Be sure to read the last paragraph. This could apply to you!
Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle:
This much is true: It really is possible to love your
country and
value your freedoms and still believe the government is full
of fools
and prevaricators and BS artists and Dick Cheney. Really.
It is still possible to feel warmly patriotic in personal
and
important ways and yet believe the military and the generals
and the
war machine do not have your best interests at heart and
really
couldn't care less what those interests are anyway but thank
you for
sharing now please sit down and do as we tell you and by the
way,
thanks for all the flags and the money.
And it is still possible to feel unified and spiritually
connected to
all that is good and righteous about your generally
nonviolent
Americanism -- you know, wine and sex and good music, large
dogs and
literature and clean water and tongue kissing in the streets
-- and
still be depressed when our famously nonintellectual
president talks
to the country like we're all five years old and heavily
dosed on
Ritalin.
When Bush employs phrases like "bring the evildoers to
justice" over
and over, 17 times in one speech alone, and he furrows his
brow like
a serious Muppet and offers carefully scripted reassurances
deliberately lacking in polysyllabism and detailed
explanation
because that would be, you know, complicated.
When he repeats primitive little maxims like "There are
no
negotiations" and responds to press-conference
questions about the
vitriolic anti-US hatred that has blossomed around the globe
by
saying, "I'm amazed. I just can't believe it because I
know how good
we are," thus causing a giant global spasm of
multinational cringing
and openly insulting the intelligence of anyone who can walk
and
breathe at the same time.
When he delivers very earnest speeches he had no part in
writing, and
when he is forced to speak extemporaneously, sans script or
TelePrompTer, and is reduced to simplistic good-guy/bad-guy
platitudes and flustered, rapid blinking, and who cannot for
the life
of him articulate a complex idea, some sort of nuanced
elucidation of
our nation's motives and positioning, that contains more
than one
possible level of meaning.
But perhaps that's too harsh. Unfair. He's the president,
after all.
He is a Good Man. He's our leader right now, he's doing his
best and
he's all we've got. This is our rallying cry, our motto:
He's all
we've got. There's your bumper sticker. And there he is.
Except for Cheney, which isn't exactly reassuring. No one
has
ever seen this man's mouth actually move. No one can take
one look at his
oddly spiritless and wan figure and not think, oh dear God,
that man
is running on fumes. From a bunker. With ropes and pulleys.
But you're not supposed to. In fact, you really aren't
allowed to
criticize the president or the veep right now, not supposed
to feel
strangely leaderless and adrift, not permitted to look upon
the
events of the past weeks with much wariness or bitterness or
a
disquieting sense that we're setting things in motion that
have no
predictable outcome -- ugly, subterranean, hateful things
that could
last years and will surely cost billions and will deeply
entrench the
nation in a bizarre and poisonous shell game with shadowy
opponents
of largely unknown capability and do you hear that? That
soft
roaring? That's the sound of the GOP-stroked military
machine,
quietly cheering.
Never mind the staggering multibillion-dollar political mess
in Saudi
Arabia that fueled bin Laden's network for years, or the
enormous oil
fields that are desperately vulnerable to terrorist attack
at any
moment. Never mind the US government's outright rejection of
new
advancements in alternative fuels to get us away from oil
and out of
the Gulf entirely.
Instead we get: Evildoers. Air strikes. Hundreds of dead
civilians.
Rumsfeld denials. And Bush, squinting, saying things only
small
children and GasMaskExpress.com shoppers find comforting and
manly.
It is, Bush tells us, a war on terrorism. We will eradicate
terrorism
through largely violent and aggressive means, because that
is what we
must do and what we always do and everything else takes too
damn
long. We have to do something. This is the common wisdom.
Bush said
so. Mr. Rumsfeld told him so, with his black and shiny hawk
eyes all
a-glimmer. Disagree? You traitorous whiner.
This war, it will be just like the War on Drugs. It will be
potent
and effective and our objectives will be clear. The nation
had a
nasty drug problem and we declared a war on drugs and spent
billions
over many years and now you can't buy drugs anymore. It will
be just
like that.
There is more than one way to respond to the horror of Sept.
11. And
there is more than one kind of patriotism. We forget this.
You do not
have to rally around Bush and tolerate Cheney's chthonic
creepiness
and wave a frantic flag and believe every scripted
half-truth that
drizzles out of the Pentagon, applaud the nonstop attacks on
an
already demolished nation. Pro-America does not mean
pro-war. Or
pro-Bush. Or anti-Afghanistan. Or
pro-little-flags-on-SUV-antennas.
It means thinking independently and getting better informed
and
filtering your news very carefully and realizing that just
because
one version of the American aggro attitude is currently
being
ramrodded down society's throat doesn't mean you have to
swallow.
It means you don't have to find Tomahawk missiles really
cool or
think all those tens of thousands of Europeans and Egyptians
and
world citizens protesting the US bombings must be commie
jerks, or
feel sad and morally depleted when you can't seem to draw
any
intellectual nourishment whatsoever when Bush declaims,
"Terrorists
want us to stop our lives, stop our flying, stop our buying.
But this
nation will not be intimidated by evildoers." You don't
have to buy
into that infantile hokum for a moment.
After all, this is America.
-----
Do you realize that, based on the content of this
message, under a Joint Resolution of Congress passed
on 9/15 and the "PATRIOT" Act passed on 10/26, we
can be just declared to be "domestic terrorists."
And then we can be watched, searched (secretly
while we're out of our house), have our private
property confiscated and our financial holdings
frozen or confiscated - all without trial.