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Americans, I have bad news: You�re fucked. You�re really fucked. Obama doesn�t know how to fix your economy and his administration is full of the people who fucked it up to begin with and, in case you�re forgotten, he believes it is his right as president to carry out extra-judicial murders around the world, including the killing of American citizens. So it will be terrible to vote for Obama. On the other hand, if you vote for Romney (and his Objectivist side-kick, Ryan), you�ll be electing people who are basically caricatures of American Republicans. They�re right, white, wealth-worshipping plutocrats who openly hold poor people in contempt. They would gut what�s left of the welfare state in the US (Medicare, Medicaid, social security, disability coverage) while carrying on Obama�s overseas killing spree. And who knows, maybe worse. Romney seems hell-bent on starting a trade war with China (on his first day in office, no less), a new cold war with Russia (the greatest threat to America, he says), and possibly a hot war with Iran (although everybody boasts about going to war with Iran, they�ve wanted to go to war with Iran since at least Bush and probably since Carter, it hasn�t happened yet).
America is economically and politically fucked. American government barely functions because the right is actively trying to obstruct it and the center (the Democrats) lack the willpower and the skill to do anything about it. There�s nothing to stop another economic crisis from taking place, of the sort that we had in 2008 or far worse. It is quite conceivable that the next US president will have to contend with the collapse of the eurozone and the global economic turmoil that that will entail, and the American government that brought us the 2011 let�s-almost-default-on-our-national-debt-just-because fiasco isn�t up to the challenge. These times require visionary leadership. There is none. We need a Roosevelt and all we have is an Obama. And we might get a Romney.
Now, to my foreign readers, this is why you�re fucked too. Because if the US is going to suffer catastrophic decline, I can�t imagine its brilliant political and military leaders won�t try to take with them as many foreigners as they can. For a lot of Americans, Obama just isn�t aggressive enough when it comes to blowing up Muslims, and this from a president who has blown up thousands of them, many of them civilians, many of them children, many of them outside warzones. Obama�s drones sometimes carry out �double-tap� attacks, in which the drones hover overhead after an initial massacre and then open fire on the people who show up to render medical aid or at least try to recover the bodies. He�s also launched attacks on the funerals of drone victims, based on the logic that �militants� are likely to be in attendance at the funerals of militants (along with their wives and children, of course). I put militants in scare quotes because we know that the Obama administration considers any military-age male that they kill to be a militant unless they are presented with a posthumous vindication of the victim. So they�ll concede that you weren�t a militant, but only after they�ve killed you. It should be noted that it was this logic�that all military-age males are inherently military targets�which provided the impetus behind the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, in which Bosnian Serb forces murdered some eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys.
So Obama has killed an enormous number of Muslim civilians, but for so many bloodthirsty Americans, that just isn�t enough (or something, I don�t understood how these people can believe that Obama has been �appeasing� Muslim militants when he can�t go a day without killing a bunch of them and anyone who happens to be standing nearby). Jesus, if Romney gets elected, how many Muslims will he have to kill before his supporters are satisfied? Certainly he�ll kill a lot. The result of Obama�s drone war will have been to make these sorts of assassinations and extra-judicial murders the bipartisan norm. America�s so-called Left won�t have a platform from which to criticize Romney, because he�ll be doing the same thing as Obama, and they didn�t object to it when Obama did it (it�s almost as if� they�re hypocrites!)
It�s become something of a clich� by this point to dismiss the entire American political class as a bunch of corrupt, power-hungry assholes, but that doesn�t mean it�s not true and it doesn�t mean we can overlook it. If America continues down the path of economic decline and lawless imperial warfare and murder, nothing good will come of it. America�s increasingly militarized police forces are already getting their hands on drones, and it won�t be long before the tools of imperial oppression, honed on recalcitrant natives overseas, are brought back to the US. Historical examples abound, but for considerations of space, here are just two of them. This is exactly what happened near the end of the Roman Republic; the Generals Marius and Sulla went off to fight a foreign war in Libya and they ended up bringing their armies home with them and plunging the country into civil war. More recently, the French Fourth Republic was brought down by the threat of a coup from soldiers trying to suppress the Algerian Revolution.
Now, I�m not saying we�re necessarily going to see tanks in the streets in the US; far from it. Americans are an acquiescent bunch and they would gladly sacrifice their freedoms on the altar of �security� (in Zbigniew Herbert�s elegant little book of myths, The King of the Ants, he describes a fictional Roman deity that he calls Securitas, to whom one sacrifices everything). Tell the Americans that the Wikileakers are making us vulnerable to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (or al-Shabab, or Ansar al-Sharia, or whatever the Islamists in northern Mali are calling themselves), and they�ll gladly sacrifice their freedoms (of speech, of dissent, certainly of religion if that religion happens to be Islam). And the American republic will end not with a bang, but with a whimper, with a whimper (to continue my trend of incorporating famous T. S. Eliot lines into my blog posts).
And speaking of bangs versus whimpers, this brings me to my tepid and deeply reluctant of endorsement of Barack Obama. The election of Mitt Romney would destroy America with a bang (death to social services, death to the poor, death to labor unions, government control of women�s reproductive systems, war with Iran, war with the Muslims in general), whereas the election of Obama will continue America on the path to a slightly quieter but no less irreversible decline. He will kill Muslims, but fewer of them. He probably/hopefully won�t go to war with Iran, unless Netanyahu does something stupid, in which case any American puppet-president would jump at the opportunity to attack Iran if it first attacks Israel. On the economic front, we�ll see the same stagnant non-recovery that Japan has been experiencing ever since the bursting of its �bubble economy� circa-1990. And as for social issues, this might be Obama�s only redeeming point. Obama does not hate gay people, he does not think women are stupid and incapable of making decisions about their own reproductive health, he doesn�t hold poor people in contempt. So that�s nice and it�s in marked contrast to the Republican position on these issues.
This endorsement of Obama is not a glowing endorsement. In my heart of hearts, I want to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who holds genuine leftist positions and probably wouldn�t bomb anyone. But when it comes down it, I�m afraid I�ve accepted the logic that a vote for a third party candidate by a leftist like me is like a vote for Romney. And I really don�t want to see Romney elected. I would much rather see the American republic end not with a bang but with a whimper.
Post-script:
Also, in case anyone was wondering, T. S. Eliot, were he still alive, would probably vote for the Constitution Party�s Virgil Goode, because they�re both arch-reactionaries.
