America has become bilingual with Bush at the helm

Make all the jokes you want! Laugh to your heart’s content about Bush’s very limited vocabulary; or Americans’ loyalty to one spousal language and only fling encounters with a few Tex-Mex dialects! Although we may not yet recognize it, this nation of ours has ceased to be a monolingual butt of embarrassment. We are now, officially to the world, fully bilingual. And thanks to our tutor-in-chief we have become fluent, overnight, in this mystery second language – well, perhaps not a mystery language to many of us.Spanish, you think? Try something else. Could it be that Gallic parlez-vous? That’s way too refined and intellectual for us. And Russian is definitely a passé lingo now that we know it hasn’t helped our Condoleezza much. As for the other European tongues, nah… they have too few people speaking them; and the other languages from the Orient are as inscrutable as the people who speak them.

A language of fear:

If you are thinking Esperanto… well, that isn’t it. But you are getting warm, radioactively lukewarm; for the language Americans are being asked to master is Nuclearanto. Our neo-conservative caretakers have made this fission-Esperanto a very simple language for us to communicate political feelings and also properly punctuate demands; a tongue that requires neither vocal chords to communicate, nor reading signs, nor dactylic recognition; a language rooted in none of the accepted six language families but, instead, in the oldest and deepest of all human emotions: fear. Yep, make no mistake about it; Americans have adopted a second national language: Nuclearanto; pronounced “Nucular-anto” by its principal speaker, and dean academician of this lingua universalis, George W. Bush. This dubiously awaited lingua universalis is finally here; not for science or for commerce, but for all necessary, even unnecessary, communication dealing with diplomacy, war… and, naturally, victors’ peace.Much of the world is now seeing something which they hadn’t seen before: a US willing to stay a benign nuclear power as long as it unconditionally gets its way; otherwise it’s back to mid-summer 1945 and what has become an all too-often comment in jingoistic parlance: “stop wasting time and resources, and let’s nuke them”; proving then and ready to prove now that Dr. Jekyll can turn into Mr. Hyde without even taking a drug. Do we dare tell anyone how often we get to hear the “let’s nuke them” epithet? There is a more-than-slight difference, however, in the circumstances of sixty-two years ago and today; and to the horrors that were Hiroshima and Nagasaki we have added a new horror of pre-launch abusive fear. America, with a destructive arsenal capable of dyeing the entire green earth brown, has told the world in no uncertain terms that we have given ourselves consent to judge unilaterally when we might “feel” endangered, and react accordingly in a preemptive way. So any nation that may be looking at America or “its interests” cross-eyed, beware… For you may be asked to accept an inoculation of cruise missiles as a warning salvo, something which is definitely a better option than becoming irremediably the next nuclear holocaust.

The message to Iran:

Are you listening, Iran? We are now speaking in vernacular Nuclearanto to you. Our Pentagon geniuses believe that a hundred cruise missiles ought to do the job, that way compliance with our “nuclear exclusiveness” requirements will be met without a hassle, and you’ll become predisposed for a regime change that could meet our approval for being Israel-tolerant. You’d wise to tell Majles, Expert-mullahs and Guardians to stop looking at the Persian Gulf as if it were an Arab-Iranian waterway and not the Mare Americanus it has really become. Sorry, but we have to be firm or next you’ll be telling us that we have no right to impose a maritime petrol-toll to cross the Strait of Hormuz; or that American carriers are ship-non-grata in either Persian or Oman gulfs. Let’s get it straight once and for all: the American Fleet has inalienable nuclear rights to navigate any waters on this planet it sees fit to protect American interests, corporate or military.But America with its self-anointed rights to perform preemptive military strikes cannot be portrayed as fighting terrorists… Only breeding them at a locust-spreading pace.

And we can rest assured that there will be little change in the world until a significant number of Americans become enlightened and see it that way, then decide to have their own regime change – and by that I certainly don’t mean passing the reins of government to equally-hawkish Democrats. It needs to be a regime change that puts common sense in America’s head, soon; before everyone on this earth becomes fluent in Nuclearanto.The proposition that any one country or any one people have the right to conduct preemptive massive attacks in today’s world takes a step beyond the absurd. In the case of a military superpower imposing its will on a much weaker adversary, it is nothing short of criminal. We are not dealing here with business or bridge games deterring, hindering or preventing situations from occurring. We are dealing with the human species and its survival. Acknowledging the right of preemption to the world, as Bush has already done, might as well be interpreted as denying our own descendants the right to exist.…….Ben Tanosborn is a writer based in Washington State, USA. (ben@tanosborn.com)