Leader of the Free World: Change That Even I Could Believe In
Eddie J. Girdner
I had a dream last night. I dreamed that Barack Obama went to Venezuela to Hugo Chavez’s funeral. The prestige of the US just zoomed around the world and people started saying: “Look, the US is doing something good for a change. The US is doing something decent. I always knew that country might turn around and do something nice for a change.” But it had not happened until now. After killing so many innocent people around the world for power and sometimes oil, now they were telling the world that all those speeches about human rights and so on were not just hot wind. We are now going to completely reverse our policy and say that there is a human right to food, clean air, clean water and even to life itself. We are going to stop our program of killing people in poor countries around the world with drones.
“Hell,” Barack said, “I don’t think we should even kill Americans with them things, much less Yemenis.” Ah, change at last! Now that's change I could believe in?
When Barack got back to the Black House, excuse me, White House, he said, “You know what, folks. I think we owe that guy Hugo an apology. It’s a little late, but you know there were so many people down there just crying because he died and because he was a guy that did something for the poor. He actually helped them. Just imagine how we treated him, as such a threat to the world, and even trying to overthrow him. Did we try to kill him too? Treating him as a threat to the world and to us and we didn’t mind Silvio Berlusconi at all. And he is such an… well to put it politely, he is the south end of a north-bound horse.”
And then in my dream something else happened. The Administration announced that it had decided that it was a mistake to give 850 billion dollars to the bankers because they were too big to fail and at the same time let several million American families be thrown out of their homes into the road when they lost their jobs because they were to little to save. Then the government announced that letting people go to the hospital when they did not have any money or health insurance was a good idea and decided that Chavez was right to help sick people all along. Now my head was spinning.
Then, lo and behold, the miracles just kept coming. The new Secretary of Defense, that Charlie Bagel, announced after a long study by a task force and several days of careful evaluation, that one thousand military bases around the world might just be a little over the top. That number, they said, could quite reasonably and safely be reduced considerably with no loss of national security, to just one, that’s right, just one of those mothers. I was even more surprised when I saw that the task force members were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer.
Well, by this time the new respect for the United States of America had gone right through the roof around the world. It was knockin nearly a hundred percent in the polls. But it wasn’t over yet. A footnote to the defense study noted that nuclear weapons never were nor never would be any good to anybody, but just a menace to the world. The US would be abolishing them by the weekend as an example to the rest of the world, not to mention Iran.
Well, I had a very strange feeling, like I had never had before. I felt like standing right straight up and singing the Star Spangled Banner with loud gusto. I was so proud of my country. They had finally done some really fine things that even I could believe in.
When I woke up, the TV came on and the President announced that “nothing was off the table for Iran” and that the bombs could start falling on Bam any time. Bam? Yep, those date trees down there were clearly a serious national security threat that could no longer be tolerated. And he was sure that the international community was not going to tolerate them. Possibly because I buy those big delicious Bam dates every week here in the market in Turkey, I thought.
If only dreams could actually come true! We wouldn’t have to worry about the next war and people would be able to get a pair of glasses and get their teeth fixed without being accused of being socialists and causing that old nasty dislocation in the markets. That is so disgusting to Wall Street. They wouldn’t have to buy more drones to knock down poor people on camels trying to make a living. And then have the drones spy on them too. I was tempted to call it “blind and toothless democracy,” but that wouldn't be nice. So as not to attract the attention of a drone overhead, I just did like everybody else and called it the “world's greatest democracy and the leader of the free world.” I was back to the real world.
Sometimes one's brain can really go crazy in their sleep.
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