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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Sunday, June 16, 2002
19:40 - The White Man's Burden
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/channel/highlights_heat.html

(top) link
The National Geographic Channel today had a series of "Into the Fire" shows, with a group of American thrill-seekers and photo-journalists traversing the Sahara on fan-driven parasails with 4x4 support vehicles. Looked awfully fun.

Except that when they were in Chad, they had to spend a lot of time dodging rebel groups and anti-American sentiment. (Wasn't Chad one of the nations we'd listed as being known terrorist-harborers?) One of the team members' son was kidnapped (and later released) while they were there.

At one point, they came across a giant Mercedes truck with what had to be at least thirty men on its back, their bags of goods hung out over each side, perched precariously atop the mound like a Dr. Seuss drawing. It's a very National Geographic kind of visual-- gosh, look at the local laborers and how poor they are, and yet how carefree and simple their lives! Oh, for the purity of such a life. Do be a dear and turn up the A/C, would you?


At least, that's the impression the show seems to want to give; after the trekkers have conversed with the men on the truck in French (and convinced them with some difficulty that they were private citizens and not in fact agents of the American government (Oh, oui! Tres bien!), the adventurer told the camera what he had heard from the man he'd been talking to.
"He asked, 'Why are you so rich and we are so poor? Why are you driving this luxury 4x4 vehicle, while we're all piled up in the back of this truck? Why doesn't America give something to us, so that we can have it a little easier?' ... Kind of a hard question to answer."

Yeah, maybe it's hard to answer when you're sitting there in the Chad desert among thirty of these guys who already distrust you. But sitting here at home, I have two answers to offer:
  1. We've tried that. We've been sending food aid into countries like Somalia and Chad and Ethiopia and the like for decades now, and we've observed that the only thing that ever happens to it is that it gets intercepted by warlords and turned into guns to kill other warlords. (Then why don't they send in the US military to stop the warlords? What, you mean like in Mogadishu?)
  2. Why are you so poor? Because you live in a bloody desert. Chad has no useful arable land. Where do you expect wealth to come from? Buried treasure in the oases? An efficient manufacturing and ore-processing industry? The cultural purity of smiling local laborers? Look, some countries just happen to have more means to create wealth than others. America is rich because we took off from the most technologically and industrially advanced nation in Europe and annexed ourselves a gigantic landmass comprising every biome on Earth, full of enough natural resources to secede and become our own planet. Then we proceeded to advance the state of the art in agriculture, mining, civil engineering, and every other field to such an extent that if America hadn't existed, the planet would still probably be in the latter phase of the Industrial Age. That's why we're so rich.

To what extent are we obliged to divest ourselves of the wealth we have ourselves earned and inherited in order to even out perceived imbalances between ourselves and countries that haven't been so lucky or so diligent? Why is it our responsibility to make up for Chad's standard of living just because they can't make any food of their own? I mean, yes, I understand the whole thing about charity and all, and I'm all for it. If we're that much more comfortable, and would feel that much less of a pinch from giving some up, then by all means we should if it means raising the standard of living for people whose lives consist of traveling hundreds of miles a week on a towering truck and dodging armed rebel factions and warlords in order to obtain some semblance of subsistence in the middle of a famine. Not doing so makes us decadent and monstrous, and would mean we deserve the looks of disgust we get in the countries that would prefer to see us all dead.

But when there's such genuine inability to comprehend why Americans should have it so good-- why they should have air-conditioned SUVs and the wealth it takes to jaunt about the Sahara in a parasail just for the fun of it-- well, there's a certain point at which it becomes pointless to try to explain it. This isn't a world where righteousness and purity wins, much as the fundamentalist Muslims would like to believe that it is. Living a life of ascetic inconsequence and submission to the teachings of some ancient book don't make one rich or one's country supreme. This is a world where personal achievement and natural advantages will rule. It's called competition. It leads to capitalism and democracy. That's why we have SUVs, and why people living in the desert think we're evil.

We're not interested in empire. That age is long over, and we'd taken ourselves out of that game long before the European nations started to do so. We have our recipe for achievement, we've set up the tools we need to vault forward into the future, and we've tried to bring the rest of the world along for the ride-- but some of the world would rather stay behind. That's fine; far be it from us to dictate their domestic issues. But they don't get to blame us for it or knock down our skyscrapers just because they're pissed off that they're not the ones making Levi's and McDonald's burgers.

I dunno. I'm just sick of being made to feel guilty that our country has succeeded. Thanks a lot, National Geographic.

After all, can you imagine how poorly it would reflect upon the American people if, having started out with all the advantages we had, and with all the potential afforded us by our social and political system, we didn't become the dominant player in the world?

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© Brian Tiemann