BY JAMES MAO

In print | Published February 26, 2009

Mindlessly bouncing around the Internet as I am wont to do during time allocated for writing seminar papers, I came across yet another dire-sounding quote regarding the current financial crisis. What struck me with this particular quote were two things: first, it’s a quote by a rapper, and second, it doesn’t regard America’s economic trauma as anything especially shocking.

The quote in question was uttered by the rapper Saigon, who may also be familiar to fans of the HBO show “Entourage,” thanks to his recurring role in seasons two and three. When asked how the recession has affected him, Saigon replied, “Has the recession affected me? Nah, I wouldn’t say so. I don’t think the recession affects any poor people — people who grew up poor — [be]cause we’d been in a recession since we was born. When has there not been a recession in the hood?”

Saigon’s words, even if he has a dubious handle on the exact definition of a recession, are especially illuminating in light of the headlines that dominate any media source these days. It seems that no matter what the news story is, America is somehow involved. For people like Saigon who grew up in poverty, the hope is that the American government will find a way to clean up the streets and close the inexcusably wide income gap. But the simple fact is that America has so many commitments that no matter how much rhetoric President Obama spins, it appears doubtful that the problems that affect America most — domestic ones — will get enough attention.

I don’t want to suggest that the new administration is not giving priority to the economic crisis, because the stimulus package has obviously taken up most of the government’s efforts this past month. I do, however, suggest that even priority status will not be the “enough attention” I feel domestic problems deserve, given that this country has simply found itself involved in too many external situations. This is not Obama’s fault. It’s not even Bush’s fault.

Ever since America firmly entrenched itself in the role of world savior following World War II and the Marshall Plan, the formerly isolationist country has essentially gotten drunk off trying to make the world a better place. (Or, if not a better place, then a more American place.) In a previous edition of The Phoenix, one of our columnists listed what he sees as the four major international issues that Obama must deal with. Those are not new issues. Our columnist also made it clear that those issues did not even comprise the entire list. To paraphrase another rapper, America’s got a list, and here’s the order of that list that it’s in: Iraq, Iran, China, Russia, Afghanistan, North Korea, all of Latin America… All of these countries have decades-long experience with American involvement.

The end result of too many fingers in too many pies (few of which will end up tasting any good, to extend this cumbersome metaphor) is that the American government has chronically neglected the situation at home. While the crusaders set out to ensure all of Earth’s children could enjoy the inalienable rights of man that several wealthy landowners wrote about in 1776, forgotten was the assistance towards prosperity people at home should have received.

Take America’s involvement in Latin America, for example. On Monday, an op-ed piece was printed in the Wall Street Journal calling for an end to the war on drugs, condemning the ineffective and ultimately crisis-exacerbating policies that countries like Colombia have been pressured to implement. America, of course, has long had a vested interest in defeating the drug problem; the Latin American policies were, after all, U.S.-inspired.

The end result? Here it is appropriate to invoke the words of yet another rapper: “Instead of a war on poverty/They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me,” Tupac Shakur once lashed out.

Obama has gently warned that it may be necessary to govern with big government again. But the fact of the matter is that America may have become too big of a country in the global sphere. It is doing, and has always had to do, the job that the laughable United Nations was meant to do. Many say that Bush undermined the U.N. out of American arrogance; I am as disapproving of the last administration’s rashness as the next guy, but Bush acted in accordance with what has long been international necessity. Iraq was a mistake, to be sure, but if anybody was ever going to try and “save” it in the event that it actually needed saving, the United States was literally the only option. And that is the crux of the problem.

I am being a bit of a hypocrite, admittedly. I have repeatedly asked for America to help resolve the devastation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am, then, another symptom of the international community’s overreliance on America, and America’s probably well-intentioned efforts to meet the world’s needs. Hopefully, the recession the country faces now will return the government’s focus on matters that will help build a stronger America before America builds a stronger world.

Wall Street is suffering. Obama says Main Street has to prosper for Wall Street to do so again. But I want the government, at the federal or state level, to fix the streets first. And I want the rest of the world to find a way to resolve its own problems without always relying on a singular entity. It is disturbing to see the international community leaning on a structure that may well be rotting at its very core.

James is a first-year. You can reach him at jmao4@swarthmore.edu.

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