Irony overload

The American Dream, it turns out, is the one where you wake up with blood on your hands and you don’t know where it came from.

Americans are immigrants. They exterminated 90% of the people who lived in the land they invaded and colonised, then imported half a million slaves from Africa. 160 years later they’re suddenly shocked that there are a lot of foreigners about. Being from overseas is as American as pizza, or breathtaking ignorance.

It’s like New Zealanders suddenly wondering where all these fucking sheep came from.

Many immigrants are escaping countries ruined by US bombs. Most of the criminal ones are criminal because they’re smuggling mind-numbing drugs into a nation that still claims to be the happiest on Earth. Of course, the happiest people I know are addicted to opioids and have a tendency to shoot up schools.

They’re siding with Israel, which is busy exterminating 50,000 people in Gaza by very carefully and strategically obliterating every home and hospital, and then firebombing the tents in the refugee camps. They’re telling the nasty old Ukrainians they tricked the poor old Russians into driving tanks into their country and stealing a fifth of it. Maybe Trump thinks the whole country was wearing a short skirt, so was asking for it.

The irony is that the extent to which the Ukrainians did antagonise Putin, was largely down to wanting to join NATO, and be on the US’s side. If they put pressure on Russia’s borders, it was at the US’s behest, with US weaponry.

I don’t know about you, but I was under the distinct impression that all this NATO stuff, led by the US, was part of the 76-year programme spending trillions of dollars preparing to repel a Russian invasion of Europe. This extended to building enough nuclear missiles to turn almost everyone on Earth into a flaming skeleton inside half an hour. That’s why I spent cosy childhood nights envisaging the minute long rush of the firestorm from a Russian nuclear strike on the airport down the road from my bed.

Now that a Russian invasion of Europe is well under way, I think we can all agree that was money well spent. It’s heartening how we’re now cutting aid money to buy more things to kill people with. It’s not like there’s a looming poly-crisis threatening the entire future of the human race or anything. The starving people can wait while we just finish up killing each other.

The US, apparently, is roughly as loyal as the hyena you thought was a dog.

Trump says immigrants are destroying his country. But, all in all, a quick glance at the real world beyond his oranga-fringe suggests that the US is actually only in favour of people being in someone else’s country if they really are destroying it.

The message seems to be: “Don’t come into our country to work like slaves for us so your kids can train as doctors. Either arrive in chains, or storm in shooting. Beat our kids’ brains out with rifle butts, rape anything that moves and infect everyone with small pox. That’s the way we did it in the good old days.”

It’s kind of - Make America Gits Again. And the joy of it all is that so many nations will be only too happy to follow those instructions all over the world in just a few years’ time.

It’s hardly surprising the US administration is stamping out accurate history teaching. Its moral stance only makes sense if history didn’t happen. And the present wasn’t happening. And the future doesn’t happen either.

We’ve had the War on Drugs. And the War on Terror. You’ll have noticed they were both lost. Now we’ve got the War on Woke. Woke, of course, basically means “being nice to people”. It’s a war on being friendly, so kind of makes sense. It’s also a War on Reality, which tends to be a tough opponent. Trump firing missiles at hurricanes. He said he wanted to end US wars. Then threatened to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama and Greenland. It’s like he’s pissed out of his mind cheating at strip Risk with a traumatised intern tied to her chair.

I mean, who cares about gender nuance? Or climate change? The truth is, it doesn’t matter. It doesn't matter whether you care about them or not. They’ll carry on just the same. The US not caring about climate change is like a chain smoker not caring about their throat cancer diagnosis.

The most heavily armed nation the world has ever seen has developed a masochistic need to find interesting new ways to lose wars.

Perhaps it’s the guilt. They’ve been staggering around like a Cowboy Macbeth since those pajama wearing commies kicked their ass out of Vietnam. "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" is currently a pretty good summation of US policy on practically everything.

Even though they lost, they love that war so much they’re still making films about it half a century later. They’ve already made blockbusters about Afghanistan, when they only retreated from there with their shiny cargo shorts round their ankles three years ago.

US special forces veterans are all over YouTube flexing their Opus Dei tattoos, teaching teenage incels to become alpha-male red-pilled sexual tyrannosaurs. They never let on the most important fact - that they got whooped. They lost hands down to a bunch of aging goat herders with antique weapons, no body armour, no steroids and precious little food. It’s like Conor MacGregor danced into the ring and got beaten like a gong by a homeless guy called Carl who’d been living on squirrels.

If I didn’t know better I might start to suspect the super rich patriots who own the US military complex don’t really care if they win or lose a war, so long as there are plenty of wars. They don’t care that cousin Dwayne got his legs blown off while trying to clear his student debt, because they win every which way. They profit from the weapons they sold to the target country before they sent Dwayne there to face them. They profit from the weapons Dwayne took with him. They profit from rebuilding bits of the country Dwayne destroyed with those weapons, right up to the point where he picked up that hotwired copy of Hustler with the Kim Kardashian lookalike on the cover.

They’re now profiting royally from Dwayne’s privatised health care, leaving him with more bills than a Pelican colony and a debt equivalent to the national deficit of Sudan. That’s probably where they would have sent him next, if his balls weren’t in a tin cup full of Jack Daniels next to his hospital bed. So maybe they’ll send his younger brother.

Meanwhile, the life of the entire world is being choked out by our growth, and centre right and centre left parties all over the world are urgently responding by stopping environmental programmes to concentrate on…more growth. The world’s on fire, so let’s drill baby drill more flammable liquid, because we’re fuckwits.

We’re in a train, heading for a crash. And our political and corporate leaders are doing everything they can to speed up. The ultra rich are buying bunkers and wondering how not to get killed by their own security details. Explosive collars? Becoming sex slaves to the armed guards? Flying to Mars to live in The Worst Place Not Even on Earth. Oh, the agony of choice that riches bring…

If we don’t rein them in soon, then what happens next, and to all our descendants, will be only what we’re asking for and deserve.