Hal Crowther
No Time For Sergeants
The Bush administration is a cadaver decomposing on America’s doorstep — yet no one will take responsibility for it, no one will give it a decent burial, no one even has the courage to step over it and try to get on with a nation’s decent business. This is the president who cannot be resuscitated and cannot be removed. A lame duck is a thing we’ve dealt with before. But never a pressed duck, duck confit, duck sausage, duck a l’orange. George Bush is the devil’s dinner, the entrée from Hell’s Kitchen. A dead duck in the White House is a constitutional crisis no scholar ever anticipated and no think tank ever analyzed.
The president’s Memorial Day speech at Arlington was a crowning outrage, one that pushed many a patient, hopeful citizen over the edge into incoherent despair. If the dead could literally hear and rotate in their graves, a seismic wave of Richter-scale magnitude would have rolled across the endless green lawns and white marble headstones. “Now this hallowed ground receives a new generation of heroes,” he declaimed. “I hope you find comfort in knowing that your loved ones rest in a place even more peaceful than the fields that surround us here.”
“Aaaargh,” (with seven “a”s) wrote a friend who had watched him on TV, as I have never been able to do. Hypocrisy of such concentrated toxicity seems almost superhuman. “Shame!” we cry, but in America shame died years ago and lies buried in an unmarked grave, perhaps at Arlington. I tried and failed to think of some historical analogy. It was as if a wolf had returned to the sheepfold disguised in a clerical collar, to say a few words over the slaughtered lambs whose blood was still glistening on his whiskers. I could say this more harshly, but the plainest truth is that none of these young soldiers would be dead if George Bush had done his job half as well as they tried to do theirs. Americans are an optimistic and amnesiac people who give their politicians and celebrities a dozen chances — Richard Nixon was half rehabilitated and Don Imus still may be — but what this smirking fool has done to his country will never be forgotten or forgiven.
http://www.populist.com/07.12.Crowther.htmlgreat cover art for this article at:
http://www.aceweekly.com/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
