“Controversy, Crap, and Confusion”
Writing by treason on Tuesday, 21 of February , 2006 at 8:08 am
Alan Simpson again, summing up Washington. But I suspect it’s the same wherever you go. I was listening to the radio and heard a local news report about a woman who stole a new red Hummer. Her explanation was that she was cold and hungry, and that it was the owner’s fault for leaving the thing running. It’s just peculiar how we humans interpret the world.
How I see it, how you see it; how I say it, how you hear it. It’s like that horrible question pollsters keep asking. The one that says the country’s headed in the wrong direction. How do you answer that one? It’s always interpreted the same way: the majority of Americans feel that the country is headed in the wrong direction - it’s George Bush’s fault. Maybe that’s one way to interpret it. Liberals think we’re living in a totalitarian state, just waiting to be rounded up and put in camps. Conservatives might answer that we’re headed in the wrong direction because there are so many irresponsible people in the world who can’t even manage to teach their kids to stay off a neighbor’s property. We have education program after education program and people are still contracting STDs, littering, getting knocked up, letting pets get knocked up, driving drunk, and, in general, acting stupid.
Maybe we’re headed in the wrong direction because the government’s getting bigger and spending too much of our money. Maybe we’re headed in the wrong direction because there are too many stations selling Girls Gone Wild videos in the middle of the night. There are a million ways to answer that question, but no way to interpret it accurately.
The latest story up for interpretation is the one about our ports. When I heard Americans were horrified because “foreigners” owned them, I had to laugh. It appears that Americans are oblivious to who owns what. In high school I had a savings account in a bank and everyone assumed because the bank was in this country it was an American bank. I knew it wasn’t. People work in buildings in America that aren’t owned by Americans. People work for companies and don’t even realize they aren’t American companies. What are people looking at when they read product labels?
No one seemed to mind when the British owned these ports and I suspect that’s because few people knew about it. The Redcoats owned our ports? Not an issue. No one remembers the Revolution, but people do remember the Beatles and they were cute. Besides, the British are considered our friends these days. But we also have friends in the UAE and there’s every indication that Dubai Ports World has an impeccable reputation. Why, then, is there a problem?
Because UAE is the United Arab Emirates. This is the part that has me confused. When Bill Clinton went to Dubai and said “it was a big mistake,” and he wasn’t talking about Monica, a lot of people were…concerned. When Algore recently announced at the annual Jeddah economic forum that, after September 11, Arabs were mistreated on American soil, a lot of people were even more…uh, concerned.
And they were told they were overreacting. Algore and friends have made it a habit to tell the world that Americans are racist, sexist homophobes and xenophobic to boot. We think all Arabs are the same, all Muslims are the same. All the same terrorists. But now they’re suddenly the ones who are using the T word. We can’t turn our ports over to these people! They’re terrorists! They can’t be trusted! Whoa - talk about profiling.
On the surface, it does sound odd that we’d turn our ports over to the UAE. But it’s also going to be odd when we tell our allies - and we need all the friends we can get in that region - that we’re nixing the deal because well, you guys just can’t be trusted.
Talk about being between Iraq and a hard place.
Category: Uncategorized
- Add this post to
- Del.icio.us -
- Digg -
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
