Knock,
knock,
knockin'
on Hell's
door

Umeruhca: Empire of adolescents
Harold Hark
8 November 2002

"A veteran New York political operative once told me: 'Never underestimate the subtext of male violence that runs through American politics.' Voters need to believe their president is a tough guy, able to throw a punch if he has to." Jonathan Freedland, The Natural.

George W. Bush swaggers across the stage of Umeruhca like a modern day gunslinger. And the Umeruhcans love him for it.

Every nation has its iconic representation and the United States is no exception. For them it is the 19th century gunslinger poised at fifty paces to shoot it out with the other guy. Over the decades the black and white definition of which one was good and which one was bad has been blurred. Now they just have the gunslinger.

It's a toss up between Billy the Kid and John Wayne over who gets to be the icon. But since Wayne was an actor, Billy the Kid has to wear the crown.

Sometimes he was good, sometimes he was bad. Above all, he liked to have a good time taking what he wanted and scaring the shit out of the townsfolk.

For Umeruhcans, The Kid represents the tough individual unrestrained by group consensus. He could transmogrify on a whim from bully to saviour. Indeed the two extremes have become inseparable.

This ability to look after your own while fearlessly staring down a perceived enemy (from the comfort of invulnerability provided by taxpayer-funded security) is what modern day Umeruhcans like about George W. Bush. While claiming to be the world's saviour in the war on terrorism, he has no qualms implementing bully tactics in getting his, the Umeruhcan, way.

But by giving Bush both houses of Congress in the mid-term election, the Umeruhcan people have given away their future. The failing economy, rising unemployment, the environmental vandalism coming soon to Alaska did not matter to them. What mattered was Homeland Security: the voluntary surrender of the rights others have fought for since 1776.

They have unwittingly become the cowering townsfolk at the mercy of the gunslinger or the cattle baron--updated here to oil baron--who regards them as fodder for his imperialist, land-grabbing empire.

It's as if they had a death wish. After so many generations of mindless subservience to the omniscient Klutz-Klutcher in their lounge rooms, they no longer know who they are, but only who they are told to be. The trouble is, every new season gives them different role models. They have become a Frankenstein of disparate parts: the sexually giddy, comically ineffectual serial killer. No wonder their hero is George W. Bush.

That Umeruhca is an imperialist nation cannot be refuted. One of the root causes of worldwide hatred against it's peculiar, embarrassing style of imperialism, is that it is perceived abroad as a Hollywoodised gunslinger riding roughshod over subservient, adulating populations who speak weird languages. Umeruhca sees its global hegemony in the role of saviour; the rest of us see it as a bully.

Furthermore, the rest of the world, populated by those who have gone through centuries of tribulation, see Umeruhca as the embodiment of a puer aeternis stoked on aggression. A nation of affable, slightly insane Billy the Kids ready to slap you on the back as they deliver the gospel of their life inexperience at gun-point.

Sooner or later this fractured view of life will cause Umeruhcans to implode. They are children playing an adult game, which just happens to be the game of life. The implosion will signal the end of their immature empire and leave them, more or less, where they started. As a nation in chaos, with gun-toting marauders preying on cowering townsfolk.

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