This video, from sellaseat at YouTube, just about matches the mood right now. We've been hearing the warnings our whole lives... the environment... debt.... war.... consumerism...it'll do us in they always said. But that would be a long time from now, right? But I read this over at ICH and... this...and....this and....I dunno. I'm a huge critic of American empire, yet... I've never known what it was like to have to listen to another country. Being "#1" was like longitude and latitude... you just knew where you were. There's a great documentary on PBS about the Spanish-American-Cuban-Philippine War, and the message in it is stark. Ironically it chronicles the fall of the Spanish empire just as it explains the rise of the American one. My favorite story comes at the end when, after U.S. troops began falling from tropical diseases, necessitating American acceptance of a conditional rather than an unconditional surrender in order to just get the thing over with, Spain's only 'condition' was that they needed a ride home. They couldn't even afford to bring their troops back and we had sunk their navy. I always thought, how ignoble an end. I remember back in the early 90's in grad school taking a course on Chinese history and another in Chinese geography. Both of those professors had this to say, even back then: learn Mandarin.
08 November 2007
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