ArcaMax

When I was younger, it was pretty easy to believe that only white countries should have a nuclear bomb.

When you looked at the white countries, the guy (and it was always a guy) in charge wore a nice suit, and he'd been to college, and there were pictures of him opening a new museum. In those countries, they had canned food and television. Maybe they didn't know how to make cars, or steel, or tires, and their cheese smelled very bad, but they were regular white people, people who could be trusted with the keys to the car.

The people we didn't want to have a nuke lived in those countries where the guy (and it was always a guy) wore a gaudy uniform with medals all over it, and they weren't white, or Christian, and the guy in charge gave three-hour speeches about their country being the best country in the world. They hated all the neighboring countries, and they also hated a couple ethnic and religious groups in their own country.

A lot of them lived in tents or huts, and their government usually claimed to be democratic or socialist, or communist, or all three at the same time, but it wasn't. Instead, it was 10 guys who had all the money, and several million peasants who had big plugs in their earlobes. These were not people who could have the car keys.

The guy (and it was always a guy) was referred to in the white people press as either a "strongman" or a "dictator" because he was always bragging about how tough he was or about how his army could crush any other army. He had his political opponents shot in the street, or jailed by his private army of semiprofessional soldiers, who were referred to in the white people press as "goons." Sometimes, the people of that country stormed the presidential palace or the capitol, but nothing ever changed, and the roads were falling apart.

Pretty plainly, if the residents of that country wanted to be taken seriously, they needed to elect a boring but sincere bureaucrat, stop having four-hour military parades, scrape the gold paint off everything in the presidential palace, fix the roads and build some auto plants so people could stop living in tents.

But they didn't do that, not at all. They stayed the way they were, following their strongman, practicing some kind of fanatical religion, hating each other because of language or tribe and insisting they were mighty among the nations.

And this was all fine as long as they never got hold of any weapon more deadly than a rifle, because all they could do with rifles was kill each other, or maybe fight "separatists" in the northern area of their country.

America wasn't like that, not at all. Our roads were new and flat, and our cops were working class guys who lived in houses next door to the houses of guys who worked in the auto plant. We had jails, all right, but we didn't have what the white people papers called "detention camps." We didn't have a strongman because we didn't need someone to brag about our military might. We'd had one separatist movement, but we beat them up and took their slaves away.

In other words, white people civilization can have a nuclear weapon because we're better than those countries where the money is too big and they play soccer like it is a sport for men.

And we held that line for a long time. Civilized people who worked in the auto plant and owned their own homes could have a nuclear weapon. People who slept outdoors and didn't have steady jobs could not be given the keys to the car.

The problem is, once your proud little nation has the nukes, no one can make you give them up, no matter how crazy you get.

And that wasn't a problem. No white people countries were ever going to have a strongman. We were always going to make all the world's cars and keep our roads up the way we kept our lawns mowed.

Watch the attempted coup at the Unites States Capitol, and tell me America can be trusted with the keys to the car.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.