The British Problem

Endangering our Xenophobic Melting Pot, Threatening Subject-Verb Relationships

While we are sleeping, something terribly wrong is happening at America’s borders: Britain are coming! Britain are coming!

This happens to be the worst national security crisis facing our nation. Americans are at risk of having high-paid jobs stolen by legal as well as illegal aliens from the British Isles. British capital is the overwhelmingly dominant leader in direct foreign investment. Brits already own landmark properties here. The country ranks near the top of foreign nations snatching up our treasury securities, and it has the power to undermine our financial system.

British transplants to our soil include many illegal aliens, dozens of them and maybe more, who overstay their visas and go underground to exert insidious influence on our tolerant and defenseless society. Never mind that the rock star Sting represented himself as a legal alien. There are illegal aliens in New York, and the British crooner should know that as a former member of the Police.

These British subjects are corrupting our language and culture and even infiltrating our media. Take the so called US edition of the British news weekly “The Economist,” which hides its real intent behind a thin veneer of witty commentary. Don’t you see the Fabian socialism, bred in sadistic and sexually permissive public schools (euphemistic for elitist private schools), behind the British guise of fiscal conservatism? Their Socialist prime minister has cynically portrayed himself as hawkish Bush-kissing ally.

Just look at what’s happening to the American language. The business world is saying things like “take a decision” instead of making one. In sports casting, the broken syntax of British pidgin (a Germanic lingo with affected French words) is creeping into local vernacular.

Taking a cue from BBC announcers who report on “football matches” (sic), we are beginning to mix up our subject-verb agreements. They say “Liverpool are on a winning streak,” and “Italy are headed for the World Cup finals.” I can’t stand it. So now we’re starting to say “Detroit are the favorite in the World Series” and "Oakland aren’t playing well this season.” If we don’t keep our guard up, we’ll be putting Rs after our vowels and saying things like “the Cubs is a perennial loser.” And we’ll have to watch cricket in prime time, after suffering through programs that unleash sniffy English nannies on American families with naughty children. Wasn't Teletubbies bad enough? Uh oh . . .

People over 50 remember the British invasion of the 1960s, when girly-haired Englishmen copied American folk and blues, putting some pretty damn good US rock bands on food stamps. They unabashedly violated US intellectual property rights by reverse-engineering our native music.

Now, the potential impact on the fabric of our society is enormous when you consider the British Hoards waiting at the border. They’re ready to flood our country with white folks who will upset the fragile balance of our population’s diversity. Because they are wealthier than us, they will have more babies and skew demographics in their favor.

The risks to national security cannot be underestimated. Pretty soon, students of British descent will dominate our school systems and take the best spots in our top universities. Coddled by unofficial affirmative action programs, British women will take over our corporate board rooms, while American men hit the glass ceiling.

It’s not practical to erect a barbed wire fence across the Atlantic to hold back the armada of British interlopers. But we should alert loyal citizens to be on guard for suspicions white people with funny accents at airports and rail stations, and be on the lookout for men carrying little European purses. We need vigilantes to patrol the border with Canada, so that no subjects of the Queen of England can sneak across to our homeland.

It’s widely known that Britain had ambitions of global hegemony in the past, and has never apologized to its victims. It even abused its own British colonists on these shores. Britain are at out doorstep, and we has a duty to stop the menace now, before it is too late.

#

There You Go Again, George

Pooh on You, North Korea!

Today our president, our opportunistic commander in chief, proved once again that his inflexible ideology and his unwillingness to face reality are endangering the nation's security. With wailing sirens in the background (staged by Carl Rove, perhaps, for the fear effect) he outlined a rehash of his failed strategy to contain North Korea in a news conference at the embattled White House.

Again, he flatly refused to consider direct negotiations with Pyongyang (a word he has trouble pronouncing) and showed his contempt for ground-breaking negotiates with the reclusive nation at the end of the Clinton Administration. There's no hard evidence Clinton's deal with North Korea to halt nuclear fuel development, if coupled with stringent monitoring, would not have worked in the long run and prevented Kim Jong Il from testing his first little atom bomb.

Rather, there is every indication that the president undermined that historic step in successful diplomatic engagement with North Korea simply because it gave credit to the Clinton administration. The resulting dialogue with "punyong" has been an unmitigated disaster, worsened rather than facilitated by the mamby pamby six-party talks format - constructed to mask the brainless rejection of direct talks by our macho leader and his darkly whispering neo-con advisers -dipl0matic amateurs all.

Yes, I'm beginning to sound a little like a Democratic partisan, maybe even a KCNA mouthpiece. But I speak as a loyal critic, out of loyalty to our flawed democracy's best interests in national security, not to this tragically misguided administration. It doesn't really matter whether this morass was created by a Republican or a Democratic in the White House. But this irrational brinksmanship happens to be the handiwork of an irresponsible leader, who raised the odds of South Korea's capital being incinerated by conventonal rockets, not nukes, and who may take his party down with his ill repute in November.
#

Give Japan's Abe Junior a Chance

Japan’s new prime minister is planning his first foray into international diplomacy with a trip to Beijing and Seoul, presumably to mend fences with the Asian neighbors that have excoriated his predecessor for making provocative visits to the infamous Yasukuni Shrine. Abe comes into office with a reputation as a nationalist and hawk on defense, who some pundits believe will ultimately irritate, not improve, relations with South Korea and China.

Can Abe make friends in Asia without violating the sensitivities that endure among the victims of Japanese aggression in World War II?

A closer examination of Abe’s background reveals a much more complicated and nuanced picture of the man. Abe, 52, is the youngest prime minister in Japan’s nine decades of parliamentary government. As a ranking member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, he is by definition a conservative in the business boosting, right-wing and pro-military tradition that defines the party that has led the country for most of the post-World War II era.

It’s important to note, however, that Abe belongs to a new generation of Japanese leaders and he’s part of a new brand of nationalism that has taken hold in Japan in recent years. He does not hail from the rabid emperor-worshipping ultra-nationalism championed famously by the popular novelist Yukio Mishima in the 1960’s, when he committed ritual harakiri. Or more recently advocated by Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara and other veteran LDP party hacks.

Like his father, the late LDP general secretary Shintaro Abe, who was a well respected diplomat in his tenure as foreign minister, the youngish prime minister is associated with the internationalist wing of the LDP - not the hard-core gang of nationalists. He’s an English speaker, a rare trait among Japanese politicians, who studied political science at the University of Southern California.

He may share ambitions with other conservatives to revise Article 9 of the American-drafted Peace Constitution, which constrains Japan’s military to self defense and makes it difficult for Japanese troops from engaging meaningfully in international peace keeping missions. But his motives do not appear to be driven by a desire to return Japan to its pre-war glory days, with the power-projecting force that Korea and China fear. My view is that Abe and many of his political allies are riding a wave in the Japanese public that seeks greater national pride, not a back flip to Asian hegemony. The kind of nationalist goals he aims at, such as getting a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, are not unreasonable in light of Japan’s Great Power economic status as the world’s second richest nation.

If Abe wants to keep his job long enough to accomplish his political agenda for domestic reform and international prestige, however, he must appease the heavy duty nationalists among the old men in the LDP, who still wield considerable political influence in the Japanese tradition of opaque Machiavellian manipulation. So his response to the question of whether he will follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Junichi Koizumi, by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine –which symbolically worships convicted war criminals as well as the multitude of Japan’s war dead – is intentionally vague. This allows his administration to get off the ground without being undermined by detractors inside and outside Japan.

Only time will tell whether Abe can balance the trust of his party members and the Japanese public with the good will he apparently wants to build in the region. With North Korea threatening to test its first nuclear bomb and ongoing territorial disputes with China in potentially oil-rich offshore islands, the stakes are high.