So it is with great surprise that we learn about 3,200 Mexican federal police--nearly 9% of the total police workforce--have been fired since May 2010. Ay carumba! This represents a sea change, or at least a tidal basin change, for a government known more for knuckling under to influential cartels than to agents of positive change.

Many other governments have made a show of cracking down on their beloved internal legal incubi--men whose gift for deception, bribery, and criminal ventures seem almost genetic. From Kabul to Beijing to Moscow to Bogota to, well, nearly all of Africa, corruption is practically a way of life. But just as the British and Dutch knew, to create financial success, one must stamp the rule of law upon one's subjects; even despots must realize that the rackets can only inflate the balloon of success for so long.

Placing conquered tribes under the happy, if unsatisfying rule of law is a fine tradition for cultural imperialists--successful ones, at least--Rome implemented Pax Romana across its empire, providing its citizens with peace, military protection, and citizenship, as long as they paid their taxes, didn't cheat the government, and didn't attempt insurrection. Babylon too gave its conquered basic rights under the aegis of a serialized code of conduct.

The essential part of the mathematics of successful rule is the mutual agreement between the governed and governers: I won't fail to provide for you, as long as you obey me. Corruption always diminishes the caregiving ability of its perpetrators, eventually eliminating it altogether in order to enforce its rapidly decreased base of support and prevent the breakdown of essential societal structures--things that would have been avoidable had it not stooped to such venal injustices in the first place.

Mexico has the distinction of being the most apt illustration of a nation under complete control of corrupt officials. And like General Salazar's character from the movie Traffic, or Two-Face in The Dark Knight, crackdowns are often engineered by those opportunistic officials who have the most to gain by promoting sweeping reforms... of their criminal rivals' organizations and personnel, that is. And often such crackdowns have their own negative consequences, such as the creation of power vacuums, which quickly absorb the next set of cartel leaders trying to make their mark. The only way to tell if an official is clean or not is to wait and see; if he ends up maimed and dead, he was either clean and getting under someone's skin or he was a rival standing in the way of a power grab. While this implicates pretty much every living official in Mexico, it stands to reason; Mexicorruption is synonymous with "doing business."

Nevertheless, the eradication of such a large swath of Mexico's narco-traffickers and Zeta enforcers shows that someone has the cajones to push for the right kind of change, chomping hard on the tortilla of trafficking and the chalupa of corruption. We're not really sure who is responsible--really responsible--for these firings; it is probably best they remain nameless, lest they end up without a head and buried in the Sonora desert. But whoever you are, Caballero Blanco, you've earned our Imperialist of the Week award.

The last Supreme Court judge to make it through confirmation without having actually, you know, judged, also happened to have the most rad robe at the Clinton impeachment hearings.  So we expect big things from White House shyster Elena Kagan, another judicial neophyte sworn in this weekend as Long John Silvers' replacement.  You've come a long way, Lenie - you're our Imperialist of the Week.

Many other great leaders didn't deserve their jobs, either, but grabbed history by the scruff and threw it headlong into a pile of inevitability, like a freshman getting hazed. Hitler was a "masterly" artist who drew postcards before new German boundaries.  Jimmy Carter, who would later become history's greatest monster, was a peanut wrangler who taught young children in Sunday school to do what Jesus would do - get beat up on the world stage.  And ho-hum Ali sure as heck shouldn’t have landed hunky, gorgeous Roberto on "The Bachelorette," but that promiscuous Pole’s pixie dust overwhelmed the Spanish speaker’s Santeria, just like John-Paul II and Castro.

Kagan has shown she has the chops to join this illustrious crowd.  Barely 50, she’s already strong-armed her rabbi into giving her a feminist bat mitzvah, sailed to tenure despite a meager publishing record on the University of Chicago law faculty, and pistol-whipped the military for its discrimigaytion as dean of the Harvard Law School.

Most imperialistically, this jovial Jew singlehandedly "fooled the nation's highest judges" by fudging a medical group’s appraisal of the intact D&X procedure, casually known as partial-birth abortion, leading to the eventual Supreme Court imprimatur on the procedure as "medically necessary."  Though Congress later banned D&X, a decision upheld by the dreamy Roberts court, the fact that a sneaky political hack could orchestrate such a brilliant con on the courts shows Kagan's clinical determination to win at all costs.

The raging debate over whether Kagan's slugging abilities show her sexual proclivities obscures the more fundamental truth that she plays political hardball.  Jon Lovitz's fraternal twin will surely be lobbing up hard-hitting opinions masked by toothy grins for the next three decades. Cultural Imperialist salutes you, Shorty, and looks forward to your reign.

Photo used with attribution

I've never been much for fireworks, at least on the city-wide level. The displays can only have so many planet shapes and smiley faces before they get old, and much of the show is repetitive, like returning to the same move in bed all the time, simply tweaking it with a swirl and a pinch. But now that I've learned that fireworks are "imperialist and hegemonic," I've fully embraced July 4's aerial orgy.

You're not just a shell-out anymore, you low explosive pyrotechnic devices: You're our Imperialist of the Week.

The Slate article above makes the argument that

The professional fireworks display is an exercise in pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris. The pyrotechnician—and, more importantly, his patron—intends to ornament the night sky beyond the powers of God himself. He means to inspire awe for little purpose other than to demonstrate his power. The first great fireworks nuts in the Western world were Peter the Great (who put on a five-hour show to celebrate the birth of his first son) and Louis XIV (who, with a specially equipped sundial, used them to tell time at Versailles).

If I may parrot my co-imperialist's favorite insult, listen, douche: That's what makes fireworks AWESOME. You may prefer to see a piano on fire, echo the Gavin Rossdale lamentation that there's no sex in the violence of fireworks, and complain that all fireworks offer is "bombast."

But much to the dismay of the French, Americans have long preferred violence to sex, at least in public displays, and we love bombast, as evidenced by our affinity for Shaggy and Rush Limbaugh. In fireworks, we gain release and nobody or thing gets hurt, like a certain activity championed by Joycelyn Elders. Sex can wait - detonate!

When Mother Nature halts oil-spill cleanup for weeks at a time and smothers East Coasters with oppressive heat, fireworks reassert Man's control over the sky. Unencumbered by gravity or enviromorality, fireworks pwn the sky and make the moon irrelevant, like Conan O'Brien taking the 25-54s to TBS and leaving the geriatrics to Jay.

Cultural Imperialist salutes you, inanimate objects. Never stop reaching for, and light-polluting, the stars.

While we caught your thieving Red fingers in our very boroughs, it did take us almost a decade of dedicated FBI investigations to do it, and that was with the sultry online photos (see above) posted by your resident hottie, Anya Kushchenko, aka Anna Chapman (yowie, what a Natasha!), who nevertheless is a savvy operator who knows how to build high tech startups and bring value into market (at least, that's what her LinkedIn profile says). With a photo like that, who'd disagree?

The Plaming of these alleged spies presents two possibilities. One, it reignites the dispute between two aging superpowers over which fundamental economic and political ground is most firm, communism or capitalism. Two, it begs the question: Is Russia still to be feared as a Menace II Free Society?

A look at Chechnya might make you think no, but consider Russia's current position in the world poker tour: an economy staggering under a tax burden and an insufficient population to prop up the infrastructure for more than a couple decades, a loss of dominance in Olympic sports, and internal political corruption that threatens stability within the power structure.

What better way to announce that the sleeping babushka may rumble once more than by having a spy ring within the United States exposed? It signals ability, if not intent, to unsettle the American heartland through wily godlessness. And if their femme fatales are any  measure of their worth as enemies, we've got a hell of a fight on our hands.

So congratulations, Russia; you may once again fly the Imperialist flag proudly.

Image courtesy of Phawker

Facebook says "Privacy? What privacy?" And Cultural Imperialist heartily agrees. You don't own your privacy. In fact, you don't even have any privacy. And even if you did, you gave up your privacy rights the minute you were born. See how that works? See what I did there? Congratulations are in order. Facebook, you're our newest (and hardly weekly) Imperialist of the Week.

Facebook wants to eat the Internet, starting with your profile as an appetizer and all your friends as an aperitif, moving on to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, and Twitter accounts for the main course, and finishing off with a breezy port and walnut glaze brownie. And why shouldn't it? It's been given the motivation by you, its users, to make the interwebs as easy and cheap as possible to use, and since you, the average user, can't be bothered to moderate your own security (let's face it, you're the same people still sending out chain-emails from "Bill Gates" and forwarding malware because you apparently don't know that "Click here!" equals instant Trojan death. But I digress.) Facebook has shouldered that responsibility.

And admirably so. Someone needs to step up. The internet is a scary place, but Facebook has made it a whole lot friendlier with its now-ubiquitous "Like" button. Note the many "Fan" pages (you may be reading this on Cultural Imperialist's Fan Page, how meta). Notice that when you have a profile, all your friends can see what you post, and if you don't change those privacy settings, they get to share your love with everyone in their network. Strangers of strangers of friends of you could be copying and disseminating the Facebook version of you around the globe. Isn't that a nice thing? Don't you want the opportunity to be famous, if only for one brief kiloparsec?

Facebook's frenemies are basically pissing themselves now because they didn't think of a way to own the internet first. Now that Zuckerberg has Bob Loblaw'd himself into a position where he can own the online version of you while simultaneously courting you to give more time and more content (the average Internet user spends more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon combined. Holy CRAP!), Facebook is primed to make itself the arbiter of all that is good and true about the Internet. And that's a lot of everything.

But the privacy thing is very simple. Many people are scared that Facebook not only doesn't care about your privacy, it is actively circumvrenting it. Here's the rub. If you're online, you've already lost the privacy game. You've given away your name, birthday, email address, and maybe phone number, bank account, and even photos to any number of corporate entities. That ToS you didn't read when you signed up? It says that in exchange for using the free service, the company that made that free service can do whatever the hell it wants with the information you freely give it, provided it doesn't harm you.

Facebook isn't the devil, and it isn't an angel. It's just a thing, a behemoth intent on using you because you are a consumer, and our open and free society dictates and encourages the natural parasitism of the creator and consumer. You are the cookie. Facebook is the blue monster. It is not evil; it's just big and hungry.

So quit your griping and hit that "Like" button. Because Facebook's eating, whether you like it or not.

So it was a shock when the polling numbers came up and Nicolas Sarkozy won handily with the submission of a bill banning the wearing of face veils in public places. Talk about flying a counter-cultural flag. France has the largest number of Muslim inhabitants in western Europe, totaling between 5 and 8 million. Sarkozy maintains the garb oppresses women and is "not welcome" in France.

Ignoring experts who say the bill stands on shaky legal ground, Sarkozy may be biting back at recent hits on his own personal capital, including allegations that he and his wife Carla Bruni engaged in mutual infidelity. Not that an affair of state is unprecedented--in France it's practically a national pastime.

But Sarkozy's stance is surprising, considering the rapid growth of Islam in France, especially in the urban ghettos which foment Muslim youth street violence. Even in the face of warnings from the Conseil d'Etat, a watchdog on state legal actions, that a burka ban was "unworkable and probably unconstitutional", Sarkozy clearly isn't afraid to stigmatize a majority of Muslim orthodoxy to cater to the supermajority of secularists and libertarian oglers who just want women to enjoy the same freedoms as men.

Or maybe they just want those restrictive clothing rules to be loosened up a bit. Nothing like a little sex to ease a terrorist's zeal.

Whatever the motivation, Cultural Imperialist applauds Sarkozy for taking the lead on what is a universal right: the continued and facilitated baring of women's skin, the promotion of equality, and the crackdown on gender snubs in religious extremists. Whether the aim is the diminishing of oppression or the increase in Middle Eastern feminine visibility, we can take a cue from this French hero's fight. Banning the veil may not work in practice, but Sarkozy is wielding the burka ban as a political and social flag of liberty, equality, and sorority, and it appears he's unlikely to surrender the issue any time soon.

But when a long-dormant volcano in Iceland shot its wad, it left a mess on Europe's hands and put the region's greatest imperialist to shame. That's why you, Eyjafjallajokull, are the Imperialist of the Week.

Grounding flights, halting commerce - a more disruptive disaster than 9/11, the news said - Iceland's new hero struck a blow for natural rights the same way an American would, by belching loudly after a spicy meal of magma and sending people running away while tweeting. Volcanic ash can bring down a whole plane and it's invisible to radar and the naked eye, a far more potent enemy than terrorism.

Like the best overlord governments, ash ruins relationships, specifically that between the U.S. and the U.K. Stopping transatlantic flights is in effect a prohibition on aerial intercourse (not the kind on Snakes on a Plane), and we all know the best way to break the will of a petulant colony is to separate families and make them 'course with strangers.

But how, you may ask, can thousands of tons of silicate dust qualify as an imperialist? It should be obvious to the close follower of Icelandic quirkster Bjork's career that Eyjafjallajokull's eruption was simply the latest and most impressive performance art yet from the demented mind that brought us "Human Behavior." In the music video, Bjork sides with a violent animal kingdom that takes down Man and even eats Bjork, who must think about what she's done in an animatronic bear's stomach. In the same way, Bjork launched an Army of Her by way of the eruption to make us "digest" the severity of our environmental footprint.

All hail the Bjorkerlord.

President Barack Obama ignored naysayers who said he should focus on a health care bill limited to popular changes, like ending the ban for pre-existing conditions, keeping losers who still live at home on their parents' plans until 26, and making sure my doctor doesn't get paid for unnecessary colonoscopies.  He went for broke, literally in the case of states who are going to have to pick up much more of the Medicaid tab.  Imperialists have long been applauded for benighted policies that their subjects end up paying for.

By threatening to withhold his healing presence from their re-election campaigns, and tricking Democrats in the boonies into thinking executive orders can override statutory law, Obama showed his familiarity with Machiavelli's delicate balance between fear and hatred, and the "illusion of being reliable in keeping his word."

Only a leader truly contemptuous of another government's sovereignty would say the Commerce Clause gives the federal government the right to force people to buy something.  And by slapping a tax on tanning beds, Obama showed discrimination against differently-pigmented minorities and those with alternative lifestyles, as imperialists throughout history have done.

Most of all, the president's willingness to sacrifice his House to save his own political skin puts him in the league of the most famous truth-parsers.  And he will almost certainly survive, thrive and connive his way to a second term.  Congratulations, Mr. Obama - your crushing approach to governance means we're totally crushing on you.

Israel isn't really apologetic; its public "apology" is simply a political move, and is empty rhetoric slapping the face of VP Biden and his visit, as well as a larger response to the Obama administration's subtle movement away from blanket Israeli support in the region. Basically, Israel told the US to shut the hell up, they'll build wherever and whenever they feel like putting down a foundation.

Given the volatility of the region, the certain violence that will follow when construction actually begins, and the swagger of Israel in the face of widespread demonization of the decision, lends the small sandy island of a nation a certain je ne sais quoi, a heady disregard of protocol and direct contravention of assigned roles by powerful nations and leaders on the world scene.

In other words, Israel's flagrant puffery is a clear sign that even as tensions and allegiances shift in the Middle East, one can always count on imperialistic attitudes to direct the policies and decisions of embattled countries. For that Israel deserves a hand and has earned our Imperialist of the Week award.

There's nothing more imperialistic than trashing other cultures, even if you're not so ballsy as to name the runners-up, bronzes and Certificate of Participation recipients in the league of nations. That's why past, current and probably future presidential candidate, former Massachusetts governor and Olympics hostess Mitt Romney is our Imperialist of the Week.

Everyone's favorite flip-flopping Mormon has a new book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, which says President Obama is a foreign-policy pyro, providing "kindling" for anti-American fires burning around the world. Obama should talk more about "America's values" and shun "the self-loathing of Western intellectuals," which is to blame for the explosion of baby mamas and implosion of John Adams' name-recognition (pre-Paul Giamatti), Romney says.

Mitt may be the greatest denigrator of The Non-American Way since P.J. O'Rourke's brilliantly offensive "Foreigners of the World" study for National Lampoon. And there's nothing more American than putting other people in their place. But why stop at A(Me)rica Against the World?

Some religions are better than others too. Southern Baptists are better than (in descending order) Pentecostals, Assemblies of God, Presbyterian Church in America, Free Methodists, Anglicans, Practicing Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Lutherans-Missouri Synod, Sufi Muslims, African Methodist Episcopalians, American Baptists, Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus, Presbyterian Church USA, Conservative Jews, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Unitarians, Reform Jews, Animists, United Methodists, United Church of Christ, Shiites, Sunnis, Wahhabis, and Episcopalians. If you belong to a mainline, George Costanza's "Opposite" religion is better than yours, because at least he believes what he's peddling.

Mitt may not agree with my rankings, but he can't argue with the premise. Some cultural mores are better than others - people who walk single file when passing, call women by their first names, use puns for mating purposes, spurn micro-enterprise, pronounce curses on snow, judge libertarians as attention-whore hedonists, elevate taco-shell bowls above Jimmy Carter, and tell kids to stop plagiarizing their parents' taste in music.

That's my right as an American, dammit - to tell you what's what and possibly to draw pictures illustrating the demerits of your views. Show Mitt your appreciation by purchasing his latter-day golden plates of truth.