Democracy's Drip Dick

Lots of people tend to view the First World very positively. Especially if you're one of those from the Third World, like me. When your dinky little country is broken down, rife with corruption and poverty, you tend to look up to countries like America and regard them with high esteem. They're rich, they're bathed in luxuries that your fellow countrymen can only dream of, they're powerful and their people are prosperous and well taken cared. You see them as shining beacons of good things, like freedom and democracy, and warm apple pie fresh from the oven.

However, as I grew up, this image was slowly tarnished. Like how there's a shining statue in the middle of a courtyard, and gradually over a period of time bird droppings start accumulating on it, at first just a tiny stain of bird poop, but then eventually the whole damn thing gets covered in crap! Except, when you remove these outside stains, when you stick your fingers into what's truly inside these shining beacons of the First World - turns out they're not just covered in crap, they're filled with it. Like a Bavarian-filled donut with bat guano fillings. Like a septic tank wrapped in dough.

Last week, we got another shining example of Western wonderment, when it was revealed that the United States secretly infected Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases.

The discovery of the long-ago experiments stems from another, far better known episode of federal tampering with test subjects to study sexually transmitted diseases: the long-running "Tuskegee experiment," studying 399 poor black men from Macon County, Ala., who had been diagnosed with syphilis but never informed of their condition. Federal scientists simply told the men they had "bad blood" and researchers compiled a four-decades-long study monitoring "untreated syphilis in the male Negro." Researchers never treated the illness over its usually fatal course, even after the simple remedy of penicillin was shown to be an effective syphilis treatment; participants received only free meals and medical exams, together with federal funding of their funeral expenses after they died. The study began in 1932, continuing right through to 1972, when it was exposed in media reports.

One of the better-known experts on the Tuskegee scandal is Susan Reverby, a professor of women's and gender studies at Wellesley College who has published two books on the subject. As she was researching her most recent book, Reverby learned of the Guatemalan project, in which researchers from the U.S. Public Health Service conducted experiments on 696 male and female patients housed at Guatemala's National Mental Health Hospital. The scientists injected the patients with gonorrhea and syphilis -- and even encouraged many of them to pass the disease on to others.

"It was done in conjunction with the Guatemalan government," Reverby told The Upshot in a phone interview Friday morning. "They had permission from the Guatemalan government."

Uh oh. You know how America likes to outsource or export dirty jobs, like carpentry, to illegal Mexicans? Or how the unpleasant job of wiping old people's butts in retirement homes are passed on to Filipino nurses? Or call center jobs going to Indians? It's a bit like that. First Worlders like to compare themselves with countries like Iran or China or Quebec and feel all high and mighty because their butts are so clean, because they've wiped their cheeks with silk. 

First World countries don't have human rights violations, they don't have mass starvation or disease or war. Why? Because like carpenters, nurses and call center employees, they've exported these things to the outside world as well - to the Third World. Their people are too good for that, First Worlders in America and the West are better than Third World people in Asia, Latin America, Africa or the Middle East. 

So the inglourious job of becoming guinea pigs for STD research, the miserable task of getting invaded and bombed out, and the honor of manufacturing shiny new iPods and iPads and iPhones and iCraps in miserable Chinese sweatshop factories, goes to those of us in the Third World - those of us who looked up to the First World and saw them as beacons of hope and enlightenment in all the crap around us. 

With this sobering realization, which is itself as superficial as it is depressing, I leave you with the following statement. Of course the Western First World bourgeois will rush to defend their actions, saying that apologies are not necessary for past atrocities, that the First World nations deserves their slot and the rest of the world should just know their place and keep their mouths shut in humble subservience to them. In order to preempt these shits, I'll just do my best George Bush/Fox News/United States of SPARTAFREEDOMERICA impersonation with tongue firmly in cheek, and the taste of irony lingering in mein tastebuds:

The Guatemalans sacrificed much for the United States of America's war on microorganism terror, thus showing themselves to be truly with America rather than against it. There is no need to apologize for this, as casualties are an acceptable loss for any war, and like the vans full of Iraqi children torn to pieces by helicopter fire for the terroristic act of being in proximity to a bunch of Iraqis on the ground with Reuters camera crews, this is merely an unfortunate case of collateral damage - not an atrocity, despite what these limp-dicked liberals and anti-American communists would say. No lives are ever lost in vain in the war against terror, be it in the Middle East, the Middle Earth, or in the infections of the middle ear. These Guatemalans gave their lives, and had their precious bodily fluids sapped and impurified, in the name of something far greater than themselves and their country. American foreign interests are God's most beautiful creation. 

So for their values, their loyalties, and in knowing what is most important in the free world - namely the United States of America - these Guatemalan patriots have done their solemn duties in refreshing the tree of liberty from time to time with their infected blood and urethral discharges. God bless Guatemala, but not as much as He blesses America. Thank you, all of you.