A Recipe for Disaster

I don't know much about religion. Oh sure, I remember a few of the best stories. How God committed Deuteronomy on Adam because he couldn't come up with an original sin. How Jesus catered a huge event with bagels, lox, and a mountain of olives. I think Moses ate so much that he had to go directly to Mount Sinai where God gave him a couple of tablets and said "Call me in the morning." Ok, I don't know much about religion. But I know it has no place in politics.

By allowing our leaders to utter the word "evil" in public we have seriously diminished our global status, antagonized other nations, and revealed to the world our current national character...a rogue state with ideological ambitions. Just over a year ago America received a wake-up call about the state of hopelessness in the Islamic world.

In response, it did not just promptly hit the snooze button and go back to sleep. It got out of bed, took a long angry jog through the park, made itself a nice, hearty, Texas-style breakfast (flapjacks, bacon, toast, hashbrowns, coffee)...and then boldly announced that its enemies were "evil", "flat-out evil", "simply evil", "part of an axis of evil" and "significantly more evil than even our recommended daily allowance of evil". Thus began the first act of Bush diplomacy. The second was to announce a new doctrine of pre-emption which effectively takes us back about four hundred years in our cultural evolution to a time before nation-states decided to respect their sovereign borders.

By systematically charging America's real wealth, its global good name, to our forefathers' credit card, we have depleted any global good will we may have garnered since World War II, and begun to place our own brand of righteous dogmatism before the judgement of the world.

Good faith on bad credit is a recipe for disaster.

(Foodism Magazine 2002)