As Belgium responded to the corruption of Trump and Infantino in the best way possible by thumping the US soccer team, Andrew Brown sends birthday greetings to a foundering empire.
Dear America,
Happy 250th, mate.
Quarter of a millennium. Massive effort. Not many countries make it that far, and fewer still make it that far while holding a national debate about whether children deserve lunch.
You started with liberty. Then democracy. Then somewhere in the third act you flogged the lot to a private equity firm and kept the merchandise rights. Now you are three corporations in a trench coat, standing on an aircraft carrier,
screaming about freedom at a bloke who cannot afford an ambulance.
Fair dinkum, your star-spangled greatness is an abject failure. It is swinging like a dunny-door in a cyclone. Still attached. Still banging away. Not actually keeping anything out.
You sell insulin like it is vintage Grange. You make dying people sit on hold before they are allowed to argue with death. You charge a woman for holding her own baby after giving birth to it. Skin-to-skin contact. Line item. Invoice attached.
Mate, we would not charge you to pat a dog at Bunnings.
You have blokes sleeping in the supermarket car park before their shift stacking shelves inside. The staff car park. Of the supermarket. Where they work. And your answer to all of it is a bald eagle screeching over a Ford ad.
Illusions of democracy
Every four years someone stands in front of a flag the size of Tasmania and announces this is the greatest country on Earth. At what, cobber? Medical bankruptcy? School shootings? Thoughts and prayers as a national industrial policy? Your minimum wage has been parked so long it should be heritage listed. Yeah nah. That is not a dream. That is a hostage situation with fireworks.
And you cannot even hear any of this, because questioning America is the one thing Americans consider un-American. Land of the free, home of the touchy. Point out the emperor has no clothes and eighty million of you salute the nudity.
Then there is the money. Nearly a trillion a year for the Pentagon while forty percent of your adults cannot cover a surprise bill without flogging something on Facebook Marketplace. You borrow to feed the war machine, then borrow again to pay the interest on the borrowing. That is not an economy. That is a bloke paying off one credit card with another and calling himself an investor.
Couldn’t run a chook raffle, but sure, run the free world.
The rich own the future. The poor rent the present. The middle class is being carried out the back like a busted couch on council pickup day.
Fentanyl economy
And then there is the fentanyl. Whole streets folded over like question marks, in the country that put a man on the moon. Your drug companies got millions hooked, made billions, paid a fine and kept the yachts. Overdoses now kill more Americans every single year than the entire Vietnam War did, and the official response is a shrug and a share price. You declared a war on drugs fifty years ago. The drugs won.
Only war you have ever been honest about losing.
Speaking of wars. Eight hundred bases. Stealth bombers. Satellites that can spot a goat scratching its nuts in the Hindu Kush. A defence budget that looks like someone fell asleep on the zero key. And you still keep getting your arse handed to you by blokes in sandals.
Twenty years in Afghanistan. Trillions gone. Thousands of your own kids in coffins. Then you handed the keys back to the exact blokes you went there to remove. You arrived like the Death Star. You left like a man sneaking out of a motel at 2am because the card declined. You are not a country with a military anymore.
You are a military with a healthcare problem,
carrying on like a pork chop about freedom while jailing more of your own people than any nation on the planet. Land of the free. Highest incarceration rate on Earth. Even the irony is doing time.
And through all of it, the chant. USA, USA, USA. Three letters shouted at the sky like a car alarm nobody can switch off. You chant it at the footy. You chant it at rallies. You chant it at the funerals of wars you lost.
Notice something, mate. Nobody chants when they are actually winning. You have never once heard forty thousand Kiwis scream New Zealand , New Zealand, New Zealand at a scoreboard. The All Blacks just win, do a haka that makes grown men soil themselves, then go home and get free knee surgery. Your chant is not confidence.
Your chant is the noise you make so you cannot hear the sirens.
It’s all so sad
We grew up on you. Your movies. Your music. Your moon landing. Half of Australia learned to dream in an American accent. You were the mate with the big house and the loud laugh, and we loved coming over.
Now we visit, and the roof leaks, the kids are doing active shooter drills between maths and little lunch, Grandpa is rationing his insulin like it is wartime butter, and the waitress needs a twenty five percent tip because you decided wages were communism. It is not funny anymore, mate.
It is a dog’s breakfast with better fireworks.
So this year we got you the only present that might actually help. A mirror.
Have a proper look. Past the flag. Past Hollywood. Look at the tent cities. The hospital bills. The veterans under the bridges. The kid doing homework in the back seat of the family home. Then ask yourself one question. Greatest country on Earth? Or just the loudest galah in the cage?
Happy birthday anyway. Enjoy the cake. Go easy on the candles though. At your hospitals, the price of a singed eyebrow is a second mortgage.
Keep the mirror. We’re not perfect, either, but you need it more than we do.
Love, Australia
P.S. Yeah nah. Greenland is not the poorly run one. It has free universal healthcare.
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist