So there you have it: It turns out that the Justice Department is entirely staffed with Jesus freaks from a televangelist diploma mill in Virginia Beach. Most of them young women with very little knowledge of the law, but a very strong sense of doing what they’re told. Like the Manson family, but with cleaner hair. In 200 years we’ve gone from “We the people” to “Up with people.” From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber.
Act like me. After 100 years of democracy let your slaves go. After 150 let your women vote. At the start of democracy ethnic cleansing is quite ok.
Love you madly!
Uncle Sam
As a “chicken hawk,” VP Cheney obviously never read “The Art of War,” the oldest known military treatise in the world, written by a true warrior, Sun Tzu. Sun-Tzu wrote that through planning, knowledge, understanding of your enemy and timing of your attack, you win the battle before you fight it. This so-called war on terror and the illegal invasion of Iraq were conceptually doomed to fail from the beginning. The war was lost at the moment it was conceived. Any understanding of history would have shown Cheney and all of those who supported this blunder that you could not take three culturally and religiously diverse segments of the former Ottoman Empire and combine them into a Jeffersonian democracy at the barrel of a gun.
Now, even Arizona Senator and Republican presidential hopeful John McCain is trying to convince the American people that all is not lost in Iraq. He recently wrote, “I disagree with what the majority of the American people want. Failure will lead to chaos, withdrawal will lead to chaos.” Well, last I checked, we have utter chaos in Iraq because our policy and the implementation of that policy have failed. Also, in a representative democracy, you can disagree with the majority of the American people, but you need to listen to what they are asking you - as their representative - to do.
Contrary to popular belief, withdrawal may not lead to chaos. It depends on how you withdraw. Most of the American lawmakers and pundits that I have heard speak on this issue are trying to have their cake and eat it too. The problem is not withdrawal; the problem is control. Most of these politicians want to withdraw from Iraq while retaining control of the region and its resources. That cannot and will not work.
The global-warming naysayers would have us believe there is a one-shot, magic cure that will preserve the earth in a coolly livable form without our having to do anything or change our ways or spend any money. For the time being the magic cure is ethanol. Ethanol will stop global warming, and as an added plus, it will make the agribusiness interests richer and insure that the GOP carries the corn-growing states of the Midwest. Talk about living happily ever after!
In a few years the articles and books about the ethanol hoax will begin to appear, and we will learn who got rich while the earth got warmer and almost nobody–at least nobody important, nobody with influence and power–took note. The effects of global warming are all around us. Anybody with a backyard garden knows about them, but the garden lobby does not swing a heavy club.
So here we are, like the polar bear marooned on his little melting iceberg, snuffling here and there, looking out across the warming sea, hoping to God somebody throws him a fish. Well, bless us all, but are we truly too dumb and too selfish to save ourselves and our children?
The radical Christian right has no religious legitimacy. It is a mass political movement. It is interchangeable, in many ways, with other traditional political movements ranging from fascism to communism to the ethnic nationalist parties in the former Yugoslavia. It shares with these movements an inability to cope with ambiguity, doubt and uncertainty. It also embraces a world of miracles and signs and makes war on rational, reality-based thought. It condemns self-criticism and debate as apostasy. It places a premium on action. It dismisses those who do not bow down before its god—and the leaders who claim to speak for God—as heretics and traitors.
This movement shares with corporatists, who are busy cannibalizing our society for profit, the belief that there are a chosen few who know the truth and therefore have the right to impose it. The citizen, the individual, no longer has any legitimacy in this new world. All legitimacy is assumed by groups, whether they are corporate groups herding us over the cliff of globalization or religious groups that give popular vent to corporate-generated despair through faith in the Christian utopia. In this paradigm-corporate and religious-we become disempowered, afraid, passive and easily manipulated.
Apocalyptic visions like this one have, throughout history, cowed populations and inspired genocidal killers. They have enticed societies into collective suicide. These visions nourished the butchers who led the Inquisition, the Crusades and the conquistadors who swept through the Americas converting and then exterminating the native population. These visions sustained the SS guards at Auschwitz, the Stalinists who consigned tens of thousands of Ukrainian families to starvation and death, the torturers in the clandestine prisons in Argentina during the Dirty War and the Serbian thugs with heavy machine guns and wraparound sunglasses who stood over the bodies of those they had slain in the smoking ruins of Bosnian villages. Those who promise to purify the world through violence, to relieve the anxiety of moral pollution and despair, appeal to our noblest sentiments, our highest virtues, our capacity for self-sacrifice and our utopian visions of a cleansed world. It is this coupling of fantastic hope and profound despair, along with visions of peace and light and absolute terror, of selflessness and murder, which frees the consciences of those who call for and carry out the eradication of those they have banished from moral consideration.
From all this the Sunni Arabs would get an end to the US occupation–among their main demands–as well as an end to de-Baathification and political marginalization. They would have an important place in the new order and be guaranteed their fair share of the national wealth. Shiites and Kurds would get an end to a debilitating civil war, even if they have to give up some of their maximal demands. The neighbors would avoid a reprise of the destructive Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, which killed perhaps a million people and deeply damaged regional economies. And by ending its occupation, the United States would go a long way toward repairing its relations with the Arab and Muslim world and thus eliminate one of Al Qaeda’s chief recruiting tools. A withdrawal is risky, but on the evidence so far, for the US military to remain in Iraq is a sure recipe for disaster.
Consider the choice between two government programs.
Program A would provide essential health care to the eight million uninsured children in this country.
Program B would subsidize insurance companies, who would in turn spend much of the money on marketing and paperwork, and also siphon off a substantial fraction of the money as profits. With what’s left, the insurers would provide additional benefits, over and above basic Medicare coverage, to some older Americans.
Which program would you choose? If money is no object, you might go for both. But if you can only have one, it’s hard to see how anyone could, in good conscience, fail to choose Program A. I mean, even conservatives claim to believe in equal opportunity — and it’s hard to say that our society offers equal opportunity to children whose education may be disrupted, who may even find their lives cut short, because their families can’t afford proper medical care.
And here’s the thing: The question isn’t hypothetical. Universal health care may happen one of these years, but the choice between A and B is playing out right now.
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For the love of one's country
is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear
with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part
of the patriot game.
— Dominic Behan
It was eye for an eye
in the land of the blind
When desert storm blew back
Across the shining seas
and spacious skies
Brought down the purple towers
Cut short the amber waves
Forever fouled the fruited plains
When desert storm blew home
We stopped
One broken hearted people
We huddled in the howling silence
Trembled in that awful still
Until, too soon,
The star-spangled
jingo dance began
The bully speech
and the heavy hand
The schoolyard line
drawn in the sand
And the call to arms, to arms,
and patriot storms
In the land of the blind,
it was eye for an eye
It was tooth for a tooth
and the torture of truth
When the old gray men
again called the tune
Ours is the one true creed,
they said
Ours are the noblest of the dead
Only our suffering counts as real
Only their suffering will heal
this unfair
and so unwanted wound
And oh, we stopped
One nation, terror torn in two
Minds heavy with
the growing madness
Wary of Orwell's
whispered warnings
Of war without end,
the ministry of spin
Destroy the village now
to save it
Imprison love
for freedom's sake
Until all talk of peace is treason
Peace is treason,
As we torture the truth
With tooth for a tooth
Now it's cry for a cry
and tear for a tear
And sword for a sword
and fear for a fear
We'll do it to them
because they did to us
We'll do it again
and again if we must
We must, if we can,
vain foolish men
It goes round and comes round
and goes round again
History falls
through the cracks in our walls
Reason fails
and love . . . love pales
Until we stop
One sorry hopeful sorry planet
Soul-sick of it all
So weary of the same old
blame scold
And no, pampered prince,
this is no new war
Not new the cratered cities
Not new the blackened dawn
Not new the wailing lovers
Not new the friendly-fired spawn
Not new the burning cross
Not new the blood-soaked
cemetery lawn
The wasted and forsaken youth
The tooth for a tooth,
The torture of truth
The eye for an eye
In the land of the blind
Unless, until,
Oh will we stop.
Michael Sky
October, 2001