The Advantages of Imperialism

Passing Storm Death Valley - photo by JoAnn Sturman

by Mike Burnaugh

In the first half of the previous century, I walked into my first kindergarten class room in the hamlet of Harrison, Nebraska. The class picture of the kindergarten, first, and second grade students of the year 1948 showed only two smiles on cute girls. The rest of us were convinced the Nazis were going to grind us into sausage before lunch. But I could already read, thanks to my mother and older sister, so I learned to survive in Stalag Harrison. I remember Mrs. Howard doing science experiments for all of us. It was possible to learn everything in the second grade while sitting in the kindergarten row. My favorite subject was always geography. The teacher would pull down that big map of the world, and I would see how small a part of the world I lived in. As a kindergartener I learned about Mercator projections, which caused me briefly to believe Sweden was larger than Mexico. But the map was THE WHOLE WORLD, and I set to work memorizing it. Red was for the British Empire and Green, the French. That accounted for most of Africa. Belgium and Portugal were bit players, so they had to share Purple.

Nowadays Africa is a nastier place, and Rand McNally has to hire mathematicians to figure out how to color a continent with more countries than a standard box of Crayolas. Even British India is now Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, and a lot of Himalayan runt states whose main function is to denude hillsides and send topsoil down the Ganges. What was simpler in the other century was that we knew Britain, loved Churchill and the Monarch, tolerated the French, and didn’t much care for the Soviets or Chinese

If there was a problem in Africa, we called up the foreign minister of one of the major Imperialist colors, and were assured that everything was fine. Now we’re supposed to think our government absolutely HAS to have a policy for every pretend state in the world, including Pacific Islands composed entirely of guano (that’s bird crap, for those of you who are recent graduates of the public schools). Not only must we have a policy, but we must imagine what goes on in these places is somehow OUR BUSINESS. The title of this tome is that the Advantages of Imperialism have to do with us being pals with Imperialists, but not being one. You know we are now imperialists when we have to have a policy about the ever laughable Arab Spring, the Greek debt crisis, and any other headline on cable news.

Look, I don’t like admitting this, but Ron Paul makes sense to me on many issues. For God’s sake bring our troops out of some of the hundred plus nations where they are currently stationed. I’m officially Old, cranky and a refugee from the Age of Gutenberg. In my day we walked uphill both ways to school and we LIKED IT! Well, maybe not.