Perhaps you are familiar with Rudyard Kipling's classic short story, "Riki Tikki Tavi"? At the climax of this story, the hero, the mongoose Riki Tikki Tavi, chases the evil cobra Nagaina into her hole, where they fight it out to the death. All of the other animals, and the British family that Riki Tikki is supposed to protect, fear the worst, because the mongoose has foolishly chased the cobra into her hole. But not to worry: Rikki Tiki kills Nagaina, and nobody ever has to worry about cobras having the run of the garden as long as Riki Tikki is alive.
Now Kipling believed that the "white man's burden" was to bring civilization to all those brown "savages" living in the Third World. US President William McKinley said in a speech that the United States had a "duty" to bring Christianity to "our brown brothers" in the Philippines. (Never mind that the Spanish had already converted most of the Filipinos to Catholicism.)
As long as the British were in India, the French were in Algeria, and the United States was in the Philippines, the universe was in a harmonious state of balance, and the world could sleep at night. But if the US and the other European countries (sic) relaxed their "white man's burden..." Then all hell will break loose!
March 15, 2008 marks the fifth anniversary of the United States-led coalition's quixotic foray into Iraq. You could say that this is a case of a mongoose chasing a cobra into the cobra's hole. Granted, the Iraqi people strung up their fearless leader, Saddam Hussein, but that country is no safer than it was five years ago. Probably 5,000 coalition troops (mainly US) will be dead by the end of this year, with about ten times that many Iraqis dead. Nobody thinks that any coalition troops will be going home in significant numbers by the time the results of the 2008 presidential election are tabulated. No, the US-led coalition is in it for the long haul.
Only Republican presidential candidate John McCain has dared to be frank: The United States and its coalition partners could be in Iraq for a hundred years — regardless of who is president.
However, the US under George W. Bush has taken up the white man's burden to bring peace and democracy (as opposed to "civilization") to "our brown brothers" in Iraq. The US and the other members of NATO are trying to do the same in neighbouring Afghanistan, hoping that Pakistan's president Perveiz Musharraf will do his part to police the wild North-West Frontier Province. (Never mind that Musharraf and his people fit nobody's definition of "white man.")
We could be looking at a hundred years, folks. Bush will be leaving office when a new president is inaugurated January 2009, only to pass the white man's burden to a new president.
Now things are quieter in Iraq than they were a year ago (though suicide bombings are still a daily occurrence). Commanding officer Gen. David Petraeus deserves much credit for painstakingly negotiating with the Sunni sheiks of Anbar Province, who have broken away from Al-Qaeda, but it's the Iraqis themselves who have done the most to keep the lid on the situation. If the Sunnis of Anbar Province didn't want to cooperate, Petraeus wouldn't look like the competent general that he has shown himself to be. Sheik Muqtada al-Sadra, the Shi'ite leader in the south, has largely kept his people out of the fray, only now he's complaining about not getting enough "respect," which is a vague term. If Al-Sadra decides to turn his militia loose, you can bet that the Sunnis will turn their militias loose as well, and Petraeus will have to start again at zero.
In the race for the Democratic party's nomination for president, both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama want to withdraw US troops from Iraq, while McCain, the almost certain Republican nominee, wants to keep US troops there until this thing is over — whenever that may be. But it should be apparent by now that the US-led coalition will not be leaving unless that Iraqis themselves really want it to leave. Just when the United States may be electing a president who wants to withdraw all US troops, Al-Sadra is making noise about starting up the conflict again. If Al-Sadra and his kind really wanted the coalition to withdraw, you would think that they would wait until the last coalition troop was out of Iraq before starting up the conflict again.
It should be apparent that nobody wants the coalition to leave: not George Bush, not Dick Cheney, not Haliburtion, not Blackwell, not the democratically "elected" Iraqi government, and — most of all — not Iraqi tribal leaders like Muqtada al-Sadra and his Sunni counterparts in Anbar Province. There's a perverse symbiosis here: coalition leaders George Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair have used militia violence as a justification for the continued presence of coalition troops, while the Iraqi militias justify their violence with what they gleefully call "a US-led occupation."
It is time that the world understand the game in Iraq. What the militias want is not ultimate victory but perpetual conflict. Sheiks like Muqtada al-Sadra are not temperamentally suited to deal with the finer details of government, like garbage pickup, street repair, and police and fire protection. They do, however, know how to set up roadblocks and shake down people who want to enter their "turf." In other words, corruption and official intimidation are de rigueur in that part of the world.
When you understand that the Iraqi militias are but Mafiosi involved in organized crime, while using religion as a justification, then you realize that the worldview of people in that part of the world is essentially Manichean: you have "good" and "evil" locked in a perpetual struggle in which neither good nor evil prevails. If Iraq were to become a peaceful, functioning democracy, then sheiks like Muqtada al-Sadra would become useless. Al-Sadra and his kind aren't going to let that happen.
We cannot convince the Iraqis to reject the idea of a universe locked in perpetual conflict, in which neither good nor evil prevails unless they are first willing to reject this worldview. Remember, Manes, whose philosophy of Manicheanism combined Christianity and Zoroastrianism, came from that part of the world.
What we have is a failure to communicate. The West wants Iraqi oil, but the Iraqi militias only wants to send the world their "martyrs."
We will only see a "paradigm shift" when people start calling these "insurgents" what they really are: assholes. I'm hoping for a day when there will be a headline like this in the New York Times: "Asshole drives truck into mosque!"
The "white man's burden," then, is for the West to realize that it only plays the role of the mongoose chasing a cobra into a snake hole at its own peril. You can't bring peace and democracy to a people that doesn't want it. You cannot convince a people to accept the idea that good must prevail over evil, that peace must prevail over war, unless that people is willing to accept these values as their own.
The United States and its coalition should withdraw their troops — and then be prepared to send them back in when the side that they don't like is winning.
It's what the US has done with the "banana republics" of Central America. Iraq is clearly a "petro republic."
Friday, February 29, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Review of "City of God"
Recently saw a DVD of a Brazilian-made film, "City of God," by Fernando Morelles. Now this film is based on a true story. In 1988, the Brazilian army and police made war on the homeless street children of Rio de Janeiro after the gangs led by Zaca (a black kid) and Cabeludo (a white kid) attacked a police station in Rio. By the time the conflict was over, hundreds, if not thousands, were dead. To this day, police vigilantes still carry out assassinations in the favelas, usually of gang leaders. Most of the leaders of O Primer Comando do Capital, the conglomerate of gangs that rule the favelas, are in prison now, but the gangs will sometimes attack a police station in Rio or São Paulo for something to do on a Saturday night.
The City of God (Cidade de Deus in Portuguese) is merely the best known of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. There are more than fifty of them: vast shantytowns built alongside the hills outside of Rio that rise up to the sky like the levels of heaven, hell and purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy. Only there is no Paradisio at the top of the City of God: just a better view of Rio de Janeiro.
This writer saw a picture in National Geographic magazine of a pig sticking its head through a hole in one of the shacks. He looked like he had a smile on its face; all he needed was sunglasses. As you make your climb up to the summit of a favela, you will see shacks built into the hill, supported by stilts, built of whatever materials that the inhabitants can find in the city dumps: wood, linoleum tiles, tin cans, glass table tops, whatever. The people may keep farm animals — chickens or pigs, for example— because these people mostly come from rural areas in neighbouring states like Bahia. Pregnant women, it is said, like to chew on pig fat, probably for the salt content.
However, if you see the movie "City of God," you will see no scenes of life in the favelas; you don't see any of these shacks built into the hillsides that are often washed away in a mudslide following the seasonal rains that come in spring and autumn. After the movie opens with a chicken about to be slaughtered in the market place (probably in downtown Rio, where there's an open air market), the film takes us to a series of block houses built by the government in the 1960s. These houses are all ugly in their uniformity; they all look the same: all made of cinder blocks, all painted yellow, like the inside of a school building. But these houses are palaces compared to what the real favelados live in. And it gets even better: the scene shifts to an apartment that could only be located in downtown Rio (which, admittedly, has seen better days: periodic water stoppages and power outages, thinks like that). It's even nicer than my apartment.
I thought the City of God was supposed to be a shantytown.
The story of the film traces the rise and fall of a young hoodlum based on Zaca, the leader of one of the gangs that started the gang wars in the 1980s. Hired as a lookout while some older kids rob the patrons a "honeymoon hotel" in Rio (what you might call a "no tell motel,") he shoots up the place instead and leaves a trail of bodies in his wake. Now this kid is about five or six years old at the time, but clearly he's a menace to society. Not somebody who will settle for extorting lunch money at school.
Of course, Zaca has a friend who wants to break away from the criminal element, but he only gets sucked in deeper and deeper until Zaca kills at him at his own party. It's all very predictable: you can keep a good man down in Rio's City of God.
However, balance to the universe is restored when a group of little tykes working for Zaca pump him full of lead. The evil Zaca gets his, and the good residents of Rio can sleep better at night. Brazil (or, at least Fernando Morelles) adheres to the Tao of Hollywood, it seems. Like the Hollywood of the 1930s, Brazilian cinema apparently has its own version of the Chinese Mandate from Heaven, where bad people get what's coming to them while the good guy gets the girl. Our "hero" — the kid who gets shot by Zaca at his own party — gets lots of girls in the movie. That's why Zaca shot him.
Now the violence is extremely graphic, without actually being terribly bloody. Because, let's face it, you usually only get a lot of blood if you do something like cut somebody's carotid artery. Since so much of the violence involves small children, it has a futuristic sci-fi quality, only the future is now in Rio de Janeiro.
Two scenes are particularly memorable for this writer. In the first, a café owner beats his wife to death with a shovel after he catches her with the hero (who manfully jumps out the bedroom window bare-assed naked). The film doesn't actually show the bloody deed, but you get the drift when you see the shovel after the police take the suspect away in handcuffs. (Just like you see a mushy banana, still in its peel, after she has sex with the boy.)
There's another scene, however, that was so realistic that you have to wonder if it wasn't real. (Argentina, you know, became infamous during the 1970s for "snuff" films, where the victims were really murdered in the film.) In this scene, Zaca and his henchmen confront two kids about ten or eleven years old. First Zaca shoots one of them in the foot, then kills the other by shooting him in the chest. There isn't a lot of blood in this scene either, but you can clearly see the bullet enter the body. Not a bad special effect for a low-budget flick.
If the violence is brutal in the naturalistic tradition of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," or other "spaghetti westerns," the acting is sometimes downright terrible in the same tradition. The kid who played Zaca could barely act in an elementary school play. If the director tells him to snarl for the camera, he can do it — no problem. But if you want him to delve more deeply into character, forget it. The same with most of the other actors; there isn't a lot of quality acting in this movie. All of the best Brazilian actors, like Sonia Braga, are working in Hollywood — trust me.
But there's a reason why the world has taken to American films and American television: it's the actors. They're the best in the world. Okay, it's the directors too.
"City of God" won an Academy Award for best foreign film, but what you really get is a lot of sensationalism, perhaps pandering to the middle-class suburbanites who live in fear for their lives in places like Copacabana and Ipamena. The girls from Ipanama had better hold on to their purses for dear life now as they stroll down to the beach!
Unfortunately, the film is silent about the children who were tortured by the Brazilian police while in custody during those times. That silence has the thud of an anvil rolling down the walls of the Grand Canyon when it hits bottom, or maybe one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Of course, babies in Rio murdering other babies is an alarming development in the world; you must be in life support if you don't find it shocking. But this film is more in the tradition of American "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s than anything meant to raise social consciousness. The attitude of the makers of this film seems to be: "Que sera sera!" If you're a poor boy in Brazil and you're not picking coffee for some rich man on a plantation, you're useless over there anyway. Nobody cares what happens to you.
But it's too bad that we only get a graphic novel's view of Rio de Janeiro, because we should want to know more about what's really going on in Third World cities like Rio — or Los Angeles, for that matter. I mean, why do people like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara spend much of their youths hiding out in the mountains so that they can overthrow the government some day?
Think about it.
The City of God (Cidade de Deus in Portuguese) is merely the best known of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. There are more than fifty of them: vast shantytowns built alongside the hills outside of Rio that rise up to the sky like the levels of heaven, hell and purgatory in Dante's Divine Comedy. Only there is no Paradisio at the top of the City of God: just a better view of Rio de Janeiro.
This writer saw a picture in National Geographic magazine of a pig sticking its head through a hole in one of the shacks. He looked like he had a smile on its face; all he needed was sunglasses. As you make your climb up to the summit of a favela, you will see shacks built into the hill, supported by stilts, built of whatever materials that the inhabitants can find in the city dumps: wood, linoleum tiles, tin cans, glass table tops, whatever. The people may keep farm animals — chickens or pigs, for example— because these people mostly come from rural areas in neighbouring states like Bahia. Pregnant women, it is said, like to chew on pig fat, probably for the salt content.
However, if you see the movie "City of God," you will see no scenes of life in the favelas; you don't see any of these shacks built into the hillsides that are often washed away in a mudslide following the seasonal rains that come in spring and autumn. After the movie opens with a chicken about to be slaughtered in the market place (probably in downtown Rio, where there's an open air market), the film takes us to a series of block houses built by the government in the 1960s. These houses are all ugly in their uniformity; they all look the same: all made of cinder blocks, all painted yellow, like the inside of a school building. But these houses are palaces compared to what the real favelados live in. And it gets even better: the scene shifts to an apartment that could only be located in downtown Rio (which, admittedly, has seen better days: periodic water stoppages and power outages, thinks like that). It's even nicer than my apartment.
I thought the City of God was supposed to be a shantytown.
The story of the film traces the rise and fall of a young hoodlum based on Zaca, the leader of one of the gangs that started the gang wars in the 1980s. Hired as a lookout while some older kids rob the patrons a "honeymoon hotel" in Rio (what you might call a "no tell motel,") he shoots up the place instead and leaves a trail of bodies in his wake. Now this kid is about five or six years old at the time, but clearly he's a menace to society. Not somebody who will settle for extorting lunch money at school.
Of course, Zaca has a friend who wants to break away from the criminal element, but he only gets sucked in deeper and deeper until Zaca kills at him at his own party. It's all very predictable: you can keep a good man down in Rio's City of God.
However, balance to the universe is restored when a group of little tykes working for Zaca pump him full of lead. The evil Zaca gets his, and the good residents of Rio can sleep better at night. Brazil (or, at least Fernando Morelles) adheres to the Tao of Hollywood, it seems. Like the Hollywood of the 1930s, Brazilian cinema apparently has its own version of the Chinese Mandate from Heaven, where bad people get what's coming to them while the good guy gets the girl. Our "hero" — the kid who gets shot by Zaca at his own party — gets lots of girls in the movie. That's why Zaca shot him.
Now the violence is extremely graphic, without actually being terribly bloody. Because, let's face it, you usually only get a lot of blood if you do something like cut somebody's carotid artery. Since so much of the violence involves small children, it has a futuristic sci-fi quality, only the future is now in Rio de Janeiro.
Two scenes are particularly memorable for this writer. In the first, a café owner beats his wife to death with a shovel after he catches her with the hero (who manfully jumps out the bedroom window bare-assed naked). The film doesn't actually show the bloody deed, but you get the drift when you see the shovel after the police take the suspect away in handcuffs. (Just like you see a mushy banana, still in its peel, after she has sex with the boy.)
There's another scene, however, that was so realistic that you have to wonder if it wasn't real. (Argentina, you know, became infamous during the 1970s for "snuff" films, where the victims were really murdered in the film.) In this scene, Zaca and his henchmen confront two kids about ten or eleven years old. First Zaca shoots one of them in the foot, then kills the other by shooting him in the chest. There isn't a lot of blood in this scene either, but you can clearly see the bullet enter the body. Not a bad special effect for a low-budget flick.
If the violence is brutal in the naturalistic tradition of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," or other "spaghetti westerns," the acting is sometimes downright terrible in the same tradition. The kid who played Zaca could barely act in an elementary school play. If the director tells him to snarl for the camera, he can do it — no problem. But if you want him to delve more deeply into character, forget it. The same with most of the other actors; there isn't a lot of quality acting in this movie. All of the best Brazilian actors, like Sonia Braga, are working in Hollywood — trust me.
But there's a reason why the world has taken to American films and American television: it's the actors. They're the best in the world. Okay, it's the directors too.
"City of God" won an Academy Award for best foreign film, but what you really get is a lot of sensationalism, perhaps pandering to the middle-class suburbanites who live in fear for their lives in places like Copacabana and Ipamena. The girls from Ipanama had better hold on to their purses for dear life now as they stroll down to the beach!
Unfortunately, the film is silent about the children who were tortured by the Brazilian police while in custody during those times. That silence has the thud of an anvil rolling down the walls of the Grand Canyon when it hits bottom, or maybe one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Of course, babies in Rio murdering other babies is an alarming development in the world; you must be in life support if you don't find it shocking. But this film is more in the tradition of American "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s than anything meant to raise social consciousness. The attitude of the makers of this film seems to be: "Que sera sera!" If you're a poor boy in Brazil and you're not picking coffee for some rich man on a plantation, you're useless over there anyway. Nobody cares what happens to you.
But it's too bad that we only get a graphic novel's view of Rio de Janeiro, because we should want to know more about what's really going on in Third World cities like Rio — or Los Angeles, for that matter. I mean, why do people like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara spend much of their youths hiding out in the mountains so that they can overthrow the government some day?
Think about it.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Maiden Voyage
That's right, folks, this is my first posting on this blog page. I do a lot of ranting and raving, so I might as well post one from time to time. I will start by putting in my two cents' worth on the upcoming presidential elections.
With Mitt Romney bowing it, it looks like John McCain has the Republican nomination in the bag. Looks like this country isn't ready for a Mormon President yet. Not that anybody ever had to worry about anything with caffeine being made illegal just yet...
The Democrats, on the other hand, are looking to score one of two firsts: either the first black man to be President, or the first woman. But like practically every presidential election since the end of World War II, it's going to come down to the South. If the Democrats nominate Barack Obama, that may scare enoughs whites in the former Confederacy into running over to John McCain and turn the election in his favor. It's almost a cinch that at least one of the two parties (if not both) will nominate a southerner for vice-president: say, Mike Huckabee for the Republicans and John Edwards for the Democrats. That's because winning the South is going to be vital in this election.
Either Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama will have to win in a landslide because the Republicans are better organized at the grass roots level. Remember, George W. Bush won 38 states in 2000 and almost that many in 2004. If it comes down to the electoral college and absentee ballots in the armed forces, the Republicans will have the edge.
What McCain has going for him is that he's a veteran who spent years of his life in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. While he's in favor of unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he isn't asking any service personnel to do what he wasn't willing to do himself. Hilary, on the other hand, voted in favor of sending troops to Iraq, then said, "Omigosh, I think this was a mistake! George Bush mislead us."
Now how do you mislead someone who has been rated one of the top 100 corporate lawyers in the United States? A laywer like Ms. Clinton must have a sharp mind for detail. I mean, she can cross her t's and dot her i's with the best of them. If anybody was ever born for crafting legislation in such an august body like the Senate, it's this woman; you wouldn't think that anything would get past her. Yet she acts like she was as gullible as the rest of the American people: "I'm just a girl who can't say no when it comes to sending young men and women off to war!"
At least Obama was against this war from the beginning. Or so he says.
Right now, the war looms as a huge issue, but no matter who wins the election, it's going to be at least four more years as far as the war is concerned. The United States isn't going to be able to pull out until the Iraqi insurgents themselves really want the US to leave. If they really wanted the US to go home, they would lay low until the last American troop was home. Instead, they drive trucks loaded with explosives into US convoys and Shi'ite mosques. When things get a little quiet, they stir things up again.
The insurgents have been using the Americans as a shield. The election of a new President isn't going to change that.
What is all comes down to is this: it's the economy, stupid. Just like Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted both the Great Society and the Vietnam War at the same time in the 1960s, another Texan, George W. Bush, wanted tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq at the same time. The United States started to pay the price for the Vietnam War economically right around the time of the oil embargo and the fall of Saigon in the 1970s. The American people are going to be paying the price for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for a very long time as well.
The US is the largest debtor nation in the world today. How does the US pay off the interest on the national debt, which is trillions of dollars? By working it off. From here on end, the United States will be fighting the world's battles to pay off its national debt, only to sink deeper into debt. (Sort of like somebody who has a massive credit card debt with interest rates that keep going up.)
Somebody asked all the Democratic candidates what problem they expected to face for which they don't think they had all the answers. As part of her campaign strategy to appear more "girly girl" for the voters, Hilary Clinton just laughed it off. Barack Obama, on the other hand, said that he expected to face the increased challenge of global warming, and he admitted that he didn't have all the answers.
I liked Obama's answer much better than Clinton's.
It's the economy, but everything in this world is changing, and fast. In a hundred years, the Chinese people might all be speaking English. The Canadian Northwest Territories might look like the Florida Everglades. The USS Nimitz could end up being eaten by a giant jellyfish.
But the one thing that the American people have been able to count on (at least so far) is presidential elections every four years. That's something. Let nothing short of a giant jellyfish keep you from getting to the polls.
With Mitt Romney bowing it, it looks like John McCain has the Republican nomination in the bag. Looks like this country isn't ready for a Mormon President yet. Not that anybody ever had to worry about anything with caffeine being made illegal just yet...
The Democrats, on the other hand, are looking to score one of two firsts: either the first black man to be President, or the first woman. But like practically every presidential election since the end of World War II, it's going to come down to the South. If the Democrats nominate Barack Obama, that may scare enoughs whites in the former Confederacy into running over to John McCain and turn the election in his favor. It's almost a cinch that at least one of the two parties (if not both) will nominate a southerner for vice-president: say, Mike Huckabee for the Republicans and John Edwards for the Democrats. That's because winning the South is going to be vital in this election.
Either Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama will have to win in a landslide because the Republicans are better organized at the grass roots level. Remember, George W. Bush won 38 states in 2000 and almost that many in 2004. If it comes down to the electoral college and absentee ballots in the armed forces, the Republicans will have the edge.
What McCain has going for him is that he's a veteran who spent years of his life in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp. While he's in favor of unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he isn't asking any service personnel to do what he wasn't willing to do himself. Hilary, on the other hand, voted in favor of sending troops to Iraq, then said, "Omigosh, I think this was a mistake! George Bush mislead us."
Now how do you mislead someone who has been rated one of the top 100 corporate lawyers in the United States? A laywer like Ms. Clinton must have a sharp mind for detail. I mean, she can cross her t's and dot her i's with the best of them. If anybody was ever born for crafting legislation in such an august body like the Senate, it's this woman; you wouldn't think that anything would get past her. Yet she acts like she was as gullible as the rest of the American people: "I'm just a girl who can't say no when it comes to sending young men and women off to war!"
At least Obama was against this war from the beginning. Or so he says.
Right now, the war looms as a huge issue, but no matter who wins the election, it's going to be at least four more years as far as the war is concerned. The United States isn't going to be able to pull out until the Iraqi insurgents themselves really want the US to leave. If they really wanted the US to go home, they would lay low until the last American troop was home. Instead, they drive trucks loaded with explosives into US convoys and Shi'ite mosques. When things get a little quiet, they stir things up again.
The insurgents have been using the Americans as a shield. The election of a new President isn't going to change that.
What is all comes down to is this: it's the economy, stupid. Just like Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted both the Great Society and the Vietnam War at the same time in the 1960s, another Texan, George W. Bush, wanted tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq at the same time. The United States started to pay the price for the Vietnam War economically right around the time of the oil embargo and the fall of Saigon in the 1970s. The American people are going to be paying the price for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for a very long time as well.
The US is the largest debtor nation in the world today. How does the US pay off the interest on the national debt, which is trillions of dollars? By working it off. From here on end, the United States will be fighting the world's battles to pay off its national debt, only to sink deeper into debt. (Sort of like somebody who has a massive credit card debt with interest rates that keep going up.)
Somebody asked all the Democratic candidates what problem they expected to face for which they don't think they had all the answers. As part of her campaign strategy to appear more "girly girl" for the voters, Hilary Clinton just laughed it off. Barack Obama, on the other hand, said that he expected to face the increased challenge of global warming, and he admitted that he didn't have all the answers.
I liked Obama's answer much better than Clinton's.
It's the economy, but everything in this world is changing, and fast. In a hundred years, the Chinese people might all be speaking English. The Canadian Northwest Territories might look like the Florida Everglades. The USS Nimitz could end up being eaten by a giant jellyfish.
But the one thing that the American people have been able to count on (at least so far) is presidential elections every four years. That's something. Let nothing short of a giant jellyfish keep you from getting to the polls.
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