The Neighborhood Lunatic

It's now been a week since the hurricane struck, and two days since Bush's photo opportunity appearance in New Orleans. It looks as if the disaster along the Gulf Coast is finally being dealt with somewhat adequately, but the damage to this country's reputation and standing in the world is going to linger.

This comes on top of the ongoing embarrassment of the Iraq debacle, a naked grab for power and resources that has made the United States the most feared and hated country on earth since Nazi Germany.

In every human community, there are inevitably a few individuals who have to be locked up because they're a danger to themselves and others. And in the community of nations, the U.S. has now become such an individual.

It's no wonder then, that when I see this kind of response to the world's diminished opinion of us, from the red-white-and-blue blog "American Digest," I fear not just for our reputation but also for our sanity.

I see this virulent strain of world-hating, self-hating fear and rage a lot now, and hear it on wingnut radio whenever I have the misfortune to cross some fascist bandwidth on my car radio. It's the incoherent raving of an egomaniac with an inferiority complex, and the self-pitying bray of the sociopathic jackass clinging to the fiction of his own righteousness.

Is this what we've become? Well, some of us, anyway.

Vanity Fair's James Wolcott says of this projectile vomitus masquerading as an essay, "It's hard to believe a grown man wrote this, and, worse, after running it as a sort of New Year's fuckoff letter to the world, thought it was worth republishing post-Katrina. Apparently, he's unaware that scores nations and international groups have offered assistance to New Orleans and the surrounding region..."

If this government and the individual Bush humpers among our citizenry continue giving the finger to the rest of the world, then the rest of the world might just decide to lock us up, for our own protection as well as theirs.

And after the events of this past week, they've definitely got our number. As Jesus once said, "Whatever you neglected to do unto the least of these, you neglected to do unto me."