Potemkin World... or the President in the Zone

[sintax]

Potemkin World… or the President in the Zone

"The great motorcade," wrote Canadian correspondent Don Murray, "swept through the streets of the city… The crowds … but there were no crowds. George W. Bush's imperial procession through Europe took place in a hermetically sealed environment. In Brussels it was, at times, eerie. The procession containing the great, armour-plated limousine (flown in from Washington) rolled through streets denuded of human beings except for riot police. Whole areas of the Belgian capital were sealed off before the American president passed."

Murray doesn't mention the 19 American escort vehicles in that procession with the President's car (known to insiders as "the beast"), or the 200 secret service agents, or the 15 sniffer dogs, or the Blackhawk helicopter, or the 5 cooks, or the 50 White House aides, all of which added up to only part of the President's vast traveling entourage. Nor does he mention the huge press contingent tailing along inside the president's security "bubble," many of them evidently with their passports not in their own possession but in the hands of White House officials, or the more than 10,000 policemen and the various frogmen the Germans mustered for the President's brief visit to the depopulated German town of Mainz to shake hands with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

This image of cities emptied of normal life (like those atomically depopulated ones of 1950s sci-fi films) is not exactly something Americans would have carried away from last week's enthusiastic TV news reports about the bonhomie between European and American leaders, as our President went on his four-day "charm offensive" to repair first-term damage to the transatlantic alliance. But two letters came into the Tomdispatch e-mailbox -- one from a young chemist in Germany, the other from a middle-aged engineer in Baghdad -- that reminded me of how differently many in the rest of the world view the offshore bubbles we continually set up, whether in Belgium, Germany, or the Green Zone in Baghdad. (Both letters are reproduced at the end of this dispatch.)

<snip>

"American presidential trips abroad increasingly remind me of the vast, completely ritualized dynastic processionals by which ancient emperors and potentates once crossed their domains and those of their satraps. Our President's processionals are enormous moving bubbles (even when he visits alien places closer to home like the Big Apple) that shut cities, close down institutions, turn off life itself. Essentially, when the President moves abroad, like some vast turtle, he carries his shell with him."

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2222

[GCP]

1. As opposed to Queen Elizabeth going through London in an open carriage

Through crowds of thousands of people 3 days after the first terrorist bombings in London.
Americans have no idea how much Bush is loathed around the world and what a coward he is - when was the last time any Presidential motorcade went through any US city, let alone a European one?

[susu369]

2. First-rate article!

Excellent piece - thank you for sharing.

History will not be kind to this evil man bu$h* and his evil cabal.

From the first days of 2001, the Potemkin Village theme was obvious and ominous.

[WhiteTara]

3. Like all bullies, chimpy is a coward

He has to carry around his own armor plated car? Geez Louise. No wonder he secretly drinks so much he is passed out by 9pm.
BUSH TO THE HAGUE!

[pfitz59]

4. Cowardly bully.....

and an international disgrace! He travels with an army of enablers..... (Do you think the 20,000 nukes in our arsenal have something to do with it?)

[WhiteTara]

6. they take the place of his

flaccid penis.

[wli]

5. Well, he's so unpopular it does take an army of riot police

If they weren't there, he'd be lynched by millions of very angry Europeans.

[Lisa]

7. he did this in Canada too

They cleared out and sealed off much of historic downtown Quebec City for him. He commented on how nice the buildings looked without the people.