Of dreadnaughts and doomsayers

Lyndon LaRouche says the world is doomed within the next 10 years. But though it is possible he will be elected during that time, I do not see the likelihood. And I guess that means the show will go on as it always does.

If you are graduating from the UW next weekend, this may be the last issue of The Daily you ever read, and I hope to write something worth remembering.

In that spirit, I wish there were some great controversy on which I could opine, but I daresay The Onion has already done best justice to our world's most important headlines, such as "Dress code cracked" and "Ross Ice Shelf embarks on world tour." These things imply the obvious: Our culture is rotten on the inside and malevolent on the outside. On the home front, American citizens waste their dollars and their days looking for controversy in 90-dollar shirts from companies that cater to garbage and simply do not deserve the attention. And around the world, the United States is squandering precious opportunities to set an example from sea to shining sea by behaving itself and acting with the interests of all the Earth at heart rather than just lusting for the shallow glimmer of immediacy in profit.

Humanity ain't perfect yet, and we really must work on that.

If I have not yet made it clear in my quarters as opinion writer, I am an imperialist. I favor a one-world nation -- indivisible not under God but under the secular rules of good sense and learning -- and I reason that if any two cultures are not able to grow up and behave themselves, then they have got to be unpopularized and dismembered over time as a hindrance to human evolution.

The empire is the only political model that accommodates both pragmatism and optimism by providing central vision and resource agglomeration, and to favor imperialism does not mean so much that I would like to see a restoration of autarchy as it means I would like to see power diverted away from the alarmists and the mob of popular opinion to be given to the people who would hold every human alive accountable to her or his full potential.

American citizens have grown corrupt by simultaneous exposure to a great wealth of freedoms and to the technological fruits of an industrial superpower. We are all distanced from the slums of Jamaica, the wars of Colombia and the dangerous spread of fundamentalist Islam, and so we have little empathy for such plights. At the same time, we take our riches for granted so fundamentally that we would bite the hand that feeds us and call for an end to technology itself ... all instead of growing up.

Maybe American culture needs to go too.

Or maybe we just need to clean up our act and bring back the elegance ... rather like Drumheller Fountain. If you will follow my metaphor, it is bad enough that our beautiful campus grounds were widely let fallow last summer in order to conserve water, but the decommissioning of our fountain is and has been unacceptable. Turn on Drumheller Fountain and leave it on ... and clean the damn thing up!

By the same token, let silent the doomsayers that they may come to naught. Ave, LaRouche! Morituri te salutant.

Peace be unto you. As a parting thought, I offer two pieces of advice. Always be nice to clerks and cashiers, and never be fool enough to shake a left-handed person's right hand.

Editor's note:

This summer, Josh Fredman will be the opinion editor. For all those UW students interested in opinion writing or cartooning during that time, e-mail opinion@u.washington.edu and let him know.