America the Beautiful
Edward Cranswick
20MAR2008
A few weeks ago, a friend from America who had spent the previous five months working at the US McMurdo Base in Antarctica stayed with me here in Adelaide for a fortnight on his way home to the States. I was interested to hear of his Antarctic experience but ended up being surprised by his profound ignorance of not only the mission of his Antarctic posting but also of the place of America in the current world – Antarctica was the first place he had ever been to outside of America. His job was maintaining the furnaces of McMurdo Base, but he didn’t know about conservation of energy; the first time he thought about the ozone hole was when he rapidly turned pink from sunbathing naked in the Adelaide garden; he didn’t know much about global warming other than it was something that environmentalists bitched about; and, he didn’t think that local sea-level rise caused by melting/sliding glaciers in Antarctica would affect sea level on the other side of the Earth. We took a taxi across Adelaide one night, and the taxi driver told us that he had formerly owned a stationery shop but had retired to taxi driving after being held up by a young man brandishing a knife and syringe – my friend told the taxi driver that he should have had a pistol to defend himself, that’s what they do in America. My friend commented several times during his visit that the world had been in the dark ages for 3,000 years before the US came along and brought it into the light.
One might have thought that with such a captive audience that the McMurdo Base administrators would have taken the opportunity to establish an extensive educational program to indoctrinate the employees about the scientific goals of the US Antarctic Program and thereby create a body of informed tax-paying Americans who would further support the Program. However, McMurdo Base is administered under contract by Raytheon, and Raytheon has bigger fish to fry than simply maintaining a lavish US scientific presence in Antarctica:
“Tucson's Raytheon Missile Systems is on a roll. The company's Tomahawk and Paveway missiles are the weapons of choice for the U.S. military in Iraq. Its Standard Missile 3s and its Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicles are the backbone of an elaborate plan to defend the United States and its allies from enemy attacks. Raytheon Missile Systems, a unit of Waltham, Mass., defense contractor Raytheon Co., now is the world's largest supplier of guided missiles and the largest private employer in southern Arizona. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent invasion of Iraq, Raytheon has racked up billions of dollars in new government contracts that have doubled company revenue to more than $4.5 billion a year.” <http://www.sazhightechconnect.com/headlines/index.cfm?action=view&articleID=265 >
Of course, Australia knows Raytheon as the contract administrator of the US satellite-war-fighting base Pine Gap in Alice Springs where much of the Iraqi War is being waged:
<http://bushtelegraph.wordpress.com/recent/liberating-pine-gap-by-jim-dowling-ed/>,
<http://gc.nautilus.org/Nautilus/australia/australian-defence-facilities/pine-gap/>
– what do you suppose Raytheon is doing at McMurdo? Looking for the climate change that the US administration has denied for so long?
My friend did understand that the current US election campaign is in fact a process of re-branding the America image/product – the powers that be who select presidential candidates have realized that there are about a billion white people on Earth and almost six billion non-white people – if you want to flog baubles to the natives, it’s about image: it’s better to have a salesman who looks like the locals. So Barak is in, and Monica’s stand-in, Hilary, is out. The problem is that the only products America has to sell are hi-tech weapons and the American image has become a montage of cops/killers in car chases, John Wayne on drugs, and Marilyn Monroe with petroleum-product-enhanced boobs – when actually the real boob is in the White House.
Imagine a guy who’s got this big bus with this great sound system, a big beer cooler, and lots of booze and babes, and he likes to drive around and give all these big parties on the bus to show how cool he is. Everyone wants to get on the bus, get high on all the good dope, make it with the fine foxes, and hang out with all the other cool dudes. But after some of the guests overdose, others develop AIDS, a few pedestrians are run over, and the bus runs some cars off the road, some of the former party animals get nervous and want to get off the bus – but it’s too late. Suddenly they realize the driver is drunk out of his mind, and he’s starts waving a gun around – screaming, “You guys all owe me big time”, and threatens to shoot anyone who talks about getting off the bus – and meanwhile, the bus is roaring along at 150 kph out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s running out of gas, petrol, diesel, etc.
There is a fantasy in Australia that its international trade with China and India will shield it from the consequences of the impending economic collapse of the US. However, there are many US bases in Australia, some fundamentally critical to the US space-based-war system such as Pine Gap – what will the Americans there do when they see America beginning to collapse on their TVs, when, on the news programs, they see Los Angeles burning over the riots for petrol? What will Australia do with the thousands of crazed American military/spy personnel in Australia equipped with many weapons and a “Shoot first, ask questions later” attitude?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – maybe more Australians should join the group who plan another citizen’s inspection of Pine Gap on this ANZAC Day, 25 April 2008 to discover just how beautiful the US war-machine really is:
<http://www.cairnspeacebypeace.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=65&Itemid=1>
On the fifth anniversary of the US attack on Iraq, maybe it’s time to get the Yank nerds out of the bunkers under the desert near Alice Springs where they splatter real MidEastern & Central Asian human flesh&blood by clicking on the cross-hair targets of their computer screens. What’s the difference between an American and an Australian and an Iraqi or an Afghani? Maybe Australians should get the US military out of Australia before they start shooting Australians.