In the Meantime...

The Professor has been called away for a few days. In his absence I thought I'd post a response to a recent comment.

A reader made a lengthy critique on a recent post and in doing so has revealed the thinness of the scope of my analysis of who I hold accountable.  My wording made it look as if I'm holding politicians solely responsible which isn't the case, though I do think them accountable for a great deal. The innumerable instances over time of the power seeking corrupt behavior by politicians I touched on has culminated with them having, at this point, very little power at all, as the reader points out. We as a nation get what we deserve for our inattention, laziness, and apathy which seems to be either the politician who gets into the game with a desire for money and power  (today we might add celebrity) or the man or woman who sincerely hopes to change things for the better and arrives in office to find that the influence he hoped to have in fact lies elsewhere and he is for all practical purposes powerless beyond tinkering about the edges a bit.

But if we are to blame, instead of government, the giant multinationals then we must take a bit (or perhaps a lot) of blame on ourselves. We feed them. We are the ones who succumb to their advertising, waste our time on the entertainment they produce, and buy from them things we do not need with money we don't have. We buy and consume with little thought to the consequences of our actions. We have eschewed simplicity and  become slaves to "our current commercial culture" and I'm afraid in doing so we've thrown away the lion's share of freedom with both hands. As I've said there is plenty of blame to go around and in the end we have, as a whole, brought it upon ourselves.

Perhaps America isn't ready to take on the role of empire proper, but I suspect citizens of a great many other nations would take the view that we've been making a pretty good go of it, albeit clumsily, for quite some time. Being deeply in debt to our rival makes confrontation difficult as we recently observed.

Under the current circumstances we don't "have the stomach for such a leader." But my fear is that given the right conditions, every nation does.