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the thread assumes the conservative view of the situation--that america does nothing to provoke or support regimes that provoke people to desperate acts, and that the problem is not one of changing how the states is or acts, but rather one of defending and order that cannot be understood as other than an unquestioned good--that premise is faulty, top to bottom.
there is no way to prevent another attack.
what then would make the situation better?
first and foremost, booting out the bush administration in november: consign them and their infantile worldview to the ash-heap of history as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
second, isolationism seems to me a pipe dream, there is no way to pull american forces back to within american borders.
you could start by trying to actually face what is unfolding already at the economic level, and is beginning to take shape politically: a more globally oriented type of capitalism.
and you could continue along this line by facing the consequences of capitalism in its various forms, left to itself and the "enlightened self-interest" of its agents--unequal distribution of all resources, economic, cultural, political; the brutalization of a significant segment of the world's population so that the american middle class can tweeze about in its present mode, and work to develop other legal and instutional frameworks to redirect capitalism in a less barbaric direction.
politic conflicts need to be addressed even-handedly.
failure to do this will eventually bring about a rain of 911s.
particularly once you combine political conflict with economic, cultural brutality.
in a context shaped by the international arms trade.
you would have to not limit information by using categories like "anti-american".
you would have to become less convinced of the singularity of america. maybe actually pushing the seperation of church and state wider would help.
it makes no sense for the americans to act unilaterally: iraq has shown (as if this was necessary, as if this was the first time) that there is nothing about being a leader of america that entails the direct grace from some god, such that there are no worries of the americans screwing up, and seriously screwing up.
in this assumption, the bush administration shows itself to be like any other monopoly--not able to see the world around it, it substitutes the world as it would like it to be and, worse, acts on that basis.
the nature of the economic and political beast is toward multilateral relations.
whether this is in itself a good thing or not is for the moment beside the point: there is no coherent way for the americans to pretend that their lives, their activities and their politics are not tightly implicated in the world.
personally, i think this mutation of economic activity is going to be the death of the outmoded idea of nation-states and the accompanying blight of nationalism along with it, in the longer run.
with this last bit in mind, i would support a less adversarial relationship with the un. but i do not think the un in its present form is going to be able to manage the problems that will emerge with an increasingly interconnected global capitalist environment.
because, despite the hallucinations of conservatives on the question of the un, it is built around the defense and maintenance of nation-states. as they become more obsolete, it will too.
something needs to be done to curtail the international arms trade.
i do not see the point of any of the security measures outlined above. i do not see why having pilots with guns will help anything, for example: i would rather they fly the planes. i do not see why the illusion of sealing american borders is coherent. it will not help.
you want to really make the situation better--educate folk from the earliest periods in a way that eliminates all traces of american exceptionalism, american patriotic history--orient people toward thinking internationally. encourage students to learn langauges other than english at levels that go beyond asking what time is that and whether the young girl over there is your sister.
be up front about the effects of cowboy capitalism and help them think about other ways of doing things.
and assume that, with these elements (and a host of others of parallel import) they will make a less barbaric capitalism, a less barbaric world.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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