PhilPaine.com

We con­tin­ue to swel­ter in a long heat­wave, alter­nat­ing with fierce thun­der­storms and tornados.

The news is dom­i­nat­ed by Lebanon. There are, appar­ent­ly, fifty thou­sand Cana­di­an cit­i­zens in Lebanon, and the Con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment in Cana­da seems to be doing an incom­pe­tent, chaot­ic job of evac­u­at­ing them. It is not the least of the cracks that are start­ing to appear in Stephen Harper’s administration.

Harper’s elec­tion last Christ­mas was one of the worst turns of events in Cana­di­an his­to­ry. The changes that are tak­ing place in the world, cur­rent­ly, are pre­cise­ly those that Harp­er is the least com­pe­tent to deal with.

The world is rapid­ly feu­dal­iz­ing. It is being tak­en over by a glob­al aris­toc­ra­cy of bil­lion­aire crim­i­nals and hered­i­tary wealth, backed by a swin­dling sys­tem of inter­na­tion­al finance and armies of thugs-for-hire. The Unit­ed States, which, despite some seri­ous inter­nal flaws, for many gen­er­a­tions pro­vid­ed some degree of demo­c­ra­t­ic and pro­gres­sive exam­ple, is now firm­ly in the hands of this glob­al aris­toc­ra­cy. Amer­i­cans have become so cul­tur­al­ly iso­lat­ed that, except in a few priv­iledged cir­cles, they don’t under­stand that they no longer rule them­selves. Even the tra­di­tion­al “disident cul­ture” in the Unit­ed States does not grasp this, and con­tin­ues to fight old bat­tles and old issues with­in old tem­plates. They still assume that Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy is pur­sued by Amer­i­cans to fur­ther Amer­i­can interests.

But this is not the case. The fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the evils of the times of Ronald Rea­gan and Richard Nixon and the evil that emanates from the White House today is that those who rule today are not Amer­i­cans. The White House is not loy­al to Amer­i­ca. Amer­i­cans are noth­ing to the crowd of crim­i­nals behind George W. Bush. To these peo­ple, Amer­i­cans are just anoth­er bunch of peas­ants, no more sig­nif­i­cant to them than Iraqi peas­ants or Venuzue­lan peas­ants. Their loy­al­ty is to the new glob­al gentry.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Amer­i­cans find their coun­try drift­ing into ever more com­plex pat­terns of inter­na­tion­al deploy­ment, wars, schemes and cri­sis which they can’t under­stand, and have no means of interpreting.