Who's listening now?

I checked where the visitors to my blog come from and found, once again, that the great majority – over 75% in fact – come from the US. One reason for this must be that there is just so many people in the US who have access to the internet. But that can’t be the whole story. There are also a lot of people in the UK who have internet access and I hardly ever see their visits account for a tenth of those from the US. I guess that part of the story must be that, in so far as I normally write about politics, it is significant for many people living in the US. But then it is also significant here in the EU, else I would not be writing about it. The social crisis that the US is going through is being mirrored in various ways around the world, with a variety of lap dog poodles running USA’s various client states; be it Little Johnny Howard in Australia, the ‘buy one get one free’ Kaczynski brothers in Poland or the original poodle in the UK. And I didn’t even mention countries where the US is overtly interfering with or plain controlling the government. Not that most of those countries have good broadband, mind you.

I guess the reason must be that I write a lot about not just politics but religion – a topic which for most of the developed world is becoming something of a curiosity, like folk dancing. Only in a few unfortunate developed countries is religion something to still worry seriously about, USA being one and my country being another. Which is why I can not help but find it funny when I see American journalists writing, in often positive terms, about the resurgence of religion on the world stage when what they mean is that the Christian Right is running the US. In so far as any religion has been resurgent it has been Islam within Muslim countries, much of the reason for that lying within the corridors of the White House that had for so long been willing to support Islamist movements against nationalist movements that were often supported by the old USSR. As the modern democracies have basically shown, create a situation where people can live in a stable, safe society and they will first turn away from fundamentalism and then from religion in general – and that would be as true in Karbala or Riyadh as in Atlanta or Kansas City. And, if that meant more boring posts from me about how my daughter is truly wonderful, that would still be a good thing.

Then again, maybe all those hits from the US are from NSA facilities.