Mind Scalpel

I’ve been relatively confident in the likelihood of the United States maintaining its hegemony in the world, not because of the superiority of our military capabilities, but because of the innate corrosiveness of our culture.

You see, America’s international predominance is not based on nukes or aircraft carrier battle groups, both of which are inherently cool and good for impressing the yokels, but rather on these (click here).

Okay, sorry about that, readers who are at work.

Anyway, our secret weapon — so secret that we can spray it out across the world with satellites and yet still not view it as the weaponization of space that it really is — is our mind-numbing, consumerist, degenerate worldview! And I say that as a compliment.

As soon as another country reaches a stage of industrialization and economic development that it begins to threaten us, we take those suckers down like an Aleut going after baby seals. Look what happened to Japan, a country that everyone’s hair was on fire about in the 80s — “My gosh! They’re growing faster than the US! They’re rich! They’re buying United States companies and real estate!” A few years later, we bought our stuff back for 30 cents on the dollar, Japanese kids were walking around with pink hair, and Japan had slumped into a depression from which it has yet to fully recover. Nice try, Japan!

I mean, seriously — France, the nation that invented hedonism, has to make laws against the importation of Americanized words and American films and television shows into their country, because if they didn’t, our stuff would throttle their amateurish native programming in a nanosecond. We’re like psycho/cultural kudzu, swiftly choking out the native wildlife by eliminating all its oxygen and nutrients.

Give bin Laden and fundamentalist Muslims one thing — they get just how lethal we are. In countries where women have to cover up everything except maybe their eyes, one episode of Baywatch broadcast on the open airwaves would be the equivalent of a mental neutron bomb, airburst at the optimum altitude. These dudes have had no chance to build up the resistance to the sight of gyrating, undulating female flesh that we have. Unabated exposure to our broadcast fleshpots will sweep through their ranks like diseases did through Native American populations when pox-ridden Europeans made landfall.

Therefore, with the increased availability of the Internet, victory over fundamentalist Muslim fanatics is only a matter of time.

So I should be well pleased with the state of affairs, shouldn’t I? Well, sure — except for one thing. This all works only when we control all the vice. Then foreigners will keep flocking to our shores, emptying their pockets in our dens of iniquity.

But now China’s on to us.

Forget their secret giant nuclear submarine base. Irrelevant!

They’ve built the world’s largest destination casino in Macau! They overtook Las Vegas’s revenue in 2006 — their profits recently were double those of Las Vegas. How did this happen? If the most successful, energetic business people from other countries don’t come here and dissipate their fortunes and their drive, we’re pretty much out of business.

Then again, the latest news is that China’s trying to put a damper on Macau’s growth; maybe they’re starting to recognize that packing too much distilled, concentrated vice into one area is like nuclear fusion — once you’ve reached a critical mass, it’s going to be damn hard to contain. Good luck making everyone in the strip clubs study your little red book, Mao-dudes!

We might come out of this okay after all….

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