Turtle on a Post

A Turtle on a Post

I got this from an American friend.

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher whose
hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a
conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah
Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President .
The old rancher said, 'Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.'
Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.
The old rancher said, 'When you're driving down a country road and you
come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post
turtle.'
The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued
to explain. 'You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't
belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and
you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.


Humour is great, but what a lot of people do not realize is that it is time for America to be serious about issues...and the feckless US media should stop making talking points about Palin's wardrobe (now that is a fantasy, is it not!) while the whole world is waiting for America to change (and I am not talking about the change that Obamaites talk about). America has caused so much grief all around the world with wars of aggression ...(170 unauthorized invasions of various countries since the first one in the Phillipines in the early part of the previous century) and the American electorate is not talking about the 1.5 million civilians who have died in Iraq FOR NOTHING... or rather because of a completely false and planted intelligence set-up. NO one cares if others die in this world... Americans consider the world only started making tallies of who did what first only from 9/11 on, when terrorists hit American soil for the first time... the same terrorists (almost all 19 of them were Saudis who had legitimate visas for the US and did not sneak in through Canada) whose boss was financed, nurtured, mollycoddled and Red-Bulled-up to beat up on the Soviets in Afghanistan... the same medieval Saudi Kingdom with whom the entire American ruling class (and not just the Bushes) hob-nob, flirt, sleep and make business with, till today.


More than 40% Americans for sure will vote for Palin and McCain. It is not because they are "gullible" or "simple-minded" people. That is simplistic, by itself. Such a large number of Americans are not your usual and rejectable "rednecks." That would also be a simplistic conclusion, as well. In fact, the majority of Americans who will vote for the Republicans are , in general, decent, honest,folks, who do put in a lot of thinking before they cast their ballots. They are not trailer park rednecks and tobacco-chewing cowhands. What the "left"Liberals in the Democratic camp (because there are a majority of Right NeoLiberals in the Dems, who are simply a flip side of the Republicans ) do not as yet comprehend or will never get down to understanding, is that the whole American ethos of unilateralist supremacy in all matters of the world ("we are stronger, we are better, we know better, we dont need the world, the world needs us and should follow us and not emulate us, we are above the law, we are fixers") starts all the way from 1492. Not because of the Soviet Union. Not because of China. Not because of Stalin. Not because of Ay-Rabs and Eye-ranians. It started, when Columbus landed. From then on, the notion of "frontiersman" "pioneer" "settler" has emerged as euphemisms for a Biblical belief in the superiority of the chosen people, Judeo-Christians. They are chosen. They save. The rest are not chosen. They ought to be saved. And the rest who were quietly farming and irrigating their lands in the plains and had quaint spiritual ethnicities like Seminole, Choctaw, Mohawk, Navajo, Iroquois, Cherokee were immediately called "savages" and herded into concentration camps. 12 milion First Nations (or Native Americans as Americans call them) were killed off by small-pox, STD, plain starvation tactics, massacres and deprivation. No one talks about this holocaust anymore. These were Asian brothers and sisters who were murdered and annihilated. They were converted from farmers to herdsmen first, (There were no horses in North America, until the white man arrived and yet bare-chested, war-hooping "Indians" with deadly tomahawks and Winchesters are what we are told confronted the "pioneers" when they first landed) and then were pushed out of their lands. Yet we never hear of Indians as farmers! That would be too quaint ! They were savage herdsmen right from the start. Then the savages had to be "saved". "Saving" is a special attribute that only Europeans know how to practice. AS Kipling had said,

Take up the White Man's burden -
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride


But saving was not on the cards for the Natives. They were simply made to disappear. And then you needed folks to work on the farms, the plantations where the tobacco, cotton needed to be grown. So you imported slaves from Africa. And then in the early part of the 20th century, the Americans, as their economy thrived, got their first chance to practice overseas expansion. Extend the white man's burden. Phillipines was the first adventure. So the US defeated the Spanish in the Phillipines and started their new imperial legacy. Most Americans do not like to know all this. Most of them do not know their own history. Most Americans do not like to know that Empire has anything to do with them. That was a British thing.
The American Literacy society has found a total of 21-23 percent - or 40-44 million - of the 191 million American adults (defined as age 16 or older) at Level 1, the lowest literacy level. Although many Level 1 adults could perform many tasks involving simple texts and documents, all adults scoring at Level 1 were counted. All these people believe what the church says, what the Pastor says, the Headmaster says, the local Police Chief says, what the local Republican and Democrat Congressmen and Senators say, what CNN and CBS says. They believe in the sacrosanct nature of the US media and its so-called unbiased reporting. The problem is that US media does not even begin to cover the skin of the teeth of truth, as it happens all over the world.

For all this time, the world could not do anything with US might and power. Because the world was powerless. The US was a mighty tiger. Not a paper tiger. A tiger with a nasty bite. The world kept its distance and nodded, just to keep the peace and the loans coming and the economic cajoling followed from the IMF and the WB. Turns out both these institutions have CEOS who are now under indictment for the crassest of social and moral ineptitude. Nepotism and asking for sexual favours from subordinates. Its the neocons, then, who made the most unpredicatble blunder. No one expected in their wildest Socialist paroxysms that this is what would happen. The necons really did what can be called a major F-up for their own kind. They brought America to its knees. The American economy has been trashed and America needs to borrow from the world to survive. It is said that the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is about 3.1:1. By contrast, when
Brazil's debt-to-GDP ratio went up to 0.51:1 it received a stern rebuke
from the IMF.
Eric Margolis from Toronto says "An empire built on debt, is an empire built on sand.
The US government now owes a staggering $10 trillion. American consumers
owe $14 trillion. Welcome to the United States of debt. Twenty-four
trillion dollars is a gargantuan sum, even for the mighty US economy. It
is now clear that America's once lauded `prosperity' was built on runaway
debt rather than productivity or innovation.
At the end of the 19th Century, the dying, debt-ridden Ottoman Empire
became known as `the sick man of Europe.' Under the Bush administration,
the United States has become the Sick Man of North America." Now the American establishment, including Obama and McCain, want to have concerted action to save the "world economy." I'm sorry dudes! The world don't need saving. The world will survive, after lurching around a little bit, despite the fact that the ol' Britannia still determines the Bank to Bank Libor rates. Even the Euro which has is not indexed to any real measure or reserve is also in doldrums. Perhaps, we will soon have a new world currency that will be called a WORLDO, or GLOBO, controlled from Shanghai, Mumbai, Rio and Caracas? A true revival of the Bandung non-aligned world of the fifties!

Something that went nearly unnoticed was that Pakistan's new headman Asif Zardari went begging to China, cap in hand. Now the United States has been propping up the Pakistani army at 1.2 billion dollars per annum. The Pakistani chief did not go to DC, as has been the tradition for the past several decades. Instead he went to China, who has 19 trillion dollars in foreign exchange reserves.

There is something not right about the "red hordes of Mao" bankrolling the United States. Something has gone awry somewhere and Sarah Palin, sitting like a turtle on a fence post has no clue about what to do and how to get off the post.