In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Hope. I keep hearing this word, as in "Lets just hope it goes as smoothly and quickly as the worst of them hope," and "I just hope the UN gets its legs back too," and "I hope for a quick and painless battle." Hope is a strange word to use at the beginning of a war. Especially this one. A lot of people are hoping. I'm not. I don't hope anything about this. Hope was sacrificed a long time ago. The gates of hell are wide open, and today we march through them, abandoning all hope. The only hell I believe is this one right here, the one we usher into existence so lovingly. The parallels with Vietnam only go so far; the big difference is that ending that war was merely a matter of leaving their country (which took 15 years), and even that took three U.S. presidents and a constitutional crisis. How are we supposed to get out of this war, when the battlefield promises to be U.S. cities and infrastructure with no end in sight? Bush has tried to make us the United States of Texas but it feels more like one giant Israel -- a militant, paranoid society with a bullseye on it, where "domestic security" means being a soldier in your own home and living behind a gas mask. If peddling fear and keeping the nation divided -- make that permanently riven -- wins elections, it's also a death sentence, because it's the opposite of how to fight a war. You might as well leave a calling card saying, Blow us up, please. The War on Terror is the war on you and me, prosecuted and perpetuated by an unscrupulous regime that is willing to sacrifice all of us for its own sake, to further its goals, which is not American hegemony or a Pax Americana but corporate hegemony, plain and simple, and if we all get blown up, so be it. Look what they did to their own companies! Ran them into the ground and stole all the money. Why should they run our country any differently? They don't care about us. That's why I said "Americans applaud" -- they applaud with crazed fear, because to do otherwise is to admit the truth, that our governement does not have our national interest at heart, that it lies continuously, and that they are more than willing to sacrifice us, which is much too frightening to apprehend. So we can either pretend this is Vietnam and protest "an end to the war" or work ourselves into a patriotic furor with the belief that invading the Mideast is a way of protecting ourselves, but it's already too late for those false distinctions. That is not why this war is being waged. The national myth has been served up, along with the spectacle of troops on borders, but the battlefield is right here. In Vietnam it was soldiers who were sent to their deaths by these exact same people. Today it is us.
- Michael 11:49 AM - [PermaLink] -
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