Nov 052009
You’d like to believe our dynasty has a noble purpose. You’d like to believe that there was something respectable about the expansion of our territory beyond the mainland United States. If Plymouth Colony was a city on a hill, you want the tentacles of the American empire to be equally special. This is why we lie to ourselves and pretend that we aren’t the descendents of opportunists and garbage collectors. So, we dress up our history and give it a higher purpose. We avoid embarrassment by constructing the epic. But, the building of the empire was not noble nor grand. It didn’t start out the story of the rise of a great superpower or the conquest of other peoples. Americans pushed outside the borders of our continent solely in search of shit.
In the nineteenth century, guano was a valuable necessity for fertilizing the rich expansive fields of American farms and for concocting the deadly gunpowder so needed by a warlike people. American explorers — sailors in the Pacific and Caribbean — stumbled on to untapped sources of guano on the islands and keys they skipped across in their travels. What claim had they to these treasures of turd, these piles of poop? None. But, Congress would not be deterred. We must have the guano. We must find a way to have it. Yes, precious. So, in 1856, it passed the Guano Islands Act, which states:
“Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other Government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other Government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.”
Yes, these fertile finds of guano would become territories of the United States. We will have our shit and we will protect it from all encroachment. How else could we obtain the Midway Atoll? For what other reason did we need Howland Island? These territories did not expand our citizenry. They did not bring us new trade or industry. They did, however, spread our fingers around the hemisphere, making us bigger, broader, and shittier. Yes, where once we only sought land we could steal from the Indian nations on which to farm and raise our families, now we sought an empire to fuel our firearms and fields — a great acidic dynasty spanning a rich hemisphere of which we are the masters. Poop and circumstance led our misguided nationalism to seize territories we did not need nor intend to inhabit and required that we build a navy to protect our interests. The French took Algiers and Vietnam. The British seized India and Hong Kong. And, America — that great and shining example of democracy and capitalism — we built an empire of shit.
m[-_-]