So how does it feel? I comply, daily. I reify. I reproduce the relationships of power and domination with every move I make within this state-sanctioned routine I call my life.

I consent, and furthermore, I benefit. If the global system was a huge pyramid (scheme), I would be positioned with other over-educated people who have access to both personal credit and a social safety-net, with many humans below me. If I (and presumably you, reader) exist somewhere above the middle, where the pyramid starts to visibly narrow and no one has to worry about a next meal or a warm, safe place to sleep, what provides the base of this structure?

Could it be the children who walk over rubble and crave water? Or the oil profits made out of countries like Ecuador, where the swamps bleed crude oil and the beautiful countryside is devastated and carcinogenic after being raped by Exxon? Or even the structural certainty that the people at the bottom of the pyramid are so desperate that men scramble to scavenge rotting chickens culled after they were exposed to bird flue?

No one wants to believe their access to a big screen TV is predicated on the misery of women and children in Congolese refugee camps or the despair pervading Gaza, but I argue that it absolutely is. Forgive me (and thank you) those of you who are reading this but who have not always lived with the assurance of material security -I do not speak for you. Everyone else, friends and peers (and particularly us white, middle-class Americans), your life is a lie.

I guess first we have to agree to the premise that the US is an empire that arose from and was maintained through the marginalization, impoverishment, dependency, envy, admiration and, to some degree or another, subjugation of the third world. From the genocide and land expropriation integral to US relations with the original North American inhabitants, to Jefferson’s Empire for Liberty and the illegitimate Louisiana Purchase (If I were Spain I would totally sue France for the recovery of the illegally alienated lands) and the violent and dishonorable seizure of half of Mexico, evidence of the imperial history of the US is gaining traction with many academics.

Countering the narrative of American Exceptionalism, or at least Benign American Inevitability is not easy, however. Sure slavery was bad and the early Americans were mean to the Indians, but all of that was a long time ago and now we have affirmative action, casinos and high profile black heroes (Obama, I love you, but our nation is not yet post-racial). Thus we are redeemed. I mean if the alternatives are so great then how come everyone wants to come here and be me?

1898 marks the start of the episode of US imperialism, according to official history, as if before that the US was a non-expansionistic republic and after a beacon for democracy. Don’t be fooled. The empire upon which our excesses, luxuries, comforts and maybe even subsistence depend, runs on deprivation like a 4X4 runs on gas – and had for the century before we liberated the Cubans from their own independence movement and slaughtered and water-boarded our way to victory over the Philippine nationalist insurgency. But because our nineteenth-century continental empire was built on the backs of Africans, in the blood of Indians and at the expense of Mexicans it’s bad manners to acknowledge past crimes. That’s the kind of imperialism gentlemen agree to forget.

Delusions of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy justified the spread of the republic. Racism saved the republic by providing a rationale for the land seizure that was necessary for the material abundance that fueled the US. The American narrative combined constructions of whiteness with popular misunderstandings of Darwin’s theory of evolution and became a movement that inspired both images of American identity and German fascists of the intra-war period. Hmmm weird crossover. The spread of the yeoman farmer across the land of the free, fulfilling the inevitable providence of Manifest Destiny somehow connected to a racial ideology that justified lynching, ethnic cleansing, and the Holocaust? (I know, Godwin’s law)

Perhaps the continuity of the American imperial project, from Jefferson to Monroe, from Jackson to Polk, and from McKinley to Roosevelt was briefly interrupted by the Great Depression and FDR’s Good Neighbor policy (and then only if you ignore the US intervention in Mexican politics, economy and culture), but quickly resumed after WWII. Domestic and international organizations funded by the participants of the social compact (taxpayers) used self-conscious and at times slapstick methods to assert cultural, economic and political hegemony. The American empire extended through Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. What a heady time of US empire: coups in Guatemala and Iran; civil war in Vietnam; assassination in the Congo; and cultural indoctrination in West Germany

As Africa and Asia underwent the contortions of decolonization, the US imperial project remained veiled behind the Cold War bipolar (dis)order. A world with opposing sides, divided so neatly along religious, economic and philosophical lines is easier to understand. Godlessness v God, Corruption v Integrity, Stagnation v Vitality, Destitution v Wealth, East v West, Evil v Good. With organizing principles like that a little empire-building can seem unimportant to imperial subjects (Americans) and even benign to willing participants (Americans).

From other perspectives, the 50s, 60s and 70s were all about the US brutally suppressing the occupied zones – whether directly through warfare, dictatorships, assassinations, coup d’etats, and death-squads, or less obviously through market forces, structural violence and cultural hegemony.

The Carter administration was a brief and incomplete hiatus from the most blatant of machinations, but where government stood down, private industry stepped up. Once Carter left power the leaders of expansionist corporations became cabinet members in the next administration. The men who privatized water in Bolivia led the Thatcher-Reagan neo-liberal revolution. Synchronicity in political and economic interests works best. For empire anyway.

International organizations had begun to develop the third world in earnest in the 1960s, working in lockstep with US foreign and corporate interests. Corrupt, opportunistic, or blackmailed (whatever), the political leaders of third-world countries entered into agreements with global financial organizations – loans to develop infrastructure and exploit natural resources. Their immediate economic potential regularly over-estimated, however, nation after nation became hopelessly overextended and indebted. Now hobbled by foreign debt and destructive trade agreements, emergent third-world countries became candidates for the type of privatization, austerity, neoliberal reforms, impoverishment, land expropriation, famine, civil war, and debt-relief programs we have seen over the last few decades.

Now “softened up” emergent countries like India and Argentina have dropped their protective tariffs, stopped subsidizing their farmers and businessmen, and political leaders all over the world have privatized previously guaranteed necessities like water. Social services (education, public health services) are curtailed while natural resources are exploited without restraint. This beautiful system has produced modern day success stories for capitalism like Ecuador – poisoned, poisonous, and locked in financial agreements with the IMF that has 95% of the nation’s oil profits going to foreign speculators as cancer rates sky-rocket as a consequence of environmental decimation.

Clinton didn’t exactly dismantle the empire, and this examination does not exonerate Democrats, but lately Republican administrations have been giant empire-building daisy chains. The current Bush administration stroked those in their circle so relentlessly that up to a million of the world’s civilians have died in Iraq, creating obscene profits for those with interest in arming enemies, starting wars, inciting warfare, suppressing warfare, supporting warfare, practicing warfare, and reconstructing after warfare.

The blood and pain of the women and children (dismembered in Afghanistan, broken in Iraq, uprooted in Colombia, orphaned in Guatemala) doesn’t deter the spread of US Empire, but instead serves as an industrial-grade lubricant. The more graphic and gratuitous the horror the more invisible it is to the American people. That many consequences to our privileges are unimaginable. It is difficult to empathize with humanity on a large scale, and besides, discussing that magnitude of carnage is un-American. Even the deaths of American troops are subsumed by the heroic narrative and inevitability of sacrifice during warfare, while those questioning the legitimacy of our wars are treated as unhelpful and sophomoric.

Well the course of empire pulls all in its wake, and the current direction of our American Empire bodes ill for planet earth and our species. If the world is wracked by environmental destruction, energy crises, food scarcity and terrorism, it is at least partly (mostly) as a consequence of or in reaction to the rise of the hegemon (us/Us)? So what are we? An imperial warrior state, consolidating capital and extracting wealth in service to a partisan and greedy God (Mammon? Baal?) The most aggressive example of a potentailly lethal human-based virus attacking the life systems of Planet Earth? Animals entangled in webs of significance we ourselves have spun? Masters of our fate, both individual and collective? Each one a revolution of personal agency waiting too long for a spark?

The blood won’t wash off of my hands, but then I’m kind of morbid. And I tend to think its all about me, therefore when I see the devastation wrought by my nation’s pursuit of domination, wealth, and impunity at the expense of so many fellow humans (innocents and criminals) I mark my complicity as a factor in the war crimes. I benefit from the death, famine, and atrocities that prop up the pyramid, and my consent props up the empire. I comply, I reify. My life is a lie.