name: Yuram Abdullah Weiler

Autumn Allegory

12 August, 2009

“But the days grow short when you reach September when the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame one hasn’t got time for the waiting game.” - September Song, sung by Frank Sinatra.[1]

 

As autumn approaches in both a literal and allegorical sense, the time is well suited for contemplative reflection and introspection,  both for me individually and for America collectively.

 

A slight coolness in the morning air hints that autumn is literally near and soon the leaves will start to change color.  In Colorado, deciduous trees are scarce, so  dazzling displays of multi-colored autumn leaves are rare; only the Aspen trees  in the mountains exhibit a brief blaze of brilliant yellow against a backdrop  of perennially verdant evergreens.

 

Likewise, the U.S. economy is not showing a brilliant blaze of fiscal fall colors, either.  Despite  massive government outlays of currency green, the economy is still in the red  as it slumps into September.  With record budget  deficits[2] and real  unemployment around 16%,[3] it appears to be withering away like a yellowing autumn Aspen leaf.

 

Autumn’s approach seems to emphasize that I, too, am allegorically approaching the autumn of my life and my days are indeed growing short.  An urgent sense of time running out is amplified not only by events in my own life but also by the  politics-as-usual taking place in an atmosphere of denial in the United States.

 

As for me, for the fourth time in the past eight years, I have received a layoff notice, suggesting that apparently, even as the autumn of my life nears, I still haven’t learned how to play the game.  But this foreboding economic event pales in comparison to a recent tragedy involving my son, which has forced me to learn firsthand about the dysfunctional dispositions of the American legal and healthcare systems.

 

As for America, its global empire is also rapidly approaching its allegorical autumn and the days of “full spectrum dominance”[4] are growing short.  Obviously, America’s  bulging budget deficits and extravagant energy expenditures cannot continue indefinitely.  However, Washington remains in denial and insists that maintaining military might is the prescription for all problems. 

 

The Pentagon is accelerating plans for a new, massive 30,000  pound “bunker buster,” the largest conventional bomb ever produced in the U.S. presumably for use against perceived nuclear threats by North Korea and Iran.[5]  “We will maintain America’s military dominance,” President Obama recently exhorted at the U.S. Naval Academy.[6]

 

The President would be wise to heed the words of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, who observed, “If force were a permanent and decisive  remedy, the Pharoahs and tyrants would have survived.”[7] 

 

Maintaining the American military requires money and energy, two items in increasingly short supply in these days of worldwide economic woes.  Despite this, the U.S. Congress still provides funding on demand to sustain imperial wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.  Only one Senator, Russell Feingold, (Democrat, Wisconsin) was courageous enough to vote against the latest supplemental war funding.[8]

 

Regarding the money required to finance its global reach, Professor Chalmers Johnson remarked, “the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy.”[9] 

 

China is also concerned over America’s solvency, since it is the largest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds. During a recent visit to China hastily arranged to allay such financial fears, U.S. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner spoke at Peking University  and afterwards fielded questions from the audience.  One concerned student asked about the safety of China’s U.S. investments.  “Chinese assets are very safe,” Geithner glibly responded to the question, after which  skeptical laughter burst out in the audience.[10]

 

Regarding the enormous energy America consumes to maintain its international imperium, Nobuo Tanaka, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris warned, “Current trends in energy  supply and consumption are patently unsustainable,” adding, “greenhouse-gas emissions would be driven up inexorably, putting the world on track for an eventual global temperature increase of up to 6°C.”[11]

 

The patently unsustainable status quo is alluded to deep inside a Department of Defense (DoD) report to Congress that admits, “DoD is the largest single energy consumer in the Nation representing 78% of the  federal sector, and a significant (and sometimes the largest) energy user in many local metropolitan areas.”[12]

 

Global warming has already forced the DoD to acknowledge that “because of the near certainty of climate change and subsequent sea level  rise, many coastal DoD installations run the risk of losing operational capabilities as continued sea level rise impacts their current infrastructure and training regimes.”[13]

 

As an aside, the DoD is facing formidable costs just to clean up its own mess of unexploded ordnance. According to the Defense Science Board, there are some 3,400 munitions dumps on 27 million acres of land which would cost an estimated $50 billion to clean up.[14]  In fact, cleaning up the DoD’s unexploded ordnance (UXO) has become a growth industry with its own non-profit trade association.[15]

 

America must confront the hypocrisy of its own leaders who condemn spending $1 trillion for humanitarian healthcare over ten years as fiscally irresponsible, while they condone spending almost $1 trillion to wage  worldwide wars every year.[16]  The cost of such healthcare for the uninsured could easily be covered by the estimated $100 billion annual savings that would  result from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone.[17]

 

For America to survive as a responsible leader in the international community, it must spearhead the search for solutions to the distressing dilemmas we face from global wars to global warming within the constraints of a contracting economy.  It must scrutinize its collective conscience over the morality of funding futilewars to kill people or having healthcare to cure people.  It must choose between financial bailouts for international investment houses or common citizens’ houses. 

 

America must take action to address the morally repugnant reality that some 50 million of its citizens --and I’m one of them-- are without medical insurance,[18]while a privileged few corporate chiefs and highly paid executives extort compensation totaling $2.1 trillion, representing one third of the nation’s entire $6.4 trillion payroll.[19]

 

Professor Noam Chomsky has suggested a number of possible cures for America’s ethical ills; among them are to “let the UN take the lead  in international crises,” and to “cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending.”[20]  Both of these are necessary but probably not sufficient to reverse its decline and prevent America from becoming the largest “failed state.”

 

Like me, America is entering the allegorical autumn of its life and must either make painful moral choices now or it will be assured the inevitable fate of all earlier empires. As its days grow short, it simply hasn’t got time for the waiting game.

 

Yuram Abdullah Weiler

2009-08-09

 

Endnotes

Posted by yuram 10:24 | Middle East , United States | Comment(0) | Permalink