Carrying the Weight of the World. Solo.

Over in his London home, NYT columnist Roger Cohen and his dinner guests are second-guessing the choices of the American people.*

“It’s the post-American world — and that means chaos.”

one German friend of his observed.

We were joined by John Kornblum, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, whose verdict was similar: “What you’re seeing is the steady break-up of the postwar system.”

Cohen and his foreign pals, naturally, would like our taxpayers to continue picking up the world's 'security' tab, underwriting real dangers so other countries can continue to concentrate on internal investment and development, prospering while their world markets are well protected.

Nevermind the young American blood shed.
The costs of crippling injuries to vets, and the permanent disability payments for these families affected, which will be born by the next two generations of Americans, at least.

You see, 'war' -- the hot destructive phase -- is easy really...
especially when you're comfortably situated, munching on your sweet dinner nibs, surely drinking a fine wine, and contemplating the loss of American muscle...

I'm ok with that.

Here's the part that concerns me: clearly, Cohen and friends are unable to articulate a convincing case for the American taxpayers to fund terrorist rebels looking to overthrow the Syrian government.

So, they're proposing an end-run around the Constitution, bypassing the will of the People, and looking to force the use of force on Americans, regaardless of what we here at home want...

It might even be that Putin, having made an impassioned case for international law, will rise above his Libyan hangover and allow a Western-drafted Security Council resolution framing the deal under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, which allows for military intervention in the event of Syrian noncompliance. (Without this, any agreement is meaningless.)

Who wouldn't want to live the good life on another man's tab? Plenty of non-militarized nations are profiting nicely of late, in fact. Woof woof. They're just more competitive, I'm sure...

No doubt Cohen and friends will be able to easily stomach the deaths of Christians -- children even, just no gas please. Bad memories and all... -- and the slaughter of non-Jewish religious minorities in the self-contained chaos that would come when they conclude the destructive work is done, the rebuilding is on somebody else's chore chart, and we leave yet another leaderless vacuum behind. ('Americans are such suckers'. heh.)


They seem to have no trouble digesting what's been wrought already in the countries we've 'helped'... to the tune of billions and billions of dollars that could have been much better spent fixing problems in our house.

So raise your glass in the air, and all that, three cheers for the Americans. Hoorah. I mean, who could imagine a world without us?

"Party over; oops... out of time."
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* Why am I picturing this group as the philosophical Jewish golfers led by Alan King whose discussion on the course opens and closes Sunshine State?

"Nature is overrated." but "we'll miss it when it's gone."

In Sunshine State, John Sayles' witty, bitter new movie about the rape of old Florida, three smart-mouth Yankee retirees on the Atlantic coast negotiate nine-irons and sand traps while philosophizing on the state as Paradise Sold. Florida was nothing, one old boy says, nothing but a place of swamps and alligators, "populated by white people who ate catfish." Then, hallelujah, the developers came and gave us the condo, the strip mall, the gated community and that highest triumph of Middle-Class Man over Wilderness, the golf course -- "Nature on a LEASH."
...
Toward the end of Sunshine State, the golfers discuss how species are going extinct right and left and how Florida will one day return to the sea from whence it came. One golfer, disgusted with the depressing intricacies of weather and global warming, snarls, "Nature is overrated." Then the other one comes back with, "But we'll miss it when it's gone."