Purr -Anxiety @ 40 - by Carl Salonen

I wish I could say that this has been an easy year for me, but it hasn't. You regular readers may have noticed I practically disappeared from the radar in terms of this column.

<shrug> Shit happens, right? Frankly, things here in New York have been bleak, almost survival-oriented. You don't see your regular coffee-and-muffin guy, and you immediately think he's been picked up by the FBI.

I'm worried. I'm very worried about where this country has been and where it's headed. Sometimes I think the cure is worse than the disease, and maybe bin Laden won.

And then I think about my flag and country, and the service I've done for it over the past year, and realize that, all in all, we'll survive. More, eventually we'll thrive, but at what cost?

18th Century colonial empires became bereft because they spread themselves too thin. 21st Century economic empires have done the same thing. I'm not sure that we, in our greed, did the right thing by encouraging McDonald's to open all around the world. It gave citizens a taste of America, yes, but it also forced the hand of those who didn't want us meddling in the first place.

And for what? For a measly profit that not all of us would share, anyway. The European colonial empires that were built over centuries at least benefitted their populations by exploration and the resulting new ideas and goods those explorations brought back.

What did we get? The Chicken McNugget? A $3 Starbucks latte where you even have to go get your own milk and sugar?

The momentum of our hegemony was and is monstrous. And we have nothing to show for it. Can anyone show me a distinct benefit we've garnered by forcing the world to swallow our Cokes, to smoke our cigarettes, to eat our junk food, to watch our TV?

I mean, really, we've sent CNN and every stinking 70's rerun to places that now hate us. Why? What good did it do us? And now we spend billions of dollars trying to persuade them that, no, we're really not like "All In The Family," we don't hate, and Archie Bunker isn't our role model.

That's not to say that these are reasons to kill innocent people, but let's face some facts: if the Muslim terrorists had any inkling of what this country was really like, they'd wait for us to implode. We're dying as a carcass that is about to collapse under it's own weight, bloated like Jabba the Hutt.

Not a bad metaphor, that. Looking over how we've run our affairs over the past 25 years, where is the noble cause? Where is the consistency? We say we don't negotiate with terrorists, then we turn around and sell them arms for hostages. We say we support freedom, and then we go and protect a corrupt monarchy because some other tyrant horns in on it? Where's the goddam nobility in that?