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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 15, 2014)
Street roots Aug. 15, 2014 AU fall down: Is the United States the next Third World? BY MIKE WOLD again reached the gridlock stage. However, having proposed this model, t last count, the U.S. had more than Greer, who writes the popular blog “The 500 military bases in other countries. Archdruid Report,” is neither incisive nor It spends as much on its aimed forces consistent in applying it. He doesn’t make as the rest of the world combined. much sense on his own terms. According to author John Michael Greer, If we’re at the gridlock stage in his eyrie, that’s because the United States is an one would expect him to advocate a new empire and its military dominance is in the leader like Roosevelt or Lincoln taking service of maintaining that empire. charge and cutting through that Gordian “Decline and Fall” gives a succinct knot definition of empire as “an arrangement | Instead, he suggests we’ll be .saved by among nations, backed and usually imposed small-scale democratic institutions, such as by military force, which extracts wealth 19th-century school boards and local sewer from a periphery of subject nations and districts. He idealizes 19th century I concentrates it in the imperial core.” The schooling — which by and large excluded U.S. version involves client states and allied African-Americans and systematically governments that maintain the structures to underserved thé poor — and makes the keep the wealth pumping, particularly from questionable claim that people were better the “Third World.” Greer points out that educated in the mid-18()0s than today, empires have a relatively short lifespan on basing this on the. contents of 19th-century the world stage. For the U.S., he believes» textbooks and the sophistication of the we’ve about reached the end of our tenure. Lincoln-Douglass debates. As for sewer Greer ranges across world history to districts, some people in Seattle may explain his theory of the rise and fall of remember when Metro was formed in the empires, from ancient Egypt, when the “¡Sea 1950s to repair the harm that local sewer People” developed a counterweight to districts had done by discharging untreated superior Egyptian military technology, to waste into Lake Washington. Whât’s even the origins of the blitzkrieg concept in more confusing is that Greer appears to he Sherman’s march through the South in the cynical about democracy in any case < American Civil War. considering it to be inevitably corrupt, since He also lays out a theory of the voters always seek out their own self- development and decline Of our democracy. interest. Quoting the ancient Greek philosopher Greer has little tolerance for other ways Polybius, fie proposes that democracy goes : of looking at political reality, whether liberal, through cycles, from beginnings with a conservative or radical, dismissing them as strong leader who resolves some intractable misguided “handwaving.” He tends to problem to a final stage where power is so pontificate, argues from anecdotes rather diffused that a new problem cannot be than real evidence and repeats his points solved without another such leader over and over. He’s not averse to distorting emerging. facts to strengthen his case, as when he lumps Keynesian economics with other He identifies Washington, Lincoln,, and mainstream economic theories, saying they Franklin Roosevelt'as the U.S. leaders who “ignore the fact that an economy left to its played this role and suggests that.we’ve C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R B Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America by John Michael Greer own devices can dole out decades of misery to everybody” (not leaving the economy to its own devices is a large part of what Keynesianism is about). Similarly, he claims that the weakness of the political left in the United States since the 1960s is due to its commitment to consensus, ignoring that most of the left, including the labor movement, does riot use consensus to make decisions. Greer seems to believe that use of fossil fuels is what riiade industrialism possible, arguing that as oil and coal get more expensive, industrial society will cease to exist. But the energy and labor efficiencies of using machinery are real, regardless of whether the machines are powered by oil, solar power, humans or animals: The beginnings of industrialization predate the use of coal or oil as power sources. Greer concludes , that people iri the U.S, will just have to get used to living without surplus wealth from other countries, as well as, from the extra wealth provided by the use of fossil fuels. This certainly makes sense to the degree that people in the U.S. shard in the wealth that flows in from the ; plunder of poorer countries. However, his characterization of the result being similar to living in a Third World society doesn’t. The Third World, after all, is the other end of the “wealth pump” for our empire. Greer has already noted that the impoverishment of the Third World is a direct result of being exploited by various empires. ; Does he really mean to imply that the U.S. would just become some other country’s imperial colony? He’s strangely silent on what might replace U.S. dominance. Wouldn’t It be better to rid the world of empires altogether? Reprinted from Real Change, Street Roots* sister paper in Seattle, Wash. The door a lifetime commitment: Part 1 by Leo Rhodes In my mind Is a door I never visit The door is locked And the key is hidden Never to be opened Sometimes I hear the creaking sound of the door opening A sense of panic rushes over me I try to stabilize myself Mustering all my courage I seek the door My emotions intensify But I don’t show it Sometimes I’m lucky and find the door And lock the door before\its to late Other times its to late untitled 27 by William Holmes the rustling tide with shallow breaths ebb, replenish, hold selfish fnurmur rolling hollow, determined steady beat astigmatic white with verdant shards, ink drops dilate aperture distilled, enamored portrait retina etched ;
