Hurray, Hurray, no Mushroom Clouds!

Wilson J. Moses, Ferrer Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University, needs no introduction at Cliopatria. He was an early member of our group and has been among its contributing editors for years. After study at Wayne State University and earning a doctorate at Brown, Professor Moses has had a long career, at Maryland, Iowa, S.M.U., Cambridge, Brown, the Free University of Berlin, Vienna, Boston, and Penn State. He is the author of seven books, most recently Afrotopia: Roots of African-American Popular History and Creative Conflict in African American Thought, and editor of three additional volumes. Wilson Moses has guest lectured across half of the known world. His articles and reviews are widely published. It's a pleasure to welcome his essay:"Hurray, Hurray, no Mushroom Clouds!"

Has anyone talked much about the response of the Japanese government in providing emergency relief for the tens of thousands of displaced persons? Not that I am aware. The Japanese are not doing much better than the government of Haiti. But this is not Haiti; Japan is a lot colder than Haiti. Japan is a modern industrial-technological-information-age society. Yet it seems beyond the capacity of the government to respond quickly to the needs of the displaced.

The Ayn Rand philosophy,"With charity towards none," seems to be dominant in Japan. The American government seems to be learning from the Japanese example by cutting the budget for emergency relief preparation. Why should people have to pay taxes to cover worst case scenarios?

Liberals and conservatives alike continue to cry:"We have entered the"information age!" But does not the case of Japan demonstrate that the human race will always be in the agrarian age when it comes to minor things like providing a handful of rice? And is it not obvious that we remain in the industrial age, so long as we require heat, shelter, lighting, and transportation?

The only lesson that seems to be coming out of this disaster is that a reactor meltdown is nor really all that bad. After all, as Glen Beck points out, only 60 people died at Chernobyl, and nobody died at Three Mile Island. In fact nobody has yet died of radiation exposure at Fukishima! An occasional nuclear accident is a minor price to be pay for expanding our rate of energy consumption. There haven't been any mushroom clouds, after all!

We are in the"Information Age," and the good old days are just around the corner, if we can become independent from Arab oil. Drill baby drill! Break the unions, fire the public employees, enact right-to-work laws, abolish minimum wage, privatize social security, and build more reactors.

Cut taxes and increase the money supply. Ben Bernanke is showing us how we all can and should aspire to three bathroom houses with three car garages. Yes, believe me folks, any intelligent, hard-working American can have a box at the Super Bowl. We need only to cut taxes, privatize social security, increase the money supply, drill more oil, and build more reactors.

And build more reactors!

This will create an environment favorable to business, and magically create more jobs. Just don't expect me to pay an American engineer $80,000, when we can get an Indian engineer to do the same job for $5,000. American workers have got to be ready to bite the bullet and accept reality.

The solution to our economic problems is to privatize every aspect of the economy and simultaneously reduce wages and benefits. How else can we compete with Chinese slave labor?

I have another idea! Why don't we make the prison population pay its way? This country currently has 2.3 million convicts sitting on their butts! Let's make the prison population work for a living, I say. Privatize all the prisons and turn them into factories. This should bring down the cost of labor, help us reinvigorate American industry and leave the Chinese in our dust.
-- Wilson J. Moses