Stinkers!

Here's a dumbfounding problem with faithless American voters! It seems we're disgusted and exhausted with how our government wields power abroad, and David Brooks of the New York Times is very disappointed in us.

Yes, Iraq and Vietnam were “disasters.” But David Brook's Panglossian remonstrations ignore the monumental scope and multiple dimensions of these moral and material outrages as well as the deadly blowback that STILL devastates US far more than just the searing physical and psychic wounds of several generations of veterans. Is the problem that simply too many of us remember how both of these conflicts were a series of soulless atrocities sold to US with an endlessly repetitive litany of cynical LIES?

But Brooks does worse than blithely ignore the truly horrific dimensions of Vietnam and Iraq when he prattles about America’s “well-meaning” deployment of power into the world. What does he say about our interventions in Italy, Greece, and Iran? What about Honduras, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua? What about the Philippines and Indonesia? Where in any of those places did the US intervene to build democracy and support human rights?

Our leaders are blind, fools, and worse.

But are WE waking up?

Can we smell the coffee? Or is it whiffs of burning blood and cordite that we twist away from?

In the meantime refugees and their children flee from the charnel houses we’ve created in Central America and trudge a winding grinding trek through Mexico only to be coldly greeted by our very special form of tortured hospitality.

Hooray for US!

Stinkers...

Would we be more morally reprehensible if most of us were actually profiting from the chaos and despair with which we scourge the world? We sure do gobble up the cheap gadgets, clothes, and furnishing assembled for us in suicide factories armed with guards and barbed wire. And immigrants with and without correct paperwork labor cheaply in sun-scorched fields and sweltering kitchens to keep us fed. Need a new roof cheap or a rapid paint job on your second house? Those quick clean workers don't speak much English yet, do they?

Right now the mainstream media is reporting the following.

• The US is the worst developed country in the world in which to GIVE BIRTH.

• The LIFE EXPECTANCY of US residents is still declining.

• The US HEALTHCARE system is deplorable when compared to other developed nations.

• Our EDUCATION systems are far from stellar.

• The state of our PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE is somewhere between subpar and a shambles.

But voters don't thrill to the idea of MORE overseas adventures?

Something sure stinks.

Is it fake news?

Or could it be US?

Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)