Politics & Power Quote by Dan Aykroyd

Calling the “Western consumer” the “common enemy” is Dan Aykroyd doing a comedian’s version of moral jujitsu: flipping the usual geopolitical villain script back onto the audience. The line lands because it’s accusatory while still sounding like barroom common sense. He’s not naming presidents or oil companies; he’s naming the person holding the remote, buying the SUV, benefiting from cheap convenience. It’s the kind of provocation that relies on a sly implicating “we” even as he points a finger at “the consumer.” You can hear the tension between blame and confession.

The intent is less to present a polished policy argument than to puncture the comforting fantasy that war is always somebody else’s pathology. By tethering “$50 a barrel” to “so we have to have these wars,” he compresses a sprawling chain of causality into one blunt sentence. That compression is rhetorical: it makes complicity feel immediate, almost mechanical, as if demand inevitably produces conflict. The subtext is guilt with an escape hatch. If the consumer is the problem, then the consumer can also be the solution - hence the unfinished “incumbent upon us to,” gesturing toward personal responsibility, conservation, or political pressure without committing to specifics.

Context matters: mid-2000s war-and-energy discourse, when oil prices and Iraq were braided in public debate. Coming from a mainstream comic, it reads like a celebrity attempting seriousness, but the sharpest edge is cultural: a reminder that “Western” isn’t just a place. It’s a lifestyle with a fuel bill.