WASHINGTON (Rooters agency) – Officials in the State Department are working overtime to deal with a flood of messages from US embassies around the globe asking for instructions on how to respond to host governments that are lodging objections to the reopening of the US government.
These nearly universal messages seem to have taken many in the US government by surprise. “How could they want us to close down?” said one State Department official, who asked not to be named. “We’re paying most of them in one way or another, and the money would stop too if we stopped.”
Political analysts disagree about the reasons for the objections. Professor T. Feeparty of the conservative Chokebomb Brothers Institute says that it all stems from the problem of foreigners not being native-born Americans. “How can they have our values and understand our need to drop rocks on our own toes if they aren’t born here and won’t do what we say?”
A different view is put by Dr. Ariel Fussfixer of the liberal Featherweather Institute. He says that the foreign reaction indicates that the US has not been willing to guarantee sufficient compensation to families whose terrorist children are killed by US surgical precision drones, in the unlikely event that that should ever happen.
“People in those less fortunate countries care about their children nearly as much as we do about ours,” Fussfixer explained, “and of course some of them are disturbed by the infinitesimally small possibility that a mistake might be made and an innocent child harmed, even though that hasn’t happened since that unfortunate accident at My Lai during the Vietnam War.”
Rooters correspondents overseas report that many of the objections to the reopening of the US government appear to have been forced by local public opinion. “People were dancing in the streets when they heard the US government had closed,” said an official in an Asian country. “If we don’t protest against the reopening, the opposition here will wipe us out at the next election. That’s if the US lets us have one.”
Even without popular pressure, some governments would really be happier if the US government stayed closed. Said an African government official:
“We knew they weren’t going to stop doing any really harmful things. But we thought that, over time, if the shutdown lasted long enough, the idea of the US government being closed might catch on. Then they might have to close some of the real things – not just the sideline fluff like Social Security. Imagine if the people who guide the drones were sent home. Imagine if the Pentagon was closed. Imagine if there weren’t hordes of US officials always twisting our arms to buy US products or to let US companies rip off our resources and our workers. I know it’s grasping at straws, but let’s have more of these shutdowns, now!”
While Rooters does not have access to cables between US embassies and the State Department, it is rumored that even some European countries have raised doubts about, if not objections to, reopening the US government.
One of the reasons is economic. An economist who is an advisor to a European government explained: “If the whole US government really closed and all those people laid off from things like the Pentagon knew that they weren’t going to be called back to their jobs, they’d have to start doing something else. Some of them might decide to do productive and useful things instead of destroying stuff and killing people. That would at least double the useful GDP of the United States and produce a boom in the rest of the world.”
However, the same economist admitted that the pro-US-close-down view was not likely to prevail among European governments, which wouldn’t want military interventions to get a bad name among their voters.
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