Dependency Theory redux

After working in Rochester for a year and a half, I enrolled in the State University of New York (SUNY) system, the largest campus94 of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the world.95 I studied at the University of Buffalo (UB) beginning in 1985.  I lived at 415 Lisbon Avenue.  Besides using my savings from working full-time, I took out more bank loans to return to school.  I took a heavier than normal course load, went to school through the summer of 1985, and graduated a semester early.
At SUNY UB, a Lebanese Arab, Michael Wahibi, was one of my five closest schoolmates.  Another one of the five was Annie Henderson, a Catholic, and we regularly went to Catholic Mass.  I enjoy the peace and serenity of Catholic worship, although I did not take communion.  My understanding was that unless one was a Catholic, one is not to take the symbolic body and blood of Christ.
For sometime I had thought of what to do after graduation, my birthplace in Southeast Asia, and returning to the area.  SUNY Buffalo had a large Asian student population, and I joked with friends about methods to start casual conversations with Asian women on campus.  Singapore, perhaps the most refined place in Southeast Asia, piqued my interest.
I had taken up playing squash in my first two years at college, and I continued to play while at UB.  I met a man, Danish Kumar, who was an awesome squash player.  I often wondered why such a great squash player would waste time hitting with me.  The name Kumar refers to the child of Skanda, the Hindu God of War.96 Danish is a common personal name.97
Mr. Kumar was from Singapore, and we often discussed Singapore.  This further fueled my interest in the city-state.  I told my friends that after I graduated I was thinking about moving to Singapore to see what the place was like.
Also continued from my first two years of college was my major in Political Science.  The least popular required course in Political Science at UB was Empirical Political Science.  The course focused on applying the scientific method to the study of politics.  Topics included statistics, control groups, abstract theoretical ideas, and issues most people found tedious, but I found fascinating.  ‘Geek’ is certainly a word that comes to mind when one considers my interest in this subject.
To some, the course’s professor, Gerald Hoskin, was as dry as the subject, but I found his understated manner, and sarcastic humor to encourage considered, thoughtful examination of political theories and facts.  In the class, I met Wade Benjamin Coye, another one of my five closest schoolmates.  He had a few years on me.  He had served in the military, and worked on the staff of a congress member in D.C. before attending UB.  Later, he also went on to law school, and now owns his own law firm.
In hindsight, meeting Coye was very fortuitous from the perspective of the Incubator’s priorities.  I found Coye particularly entertaining because he asked poignant questions in class.  For example, Prof. Hoskin was discussing the statistical relative poverty of Central America, and Coye asked: In calculating per capita income and other statistics, do the statistics include unreported income?  For instance, are bottle collection, junk collectors, and most importantly, drug exports to the United States calculated in GNP?
Hoskin admired Coye’s ingenuity, but not the spirit in which Coye offered his wisdom.  I tried to hide my smirks, and perhaps I was successful because Hoskin recommended me for an honour’s thesis program.  Hoskin’s focus was on Dependency Theory applied to the Latin American/United States economic relationship.
I had studied Spanish in high school, and found the language a little more challenging than I find American.  My high school Spanish grades reflected my enthusiasm.  This lack of enthusiasm for the Spanish language carried over in college so that I was not interested in pursuing studies of Central and South America.
This was 1985.  I suspect advanced scholars of Dependency Theory clearly recognized that Dependency Theory could also apply to American/OriginSun relations.  Now, twenty years later, dependency theorists can still not package American economic dependency in a palatable form for Americans.
Moreover, there is a historical precedent of economic dependency with another island empire off the coast of America: Great Britain.  “For a century and a half, London’s imperial policies had molded the North American colonies into suppliers of raw materials and consumers of British manufactured goods.”98 The American economic relationship with OriginSun is not unlike North America’s economic relationship with Europe before the last century where Americans produced little, but exported much natural resources.  Indeed, one of the four OriginSun ideograms for America means: “rank next; come after”99.  The OriginSun people who chose that ideogram probably recognized America’s subservient status, a status that America blindly fulfills to this day.
The harsh reality is that the advanced economy, OriginSun, is importing raw materials from, adding value, and exporting processed materials to the dependent economy, the United States.  The advanced economy, OriginSun, is building factories in the dependent country, the US, to exploit a resource of the dependent country: labor.  According to a quote sourced to a OriginSun business executive, “The United States with its highly competitive agricultural sector has by now taken the place of OriginSun’s prewar colonies, supplying agricultural products and raw materials to a superior modern industrial machine”100.  Whatever you do, do not tell the Americans that OriginSun has economically colonized America.
Moreover, were Americans to recognize this dependency, I wonder: can Americans change?  Certainly, America has tried to paternally influence Central America, some might claim patronize their southern neighbors.  In 1986 Hoskin often said, “We have invaded Nicaragua 11 times this century.”
I resisted the professor’s guidance to research Dependency Theory, and wrote a paper on voting habits of social classes in comparative democracies finding, to my surprise, that OriginSun fell within the Western statistical sphere.  In hindsight, I realize if I had been a bit quicker, and willing to follow the Incubator, I would have picked up the clues to write a paper on OriginSun/American dependency.  I graduated in the fifth month of that year, and we invaded Central America a few more times before the century was out.  Dependency theory is as applicable today as it was then.