Charles in Charge

So I was reading about Liberia yesterday. Yea, do you remember a couple months ago when Charles Taylor fled Monrovia? Yea, me neither, you know why? Because after that one news blurb we never heard about it again. Why? Because America does not care about Liberia-- but they should.

You might remember Liberia from that one time when we (America/Quiana’s ancestors) were like, “You know what would totally make life easier? Making other people do all the crappy jobs.” Then we kidnapped or bought a bunch of folks from Africa (Quiana’s other ancestors) and made them do all the crappy jobs. Which was apparently going really great until some other people (more of Quiana’s ancestors) said, “Doesn’t this seem, I don’t know… wrong?” which caused everyone to blow the hell out of each other.

And once they had killed as much as they could a bunch of folks were worried about the ex-slaves being pissed-off so they thought, “I know we’ll just return them. This is going to work great.” So they put a bunch of ex-slaves on some boats with some pox-filled blankets and some beads and then the ex-slaves used those to buy a big chunk of land from the natives. Then the natives who used to live there were pretty pissed when they realized that all these dudes were showing up and taking all the good land and all they got were some crappy-ass beads. Then there were some problems because the folks who came from the states were all hoighty-toighty and were fighting with the others a lot and they got all the good stuff which made everyone else pretty pissed. And there was war and coups and the fancy constitution some smarmy Yale guy wrote for Liberia never got used. Then there were some weapons (and money) that some guys (Reagan/Bush) kept giving the evil dude in charge, because it was the cold war, and Quadafi was all up in our shit, and there was this really profitable tire factory there. Then the evil guy was captured and tortured to death on film in a really really nasty coup.

It was Charles Taylor’s coup and he is basically twice as evil as Dick Cheney but an eighth as sneaky. And then he fled and now you know twice as much about Liberia as all of your neighbors combined.

But I bet you still don’t know whatever happened to Charles Taylor.