[Buddha-l] The mess in America

[Richard Hayes]

On Sat, 2008-02-09 at 21:43 +0800, Wong Weng Fai wrote:

> Don't worry... my prediction: Hillary and Obama will tear each other and 
> the Democratic Party to pieces... making it wide open for McCann to have 
> another at least 4 more years of Republican War on Terror (TM - that's 
> TradeMark not Transcendental Meditation).

I don't think Obama and Hillary will tear the Democratic party to
pieces, but I'm fairly confident that either one of them will terrify
Republicans into thinking that the War on Terror (a perpetual war with
no well-defined enemies, no goals and no idea of what distinguishes
success from failure) might end and that a rational health care system
might provide benefits to people who do not deserve them. (Only
billionaires deserve to be healthy, you see.) The panic that
compassionate proposals strike in the hearts of conservatives will unite
the Republicans and the independents against the Democratic candidate,
McCain will be elected for four years and then will be deposed by Romney
in 2012, and America will be ruled by a humorless pretty boy CEO until
2020. 

Actually, I don't think America will still exist in 2020. By then it
will have become a suburb of Beijing, and most Americans will either be
unemployed or underpaid workers in sweatshops that produce cheap gadgets
to be sold in big box stores in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps this is overly
optimistic, but I have always been something of a Pollyanna.

If America becomes a suburb of Beijing, at least some form of capitalist
Buddhism will thrive in Hollywood and Las Vegas.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico