Friday 17th of May 2024
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taming the american triffids..

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Monty Don’s American Gardens TV show was a bit of a disappointment, especially the last episode. When Montagu Denis Wyatt Don OBE, British horticulturist, broadcaster and writer, best known as being lead presenter of the BBC gardening television Gardener’s World — introduced us to the European, Middle Eastern and Eastern gardens such as the Chinese and Japanese gardens, we could not be more in awe of the history and philosophy going back hundreds and thousands of years. 

 

In America, Don seemed to be struggling to find his footing. Yes, there were the community roof gardens and the school gardens, but overall, the feeling left in our mind was that in America, history started yesterday and the main philosophy — which Don refrained to spell out — was “everything is bigger and better in America”. Despite his effort to glorify the American gardens, we could see that the pioneer spirit had become adventurism in crass, gross and messy multi-purposed visions for which a central theme was that money can buy anything — including the weird and the ugly. Nothing wrong with this, But we all wish that "what happens in America stays in America". Good luck with this thought. 

 

After having visited a few Mon Oncle style houses and gardens, It felt like Don “did not know” what to make of the Amazon offices in Seattle, looking like a Martian herbarium, at the centre of which a 27 tonnes tree had been planted at the last minute by dropping it through the roof using a crane or a chopper — I forgot which — so that the employees (forbidden to unionise), can work better for Mr Bezos. The last frontier in America was the West coast, but, in Jeff Bezos' mind, it looks that planet Mars is the next frontier, apart from the dark corners of your wallet.

 

I am sure that Monty Don did his best to show us the gardens of a vast country, the USA. Our general disappointment could be that we live in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Darwin, etc, in Australia where many of the gardens are on par with (or better than) those American gardens showed by Don, to which we can add the weird feelings they have more egalitarian values, more realism, more purpose and more ancient philosophy, some going back more than 40,000 years. 

 

Take a walk, with an Aboriginal guide along the old waterways from Leichhardt, Sydney, towards the Rozelle former mad people compound and learn something discreet, including the secret dances, and become survival savvy. 

 

Meanwhile, the USA has been the pill-popping land for sleeping, pills to be awake and pills to be loony…

 

The end of the American century is looming and the leaders of the American hegemony are not happy about it. We know the rest. Let’s hope that gardening restores some sanity in the American mind, but they have a long way to go. I suppose that's why many US schools encourage the kids to grow their own food — while the US leaders are dangerously prodding the bear and the dragon. 

 

GL

Gardener of pots and pans.

 

 

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Cartoon at top from The New Yorker (circa 1960)

the end of the american century...

 

The big question is: “Does the planet (we) needs the leadership of the USA?”

 

This is a fair question. In the spiel above I mentioned “the end of the American century”. This is not glib. It’s happening and the US leadership does not like it.

 

The Americans, for and against their best/worst conflicted judgements, have saved the world from communism and fascism, over two world wars, but in the process, they have created their own fascist empire. This is typical of what Blaise Pascal — that young French philosopher who refused any medical treatment (who can blame him in the 17th century) — who said that "everyone who tries to be an angel becomes a beast.” 

 

But we should know that the reverse isn’t true: a beast never becomes an angel. This is the American dilemma. 

 

Trying to implement democracy-alla-hamburger throughout the world, they forget the refinement of table manners. The BEAST of course is the US militarism, nearly ten times the size of all other nations’ military on this silly planet.

 

Meanwhile, with the UK’s Truss and the US’s Blinken, the world of diplomacy is badly served. With Biden and BoJo, the world of leadership is truthfully deep in the toilet-pipe. 

 

Humility isn’t a word in the American dictionary. Sharing is a word used by American like spikes on the road to blow up YOUR tires. 

 

It’s time to de-hamburgerize the world...

 

GL.

the ranks of the insane...

It seems like there will never be any equality in the world. Just look at the situation between the United States and Russia, as an example of how everything is upside down. It doesn’t seem to matter which party is in power in the U.S. The person in the White House doesn’t matter either. Hollywood rolls on, as do the corporations, growing and growing, piling billions into the coffers of “self made” men and women. And elsewhere, nobody, and I mean nobody can get a fair shake.

 

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” — Marcus Aurelius

 

Look at Vladimir Putin, as a perfect example of unfairness. If he goes on a fishing trip, he’s dressing up his manly image. Meanwhile, his contemporaries in Washington, or London for that matter, roll out their pitifulness to the fist pumping of whichever hordes of sad admirers adore them. Donald Trump gassing protesters outside the White House so he could stroll across the street for a photo op with the “Word of God” in his greasy, Big Mac grubbing hands comes to mind. Or, look at Joe Biden for an even starker display of “WTF is wrong with America?” The guy is a disgrace.

As for Putin, he’s accused of just about everything. But somehow the evidence of his crimes and misdemeanors never really materializes. The best the west’s multi-trillion dollar surveillance state can come up with is “very high probability” or “high confidence” that Putin did “whatever” wrong. Back home, however, a smoking gun, camera footage, CIA documents, surfaced emails, satellite photos, voice recordings, and a past conviction as a serial killer couldn’t get an American out of office.

My, how things have changed. I remember some idiot zealots who were trying to help former President Richard Nixon, getting a president to resign over what Barack Obama authorized the NSA to do to the American public. Edward Snowden dropped a dime on the Obama administration, but Barack never waved goodbye to the American public in disgrace. George H. W. Bush launched the first Gulf Warwhich, as an investigation by journalist Joshua Holland concluded, “was sold on a mountain of war propaganda.” His son George W. invaded Iraq on a false pretense, killing hundreds of thousands and costing America trillions. He’s still got a library.

 

“It is the duty of a good shepherd to shear his sheep, not to skin them.” — Tiberius

 

I could go on, and on. The point is, if you’re an American in leadership getting drunk, wrecking your car, and drowning your girlfriend won’t get you in jail, much less unseated from the halls of power. And we thought Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy was an embarrassing disgrace! Billy would be a better leader than anyone on Capitol Hill or in the White House these days, beer cans all over the lawn and all. The world would be far more equitable and balanced if my country had an honest idiot in charge. At least when Putin or China’s Xi Jinping got accused of mayhem, Americans could stand erect and show their pride for having an honest man or woman to lead them. But nope. We are just fine with the lying scumbags the corporate elite throw at us.

It’s called “empire” folks. Reference names like Caligula, Commodus, and Nero. Rome loved them too, up until things like the incompetence of leadership, a bad economy, climate change, internal struggles for power, the health of Rome’s people, religious changes, and the numbers and effectiveness of her armies doomed the empire. Sound familiar?

Well, at least we’ll have Russia’s leader to blame. As if it will matter then.

 

 

 

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2022/02/11/who-will-be-held-accountable-for-america-s-ultimate-doom/

 

 

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