I don’t know what happened, but a whole third of the DFP’s opinion section was entirely jingoistic on Tuesday. Dan Seed’s ill-informed letter about how much poor countries suck, and Brendan Cavalier’s very ‘in depth’ column about how the UN is turning into a dictatorship both made me wish I was Canadian.

I’ve heard some stupid things before, but someone who thinks that Ecuador, a country that has an average income of $1500 and a GDP of 17.9 billion could be stable. When are that bad off, they are never stable. It was the relative poverty of Italy, Germany, and Japan that gave rise to their fascist dictatorships and therefore WW2. Even here, during the Depression, there were a lot of Communists (my grandfather was one of them). All they ended up doing was take over Hollywood (or the Reading, PA dermatology market) and then fade into Democrats. Ecuador does ‘suck’, to paraphrase Mr. Seed, but it really isn’t its fault. It’s ours. The sad truth is we have an empire, and we always have. America only stands for the freedom of those who the people in control deem to be full citizens. In the past peoples like the Native Americans, Africans, Mexicans, Cubans and any number of other countries have been wiped out, enslaved, and conquered by Uncle Sam and his good old boys. Nowadays our multinational corporations use and abuse most of the third world for resources and cheap labor, so that we can have meatheads driving down Com Ave in their shiny BMWs blaring Nelly.

As For Mr. Cavalier’s column, the last time I checked the US was the most dominant country in the world. Aside from being the most powerful country in every respect, we have a permanent seat on the Security Council with veto powers and we supply most of the troops for UN engagements. Without us, the UN would fail, just its predecessor the League of Nations did. Iraq and Libya don’t have any practical power over any decision making part of the United Nations, they couldn’t even save themselves from being attacked by us.

Before you start writing angry letters, I just have to say that I like this country. Without us MC Hammer wouldn’t be able to preach his born again values to the rest of the world, and we wouldn’t be able to enjoy the majesty of the Big Gulp. Also Mark Twain was funny, and there are some pretty things out West. I like America more than any other country, but that doesn’t mean I have to think that we are inherently better than everyone else or support all of its policies. Like everyone, we can be wrong. James Downing CAS ’06