the embassy it was to
pick up a replacement passport for one I had lost in Spain. They were friendly enough. People who work at embassies giving passports
to people who lost their passports in Spain I guess are my kind of people. People who went to good schools but couldn’t
think of a career so they ended up in the Foreign Service. I got to London because I could program
computers. I got in to computer because
that was just what came along. There was
a rigid marine in those big white hats.
Do the Marines know that blue pants and kaki shirt does not go well
together? Perhaps being a Marine means
you can wear a brown shirt with blue pants and no one can say anything about
it.
The last time I was at the embassy was
because my wife was going to cover an Anti-Drone protest. We got there early and went to the place with
the good sandwiches. My wife got an
apple pie in a bowl of custard and when I finished my sandwich I ate most of
that too.
At this point, while reviewing this
manuscript my wife insists that I extend the explanation as to the custard and
pie. I frankly do not see the reason to
go in to extensive detail here but she insists that the text lacks something
without a detailed account of what she calls the ‘custard soup.’ I am now following a convention quoting her
terms and ideas about the custard.
My wife said her stomach poorly. I
recommended the cherry pie with custard.
When my wife order the waitress regretted to inform us that they were
out of cherry pie. She even looked sad
and said awe. Despite it violating all
practical reasoning I to this day believe that she really was upset for my wife
that she could not have cherry pay. My
wife then agreed to the apple pie compromising, saying she didn’t want ‘just a
little custard.’ So when the bowl came
out it ‘a piece of pie swimming in yellow custard soup.’
Late we went back to the embassy and my
wife wanted to avoid the photographers who were already there. So we walked the other direction around where
an anti-Iranian regime group was holding a hungry strike. They had set up tents so the half dozen or so
people on hunger strike, I didn’t bother to count them, could look at the US
embassy as they lied their not eating.
Then the Tehreek-e-Insaf group showed
up. These Pakistanis in the UK made up
the vast majority of the roughly 90 to 105 protests there. They were dressed in nice new western
clothing with expensive watches and well groomed hair. They are supposed to be the moderates in
Pakistani politics but they looked no different to me than any other group you
see on the TV screaming about America.
They carried two ‘coffins’ with them, one baby sized and one adult sized
with lots of flags for their Pakistani party.
They support a former cricket player.
My wife got great shots and I read a book
next to two girls in their late teens eating take away Japanese food. I assume they were American tourists waiting
for something but it was a Saturday and they didn’t seem bothered.
The Tehreek-e-Insaf and maybe six old
anti-war native English shouted for about an hour. People pushed their way in front of video
recorders giving speeches in Urdu peppered with words like “USA”, “civilized”,
“drones” and “America.”
They were just a bunch of blowhards but as
London protests go they were not major blowhards. London has imposed the most perfect form of
censorship ever known to man, a numbing idiotic flow of constant protests. In any given day you will hear blasted
through megaphone that cows have souls and Indonesian have rights and Atos is
killing people with work assessment tests and Israelis are killing children and
other things you can’t make out. The
protests are now in line with the cable TV news, an endless senseless blur of
assertions and images meaning nothing.
And in the center of this blur of senseless
London sits the US embassy at the vortex of the shit storm of the modern
world. The Empire everyone needs. The place where people come with their
petitions and grievances and stump arms and dead children and puppets and
cardboard tubes and copies of Green Mars checked out from the library and
buckets of cheap take-away Japanese and expensive watches and cameras and
pictures of Imran Khan and scream and beat their chests. If America did not exist it would be
necessary to create it. There lies the
source of the evil we fear is lurking in the world. Most of the world can sleep easy at night
only because there is an America.
In reality since Obama took office this
power has been growing and not declining.
The ultimate expression of this power as the dark one is most expressed
not in American corporations or wars of aggression but in new technology of
drones and NSA that only the Americans can create. The fear is the technical excellence of the
nation of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
America is Santa Clause off his meds or on his meds I am not sure which
one.
Not only does not one stand against
America, no one really can stand against America. We can only have one evil presence we want to
believe is controlling our lives, because after all it can’t be us who is
making this life we need to live.
Myself I have generally used Republicans
and my parents for this. I have not seen
my parents for some time so Republicans have to do for a while. Republicans are proving to make terrible
world controlling manipulators, as they are clearly mostly nuts these days. I can’t get a good paranoia running about
Plutarch’s or the 1% probably because I know too many rich people and have worked
too long in business to think that they are running much of anything. So lately I have been devoid of a good proper
dark evil force in my life and I miss it greatly. I even miss Bush. Lately I have been concerned that I may be
becoming diabetic. I am brushing my
teeth more and more and getting worried about my weight. If I don’t find an evil presence to ruin my
life soon I might develop a serious medical condition.
Even the Reagan statue in front of the US
embassy just looks silly to me. Looking at him protected by a large green
platform he looks like a statue of Mickey Mouse to me now. And I feel so empty without him I sometime
need to go on Twitter and pick flame fights on the hashtag of the day, but even
that is starting to get boring.
I am seriously concerned that I am
developing a serious medical condition.
As I think less and less about Cameron, Blair, Bush, Reagan and J.P.
Morgan I think more and more about my urinary track and heart valves my attires
and how depression, alcoholism, and unbearable self-importance run in my
father’s family.
Maybe I should screw up my life? Perhaps some insane conflict at work which
forces me to shift jobs suddenly, or a impossible sexual relationship with a
much younger woman connected to me by my wife, or a good solid addiction to
crack would be the thing to pick me up. I
have seen it do wonders for other people.
I think most people I know keep themselves healthy and alive via a
combination of addiction and work conflicts.
Of course addiction is physically demand and people, being generally
lazy, of find they don’t have the stuff for it.
But then again you have AA, which can become an all consuming patterning
hegemony. My dad went with AA and it cocktail
of AA and thinking Obama is a communist seems to be doing well for him. Now that he is old enough to collect Medicare
and not worry about losing health insurance he is in a real danger of finding
some piece of mind. I think Obama was a
real blessing for him and I am happy for him to have found his black monster.
Bush was such a wonderful gift for me. For 8 years everything that went wrong was
Bush’s fault. Boy do I miss Bush. But the Tea Party and the Tories should
restore me. But I am becoming concerned
that something is really wrong with me.
