(Captain's log): In Africa, we have a brutal tyrant who is doing his best to dismantle the culture and economy of his nation simply to stay in power. His neighbors know he's barbaric but are afraid to criticize him. Having stolen an election, he's now clamping down on the press, persecuting his opponents, destroying the economy of his nation, and doing his best to turn it into a complete hellhole. His nation once exported food; now it has to import food and it won't be able to get enough and there's going to be widespread famine. A lot of people there have already died; a lot more will soon.

Elsewhere in Africa you have routine widespread slavery. Children by the thousand are sold by their parents to slavers who take them to other nations where they are used and abused until they grow up, and then turned out on their own to live horrible lives in even more abject poverty than those they left.

There is a plague in Africa; in some nations it will soon cause a death toll unseen in the world since the Black Death struck Europe. It's already cutting a bloody swath through the educated classes there and will soon destroy the economic base of many nations.

Africa is fucked.

In Asia you seem to have people who think that there is some sort of political statement to be made by throwing hand grenades into a church. You've got Hindus and Muslims that think that it's worth fighting over who gets to build a church on a certain site, and who are willing to kill hundreds of the others, just on general principles. They may even be willing to use 21st century weapons to settle scores dating back a thousand years.

You've got people in some nations walking the streets with canes looking for any opportunity to beat someone else because they're not living a good life. They do this with government approval. Is this religious orthodoxy or thinly-veiled sadism and thuggery? Perhaps it's both.

SE Asia is also no prize; Cambodia is the world's poster child for genocide; Viet Nam is a basket case economically, and let's not even talk about Myanmar. In China you have a gerontocracy holding onto power by its fingernails, living on the past glory of a long march that happened three generations ago and talking about how everything they do is in the name of "the people". In the meantime, those who live in North Korea are suffering through conditions unimaginable to anyone who doesn't live in Cambodia, or Viet Nam, or Ethiopia, or Congo, or, well, come to think of it, it's actually not that unusual in the third world, is it? You have a corrupt and incompetent government which has so badly mismanaged the nation that its people are starving in huge numbers. Somalia, Myanmar, I guess lots of places have gone through that. Even though North Korea is importing mountains of food, millions of tons of it, it is possible that as many as a million people there may have starved already.

Asia is fucked.

Meanwhile, my good friends the French are proceeding to prove that when a democracy reaches the point where more voters are receiving benefits from the government than are paying taxes, that they will then proceed to vote for ever rising benefits and will destroy their own economies through out-of-control social spending. Living on memories of past glory, they are like old men sitting in a tavern, grumbling into their cups about how they used to be big and strong and virile, remembering how important they were when they were younger. And they are doing their best now to try to make the rest of Europe the same way, and there's a good chance they will succeed and will convert the entire economic block into a declining has-been. What used to be a lot of small nations who could make their own decisions and maybe do well on their own will become a single confederation caught in political and bureaucratic gridlock. Europe is probably fucked, too.

And then there is South America. Rich in resources and space and land and not yet overpopulated, South America should be the dream continent, more successful than any other. It is dominated by only two languages; it doesn't have a thousand year legacy of hatred and revenge; it is isolated from the rest of the world both physically and culturally. It is dominated by a single religion. Brazil has every advantage a nation could want; and yet it is stagnant and full of desperately poor people, living in slums. Argentina cannot seem to get its economic house in order; it's about to collapse and there's definitely a danger of war as a result. Colombia has a horrible crime problem. Peru is little better off. And yet, with all of South America's problems, it's still better off than Africa or Asia. But it's still fucked.

The world is a mess. There are billions of people out there who are miserable, living in horrible conditions, and they all seem to blame me for it. It's my fault either because I'm white, or because I'm old, or because I'm affluent, or because I'm educated, or because I'm a technologist, or because I'm an American, or because I speak English. If it's not my fault because I did something directly, it's my fault because I didn't do something. It's my fault because I did the wrong thing, but everything I can possibly do is the wrong thing, even when I do nothing whatever. Everything seems to be an American sin, of commission or of omission.

No matter what I do or my nation does, someone out there seems ready to bitch about it.

When two nations out there hate each other, they want my nation to solve their difficulty. When Israel and the Palestinians slaughter each other, do they negotiate and try to fix it? Hell no; they both ask the US to order the other guy to make concessions. Pakistan and India have been at each other's throats for fifty years, and they always want the US to mediate. The Arabs hate me (they seem to want to kill me); the Africans want to blame me for everything that's gone wrong because some people who look vaguely like me imported some people from Africa to be slaves here in the US long before any of my ancestors even emigrated to this country. (But their skin was the same color as mine, so it's my fault.) Europe has peaked and is in decline, and because my nation won't decline too it must be my fault because I won't ruin my nation too to keep them company.

I find myself despairing, sometimes. It gets to be too much for me. Sometimes I feel like screaming at the top of my lungs, Why don't all you people solve your OWN fucking problems for a change?

AIDS is going to do to Africa what the Bubonic Plague did to Europe when my ancestors lived there. One third of Europe died; and there is at least one nation in Africa where the HIV infection rate is already 25% and still rising, and nearly every one of those people will die of the disease. It's still spreading through the population at about a growth-of-population curve, and it may result in the first absolute decline in population of that continent in recorded history. So they're looking to the West for a solution: cheap drugs, and a vaccine, and a lot of money, and apologies. Lots of apologies.

What the world really needs is a bucket of ice water in its face, a big dose of realism. The HIV epidemic could be stopped in its tracks right now. We don't need a vaccine to prevent the spread of AIDS in Africa; what we need is 500 billion condoms and someone telling Africans the truth about sex and disease. No, having sex with a virgin will not cure you; no, HIV is not caused by poverty or witchcraft; and if you have unprotected sex with someone who is infected then you have a chance of getting infected too and once that happens there is no cure, so don't do it.

American envoy Zinni is back in the middle east on the umpteenth attempt, yet again, to try to convince the Palestinians and Israelis to stop killing each other. It isn't going to be any more successful than the last time, or the time before that; the US has been working off and on for thirty years to try to make that situation better; we've expended tens of billions of dollars in aid and outright bribes and it's done jack good. There will be no peace in the middle east until the people there actually want peace, and right now they're all too consumed with hatred. Neither side wants the US to mediate because they want peace; they want the US to mediate because they hope that US will bully the other side.

And that's what the Pakistanis and Indians want, too. Each side wants the US to come in and decide that the other side has to leave Kashmir. What has never been made clear is just what we have to do with it. As far as I can tell, it's that we're the only nation actually capable of kicking either of them out. Maybe we should kick them both out: announce that in one year's time we will nuke the whole area and make it useless, so they better both evacuate or make a deal between themselves before we do. Maybe that would solve the Jerusalem problem: tell both sides that if there is not one continuous year of peace in the area before then, that we'll nuke Jerusalem on December 31, 2005. Maybe we should just nuke the whole area and let God sort them all out. And while we're at it, let's take out Mecca. Of course we can't do that.

Sometimes I find myself thinking in those kinds of isolationist terms, though. That isn't possible, because we've got a war to fight. But I do find myself wishing that the President would make a speech in which he said, "The United States is not the world's policeman. We cannot solve anyone's problems except our own, and from now on we aren't even going to try. It is now the official policy of the United States that it will not mediate any dispute; we'll only be involved in diplomacy from now on when we ourselves have an interest in the outcome, and then we'll be working for our own interest. So don't bother asking us for help any more; that account is now overdrawn."

And then we'd give the finger to the Arabs and Europeans and proceed to pulverize Iraq all by ourselves and be damned to the consequences for our "friends". If it destabilizes some regimes there, all the better.

Of course that can't happen. I don't even think it should. But as time goes on it's looking more and more reasonable. Our attempts at cooperation and mediation are looking more and more like a pointless waste of time. Selfish unilateralism is looking better every day.

I also fantasize sometimes about having some psychic power to reach out and snuff people, and making a list of about 200 of the world's worst bastards who would drop dead on my say so without anyone knowing why. Maybe sticking pins in dolls would work. You can run, Saddam, but you cannot hide. Bye-bye, Mullah Omar, see you in hell. Have fun with your virgins, Ayatollah Khameini. It's been good knowing you, Mugabe.

It's too bad I'm a mechanistic atheist, because I know that no such thing is possible. But among the more mystical, I bet that there are a lot of people trying to do this: how many Palestinians do you think might be praying for Sharon to have a heart attack? Or Israelis wishing the same for Arafat?

Are we, my people and my nation, capable of making the world a better place? Possibly, a little, but in many cases the folks living in bad areas are themselves the impediment. Huge amounts of aid are already flowing from here to there, and it seems as if a lot of it gets subverted. Sufficient food has been given to Iraq over the last ten years to keep everyone fed, and yet there has been starvation anyway because the government is making sure it doesn't get distributed. Saddam needs starving children in the news as a political weapon. Aid was being sent into Afghanistan while the Taliban were still in power to prevent starvation there, but the NGO's responsible assumed that a substantial portion of the aid would get stolen; they just included such losses in their calculations and made sure to ship in enough excess to compensate. Huge amounts of aid were being sent to Africa but it turned out that the local aid workers distributing it were using that to coerce young refugees into having sex with them involuntarily as a price for getting fed. And in some places (for instance, Ethiopia) there have been famines because the government was using that as a means of genocide, and did everything it could to try to prevent aid from coming in.

How can we save people from themselves? How can my people improve a situation when many of the people living in those areas are deliberately trying to make their own situation worse? We're fresh out of magic wands, I'm afraid. The United States isn't the world's fairy godmother, capable of turning pumpkins into coaches. We're not miracle workers; we're just hard working and relatively honest, with each other and with everyone else.

No, I don't think that the US should disengage from the world. That's not possible, and it wouldn't be right even if it were. But I find myself caring less and less what the people of the world care about me and mine, simply because it's so predictable. And I'm fed up with my nation being the world's scapegoat.

The problem of Kashmir can only be solved by the people who live there. Peace can only come to Israel when both the Israelis and Palestinians want it. Africa will continue to suffer from plague and misery and famine and horrible government as long as its people are unwilling to do something about it. And as long as everyone out there seems to think that God is fighting on their side against the heathen, they're going to continue to die like flies.

Jefferson had it right: in the long run, people tend to get the government they deserve. And all the horrible baggage that comes along with it.

Ultimately the problems of the world will have to be solved by the world; my nation is not big enough or strong enough to carry the whole load. We are powerful but we are not omnipotent, and right now we've got problems of our own to solve. And the sooner everyone else out there recognizes this and takes responsibility for their own plight, the better off they'll be.