A patriot for Aretha

Aretha Franklin does it for me every time. So if it’s ‘My country ‘tis of thee’ that she’s singing, even if it isn’t my country, I’m a patriot. And yesterday I was a British-American patriot.

The pessimist, the sceptic and the cynic in me have all struggled to keep pace with my inner Obama on that incredible journey to the White House. Mostly, they’ve managed to keep in touch, albeit at a distance. Yesterday, though, they got left behind somewhere in the deep recesses of leftist soullessness – because soul is what you would have to have been without not to be moved by this occasion. It is one of those great, shared global events, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the release of Nelson Mandela, that I am glad to have lived to see.

It’s sometimes hard to grasp the fact that it is only four decades, barely half a lifetime, since the civil rights movement tore down the legal barriers that kept black Americans segregated and oppressed. Or that it is only two decades since Barack Obama’s predecessor in the office of president and his equivalent in the UK were the principal defenders of apartheid outside South Africa itself. If so much can change so quickly, why not believe that so much more can yet be changed?

Socialist baby-killing maggots against Sarah Palin

Stand-in Newcastle United manager Joe Kinnear may get hauled over the broadcasting coals for saying ‘shit’ on Football Focus in this country, but it’s a different matter in the US. There the constitutional First Amendment guarantee of free speech provides a familiar cover for all manner of expletives and hate-filled commentary by the right-wing shock jocks who dominate the radio airwaves.

So when Alaska’s Anchorage AM host Eddie Burke ranted about ‘a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots’ organising an ‘Alaska Women Reject Palin’ rally last month, no one batted much of an eyelid. When he went on to read out the organisers’ home telephone numbers and urge listeners to call them up and give them hell, however, he went a bit beyond the Palin.

The women, whose protest has been claimed as the biggest political rally in Alaskan history (there were about 1,500 people present, so Alaska clearly lacks much of a tradition of popular mobilisation), received a series of threatening and abusive calls. Burke also got a call – from station manager Justin McDonald, telling him he’d broken station policy (by announcing the numbers, not his choice of epithets) and would be suspended without pay for a week.

Photo: Eddie Burke demonstrating his firm grasp of geography

War dividend

With the US taxpayer facing a likely $700 billion bill to bail out bankers' incompetence and greed, Congress will no doubt be delighted to hear that US arms exports have reached record levels under the second Bush administration. The Defense Department alone has agreed to the sale or transfer of $32 billion worth of weapons and equipment in 2008 – a near threefold increase on 2005. Sales by private companies, as measured by State Department-approved export licences, are approaching $100 billion – up from $58 billion three years ago.

As well as long-term customers such as Israel and Egypt (who between them receive four-fifths of the US’s $4.5 billion military aid budget annually), a big sales push has been mounted around the globe. Recent recipients of US arms include both Pakistan and India, Argentina and Brazil, and Georgia and Azerbaijan, demonstrating once again that, as true internationalists, arms dealers recognise no borders – except as an opportunity to do business with the countries on either side of them.

For the US and its military-industrial economic base, the ‘peace dividend’ that was supposed to follow the end of the cold war has been as nothing compared with the war dividend that followed 9/11. The US share of the world arms trade went up from 40 per cent of arms deliveries in 2000 to 52 percent in 2006, with the latest projections pointing to a further, similar increase by 2010. The next-largest arms dealer is Russia, with 21 per cent of the global market in 2006.

‘This is not about being gunrunners,’ Bruce S Lemkin, the US air force deputy under secretary who is helping to coordinate many of the biggest sales, told the New York Times. ‘This is about building a more secure world.’ Glad he cleared that up.

How do they do that?

What is it about right-wing politicians that they can get away with the sort of things for which left-wingers would be crucified? When Michael Foot turned up for a Remembrance Day parade in a (as it happens very expensive) horsehair coat, he was pilloried in the press for wearing a supposedly scruffy ‘duffle coat’. But Boris Johnson can slouch around at the Olympics handover ceremony with his hands in his pockets, his tie skew-whiff and his suit looking like a mix-and-match from an Oxfam rack and no one (except Ken Livingstone, citing his late mum) gives a damn.

More importantly, the likes of Ronald Reagan and George W can turn idiocy into a presidential requisite, as long as it’s delivered with faux folksy charm. And now the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin has somehow managed to turn the fact that she was once the mayor of Tinytown, Alaska, into a plus rather than a possible indicator of lack of experience when it comes to running the world’s only superpower.

This is a clever trick to pull. You’re part of the ruling elite (albeit in Palin’s case, not quite so elite as Reagan the Hollywood actor or Bush the heir to an oil fortune) but you come across as an Ordinary Joe/anna. You even manage to accuse the media of being sexist, never previously a word heard to come from Republican lips, when those few bits of it that aren’t on your side wonder whether you’re up to the job. And despite being leaders of a party that doesn’t even believe in the availability of universal health care for those who need it, you manage to persuade a big chunk of ‘ordinary, hard-working America’ that you’re the best people to look after their interests because you ‘believe in gun rights and the bible, and are against abortion and gay marriage’, as one member of the Texas delegation put it at the Republican convention this week.

How do they do that?

In guns we trust

I wonder what definition of ‘sacred’ Republican presidential candidate John McCain had in mind when he was describing the US constitutional right to bear arms yesterday. Referring to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to overturn a 32-year-old anti-gun law in Washington DC, he said that: ‘Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today’s ruling recognises that gun ownership is a fundamental right – sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.’

So would that be sacred as in devoted or dedicated to a deity or to some religious purpose; entitled to veneration or respect by association with divinity or divine things; regarded with reverence; holy; or what? Should all true Americans get on their knees and pray, one nation under guns?

Our Uzi, which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy bullets come;
thy will be done.
And anyone who gets in the way will get blasted.