On foreign policy, demographics and Kinison

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on September 9th, 2008

From Asia Times Online comes the mysterious, one-named Spengler, whose latest column is called “A comedy of areas,” in which he channels the late George Carlin and quotes from both Carlin and Sam Kinison to illustrate his points.

Who are these countries, and why are they there? They don’t seem to want to be there much longer. The late Kinison’s “World Hunger” routine comes to mind:

You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don’t send them another bite, send them U-Hauls. Send them luggage, folks. Send them somebody like me. I’ll walk out there. Send a guy that says, “Hey, you know, we just drove 700 miles with your food and we realized there wouldn’t BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A ***** DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING’S GONNA GROW HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. Nothing grows in this *****. Here, eat some of. Taste it. You know what it’s gonna be 100 years from now? IT’S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A ***** DESERT! We have deserts in America, we just don’t live in them, *****!

Only in the context of over-the-top black humor do Americans ask the obvious question, namely: What are certain countries doing there in the first place? Merely suggesting that some of them might not need to be there made Kinison, who died in a 1992 car crash, the deepest foreign-policy thinker of his generation.

We never thought we’d see Kinison mentioned in a column on foreign policy. Or Carlin who, Spengler says, “was the closest thing stand-up comedy had to Goethe’s Mephistopheles…” and that…

Everyone isn’t going to make it, Carlin tells us, and those who don’t can go ***** themselves – desert countries where there isn’t any food and former Soviet republics where there aren’t any babies, for example.

Not everyone is going to make it. That should be America’s mantra. America was settled by people who didn’t think that Europe was going to make it, and decided that the better part of valor was to bail out and start something new. Georgia and Ukraine are not going to make it. They are past the point of no return. Nothing will save them. They do not like life well enough to perpetuate it. ***** them.

Again, we never thought we’d see anyone use the words (both real and imagined) of George Carlin to take down Wilsonian idealism. It reminds us of the English teachers of the ’70s who attempted to use comic books as a means to instill a love of reading in grade schoolers!

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