Harold Pinter's Personal Message to George Bush

[BurtWorm]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1087591,00.html


Dear President Bush,

I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.

Harold Pinter
Playwright

[nostamj]

1. ouch!

no 'pinteresque' pause in that putdown!

[bryant69]

2. A glass of blood?

really that goes better with Havarti Cheese/Ham. With Cucumber sandwitches, I'd suggest a glass of chammomile tea.

Oh wait a second, I get it.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[RichM]

3. It's interesting to see that while Britain obviously has the same disease

as the US, it apparently doesn't have quite so bad a case. Pinter speaking out like that, & a major newspaper carrying it testify to that. In Britain, the culture is still undeniably capable of being outraged by being led to war on the basis of lies. In the US, this is unfortunately no longer possible.

[BurtWorm]

4. Yes, that is exactly what's striking about it.

It's not that Pinter's message is so brilliant, but his outrage is right out there in no uncertain terms. Imagine Tony Kushner being so indelicate in the Times!

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

5. My favorite is Richard Dawkins,

solely for the line I've highlighted in bold:

Dear Mr Bush (I'd say President Bush if you had actually been elected),

I've been asked to give advice to you on touching down in Britain. It is this. Go home. You aren't wanted here. You aren't wanted anywhere else either, but you may have been misunderinformed that Britain was the one place where you would be welcomified. Wrong. Well, presumably your best pal Tony welcomes you. But that's about it. Your motorcades, your helicopters, your triggerhappy guards will try to protect you from the people of Britain, who would otherwise spoil the photo-ops for the folks back home. But be in no doubt. We despise you here too. After you and Jeb stole the election (by a margin smaller than the number of folks you executed in Texas) you were rightly written off as a one-term president: a fair advertisement for Drunks For Jesus but otherwise an idle nonentity; inarticulate, unintelligent, an ignorant hick. September 11 changed all that. Not that you covered yourself with glory that day. You are said to admire Churchill. Can you imagine Churchill, at such a moment, panicking all around the country from airbase to airbase? Even nasty old Rummy bunkered down where he belonged.

Never mind, your puppeteers from the Project for the New American Century recognised the opportunity they had been waiting for. September 11 was your golden Pearl Harbor. This was how you'd get elected in 2004 (not re-elected, elected). You would announce a War on Terror. American troops would win. And you would be the victorious warlord, swaggering in a flight suit before a Mission Accomplished banner.

It worked in Afghanistan. But then those puppeteers moved on to their long-term project: Iraq. Never mind that you had to lie about weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that Iraq had not the smallest connection with 9/11. The good folks back home would never know the difference between Saddam and Osama. You would ride the paranoid patriotism aroused by 9/11 all the way into Iraq, and hand out oil and reconstruction contracts to Dick Cheney's boys. That escapade is now backfiring horribly, as many of us said it would. No wonder young American travellers are sewing Canadian flags to their rucksacks. What we in Britain won't forgive is that you have dragged us down too. Go home.

Richard Dawkins

Scientist

***

Also, the letters from Lotfi Raissi & Habib Rasul are incredibly poignant reminders of the reality of post 9-11 human rights.

[Jacobin]

10. What a beautiful rant!!!!!!!!!!

:bounce:


:bounce:

[BurtWorm]

11. That is good!

Thanks for pointing that one out. :toast:

[mitchum]

6. kick for the world's greatest living...

playwright

[CBHagman]

7. Do read as many of those letters at the Guardian website as possible.

The "While We Have Your Attention, Mr. President" letters are three sections long. The novelist John Mortimer ("Rumpole of the Bailey," "Summer's Lease") contributes one that's as succinct as it is scathing.

Hm. Maybe I need to go out and buy some John Mortimer novels RIGHT NOW!!!

[Hell Hath No Fury]

8. The letters are...

a must read. Though there's a few supportive of Bush and his policies/visit, the majority of them are in-your-face-don't-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out anti-Bush tirades.

That was some fine reading. :)

[Jacobin]

9. Oooooooooo.............nice shot........very nice

I LOVE the British. They are masters at sardonic and mean spirited wit.

[maggrwaggr]

12. my favorite so far:

Dear George,

There is no way to write this but in anger. For the dead and mutilated you have left in the wake of your shocking tread, from Afghanistan to Iraq. For the prisoners you have caged, manacled and tortured, from Bagram to Guantanamo. For your worship of the warrior. For the smart bombs you dropped from 30,000ft and the missiles you fired from 1,000 miles. For the flesh this hateful technology has charred and for the limbs it has severed. For your threats to the sovereign nations and international bodies who oppose your ambitions. For the crass lies you told the world. For your cynical corruption of law. For your naked plundering of a conquered people's wealth. For your blank cheque to Ariel Sharon. For every signature with which you consigned a human being to the death chamber in Texas. For the super-rich friends you have so handsomely rewarded and for the poor, unemployed and marginal in your own country whose lives you continue to blight. For making the world an infinitely more dangerous place.

For all these reasons, do not be fooled by the flags you will see fluttering on the Mall. Do not be fooled by the red carpets the toadies will guide you to step upon.

Look about you, if your hosts will let you look, if your flunkeys dare let you peek from beneath the official shield. Look about you when you land. You will see people in their tens of thousands protesting against your visit. Do not say we are "lucky" to live in a country that permits free speech and free assembly. Do not insult us like that. Those rights were hard won.

I doubt that what you see will chasten you, still less change your mind - you are a man of conviction, of ideological certainty, you have truly global ambitions and power to match - but at least it should be clear to you, Mr Bush, that you are not welcome here.
Ronan Bennett
Writer