It’s the only society on earth where remote-controlled torture of their own children is considered acceptable, and as they continue to debate whether people defending their homes from a brutal invading horde of murderers, torturers and sexual predators should be granted “amnesty” for having had the temerity to attempt to protect their loved ones from harm, I notice that my non-western mail speaks increasingly with one voice: You can’t reason with Americans.
Why, people ask me, do I continue to participate on forums that while they may consider themselves to be somewhat less right wing than Cheney, Rumsfeld et al, are from a distance, fundamentally ideologically indistinguishable from those forums whose stated purpose is to praise the warlords and their barbaric “policies.”

While I myself have frequently pointed out that the self-styled US “opposition” confines its opposition largely to questions of vocabulary, the fact is that in most cases, the same vocabulary is used by the warlords’ champions and critics as well, the most obvious examples being related to the US project to destroy the cradle of civilization, an activity that it is hard to argue is anything but consistent with US’s general opposition to the very concept of civilization, such as referring to people defending their homeland as “insurgents,” and increasingly, anyone who opposes or resists any US policies, regardless of how brutal, how criminal, how contrary to the most basic notions of human decency, much less civilized behavior, as “terrorists.”

I am, as the young folks say, “over it.”

While I recognize that there are a small minority of individuals in the US, as well as US nationals outside of it, who are sincerely in favor of reform, of modernization and advancement, the fact is that these individuals are not only too few to mount any significant reform movement, they are in just as much danger of being kidnapped or exterminated by US “operatives” as any soul whose native land contains a large quantity of Muslims and sand.

While half my mail takes me to task for my futile attempts to reason with Americans, the other half accuses me of hating them.

The former may have a point, the latter is absurd. How can one hate such poor deluded beings? They truly believe that they are manifestly destined to be some sort of ultimate Master Race, to decree to the benighted rest of the world how they can best serve American corporations, which service is considered to be the only reason for anyone, American or not, to exist, and he who is unable to do so should either have the courtesy to take his own life, or submit meekly to having it taken, either through sadistic slow-death domestic policies, or bombs or bullets or any of the grisly methods funded by the taxpayers for the purpose of exterminating “insurgents” and “terrorists” in the crusade lands.

One does not hate the mental patient who believes he is Napoleon, but one would be advised not to provide him with any weaponry, and to make every effort to contain him, to prevent him from doing harm to others, to himself.

And what can we consider the Americans, with the notable exception of those endangered terrorists previously mentioned, but a large population of mental patients?

If one of the better-known warlords appeared tomorrow on CNN and ordered them all to go out onto the front yard and shoot their first born, there would be none of this dilly-dallying and agonizing soul searching a la Abraham. Within hours of the order, American streets would run with the blood of millions of little Isaacs.

Of course, that has not happened, at least not yet, however far too much of the rest of the world is now dealing with the fact that the warlords have ordered their loving subjects to murder THEIR first-born, and their second-born, and the extraordinarily docile and compliant Hosni, Abdullah and ilk notwithstanding, the population of that increasingly endangered rest of the world does not consider the US to be God and they Abraham.

It matters not how deeply ingrained such a notion may be in the hearts of the American corporation devotees, it matters not that to most Americans, any other view is not only impossible, but literally inconceivable. The belief simply has not caught on outside the US and its native overseers around the world.

I am not even sure if calling it a belief is accurate. Perhaps a mental health professional will know the correct term, but religious faith, at least the only kind worth having or discussing, by its very nature DOES question, does recognize the state of non-belief. A person with religious faith will, like Abraham, struggle with concepts, ideas, tenets.

Americans do not struggle or question, neither the notion of themselves as godlike creatures who own and rule the earth, nor that they exist only to make rich men richer, nor the inconsistency of those two precepts.

They just keep prattling on about insurgents and cutting and running and imposing their wills and bringing stability and security to lands they are blowing up, or paying someone to blow up and whether people protecting their children from men with guns sent to kill them should be “pardoned” for their failure to kneel meekly and place their own and their little ones’ heads on the block, murmuring last words of gratitude for the privilege.

That any of this is to say the least, offensive to civilized people, is a file not found. That the US has the inalienable right to invade and occupy any country at any time and slaughter and abuse the occupants right and left is a given.

Though some do object to titling massacres with names like “Iron Fist,” one cannot avoid the drawing room elephant that they do not object, or at least not enough to stop the practice, to paying for the massacre.

One does not feel hate for such people, one feels pity, and sadness, and as one does when near a deathbed, one does not try to reason. One readies one’s funeral clothes, and hopes that the patient will not suffer, and will find the peace that eluded him in life.