Yes my friends!  It is true!  The American-engineered, virtual, digitally globalizing hegemony just keeps moving forward, unabated.  We want to make sure that, while most Iraqis still have no reliable phone service, electricity, sanitation or clean water, like it or not we will take them out of the “Saddam dark ages” and bring them into the bright light of a new American future to “help them be more themselves.” 

What kind of deranged thinking is this?  Well who else would have thought to send such a stellar delegation to Iraq for “home improvement” discussions than a 27-year-old ‘wunderkind’ from Stanford who is the youngest member of the State Department planning staff – a newbie who no doubt believes that the world can be made ‘whole’ again through the virulent, virtual community of twitter-heads and other new-media community-building-technologies?

Such a new-media, ‘second-coming’ mindset is even hailed by other presumed experts from the USA, who claim that this is an opportunity to create an open society, where Iraqis will become “different kinds of citizens,” blah, blah, blah…  Oh this is classic cultural imperialism.  We have discovered the Holy Grail, and now we will dispense its healing powers to the stupid, the deaf and the dumb of the world. Cultural imperialism knows no bounds when the self-assumption of manifest destiny infects every centimeter of one’s self image.

And with our own economy in tatters, our government thought it a worthwhile investment of tax dollars to send the wealthy executives of YouTube, Twitter, Google, Meetup.com, Howcast, AT&T, Blue State Digital and WordPress to Iraq in order to convince these people that they should be tweeting, googling, blogging, posting videos and ‘connecting with people’. 

Let us be honest with one another.  This is not at all about what the Iraqis need; it is about us Americans.  Why else would we make the investment?  I mean we are getting serious here.  Pull out the army and send in the marketers.  Goddamn, we are going to open up new markets for our products, and our values, if it kills them.  After all, ‘we are the champions of the world’, my friends; and so it is our god-given right to insure that the rest of the globe adheres to our program, accepts our values and lives our life style.  As one of our delegation, Twitter’s very own Jack Dorsey, articulated: “Our whole purpose here is to listen and try to understand the way they kind of are looking at the possibility of investing in Internet infrastructure.”  Well, despite all the attempted moderation (see italics), I guess we know what the real mission was!  Investment!!

We don’t care if there is a “cultural disconnect” with the Iraqis when we tell them ‘thou shalt twitter’ – because we seem to think that they have the wrong cultural baggage; and the sooner they adopt our cultural framework, the better for all involved.  And yes, we even admitted, “this is what could make a major change in the Middle East.”  That is what we really want, to make them all like us; and to create more markets for our products.  Even one of the delegation from Meetup.com, said, “Wow, so this is just America doing some sort of cultural imperialism on this country.”  To which the Meetup executive retorted, no “it is just to help them be more themselves.”  Again, where does such thinking find its meaningful foundation?  So, by changing the Middle East and making Iraqis into new kinds of citizens, we will be helping them to become more themselves.  Again, what kind of self-delusional lunacy is this?

God knows we have been sent several messages that we should stop meddling in the affairs of the Middle East; yet, we fail to have ears to hear.  Or else, hearing, we just refuse to believe, and so we plow ahead with the assurance of our own self-righteousness.  God bless America?

(Materials for this article were quoted from “Microblogging in Baghdad,” by Gillian Reagan, New York Observer, May 4, 2009)