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Edited on Fri Apr-09-10 09:56 AM by Peace Patriot
Though most of the time our own capitol, Washington DC, seems to me like the "heart of darkness"--the spawner of wars and a thousand military bases, the cauldron of corruption in which banksters and war profiteers loot us blind, no matter who is president, the vortex of the bloodsoaked "empire which slaughtered a million innocent people to steal their oil and created torture dungeons around the world, and is larding one of the worst regimes on earth--Colombia--with $7 billion in military aid, while it demonizes and reviles and is probably plotting war against neighboring countries with lots of oil whose governments use the oil profits for reducing poverty, for universal free health care and free college education, countries that have harmed no one; the Capitol of Lies...I could go on, but you get my point. So that when Michelle Obama says, "It is a place that people here should feel immensely proud of," I cringe. I am NOT proud of it any more. I once was. And I remember that feeling. I remember being totally awed visiting the Jefferson Memorial for the first time, late one night, long ago. We had war then, too--a horrible war. Vietnam. But it seemed like the American people still had power, then--the power to demand peace, the power to end unjust war, the power to curtail an out-of-control president. It is hard to grow up and realize just how little of that democracy, that I once felt so awed by and so proud of, is left.
I was haunted by a speech I saw on vid, of Dennis Kucinich, in the midst of the Bush Junta. He described the militarization of Washington DC--the barricades he had to pass to go into Congress, the atmosphere of fear and alienation. And I have often thought of the loss of a sense of freedom that engulfed Washington with the Bush Junta. FDR said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And the Bush Junta understood that very well, and USED fear to try to rip down our peoples' revulsion at torture and wanton killing, and to try to disable us, as a people, as multinational corporations and war profiteers stole every last penny of our hard-earned prosperity. The Bush Junta began with the disappearance of Chandra Levy and the complete dodo-headedness of the corpo-fascist media (for instance, their failing to ask ANY questions about Dick Cheney's meeting with Gary Condit on the very day she disappeared, during the very hours of her disappearance), in the leadup to 9/11. The sleazy part of the story was all the headlines that summer, while Bush lazed around at his "ranch."
This article mythologizes Bush, here:
"George W. Bush, in bed every night by 9:30, had no use for grass-fed beef or freshly picked chanterelles—even less for taking his wife out to an environmentally responsible restaurant tucked into the artistic hub of D.C.'s well-established gay and lesbian scene. In the previous administration, Washington was a place you apologized for having to go to when back home in Texas, the White House just an office with a rose garden. Home was elsewhere. The forty-third president appeared most elementally himself on a mountain bike in Crawford."
Bush was NEVER a Texan. He was a carpetbagger from Yale (where, as with everything else in his life, he was a failure). And he looked about as comfortable on a mountain bike as I look on skis (not). He was the very spawn of "the Beltway"--a manufactured president, created for the purpose of wanton killing and torture and destroying the Constitution. The "corporate culture," which had been slowly engulfing Washington DC, like a vast dark cloud, smothering our democracy, beginning with Reagan (whose darkest deeds--for instance, the slaughter of two hundred thousand Mayan villagers in Guatemala--have yet to be acknowledged in the corpo-fascist media "river of forgetfulness"), found its apotheosis in Bush Jr. Corporate Rule totally run amok. The Pentagon (weapon of Corporate Rule, which didn't even try to defend our nation's capitol on 9/11), totally run amok. Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars 'disappeared.' Mercenaries running "the show." Everything run amok so badly, so out of control, that even Daddy Bush was alarmed at how naked the real U.S. government had become, and intervened. (Summer/fall 2006--they got rid of Rumsfeld, contained Darth and rescued Junior from a number of things, among them, I think, CIA retribution for the outing of their agent and their entire WMD counter-proliferation project.)
Bush Jr, the idiot, summed up what the USA had become: a ruthless, mass murdering, egregiously hypocritical, hated "super-power," with hardly a vestige of democracy left. Reagan's "legacy" writ large.
A rancher from Texas, "at home" on his mountain bike? Give me a break.
Junior was never happier than when he was executing Texans. He was not a Texan. He was a failed Yalee, an AWOL absentee from the "champagne" unit of the Texas National Guard, a scofflaw, a drunk, a failed "business man," a billionaire who never earned a dime of his money, and an ideal puppet for what Washington DC had become, by the year 2000. Not our capitol.
But there are two things that make us a democracy. One is policy (how it is devised, who gets to make it). The other is culture--more nebulous, harder to understand, but equally important. It is as important to feel free as it is to be free. You can be technically free and a paranoid schizophrenic--trapped in delusions, with no freedom at all. Got to be careful about the feeling part, though, in relation to the policy part--to be sure that the feeling of freedom is not itself a delusion. But freedom IS, in part, a FEELING. And culture is its milieu as well as its product. Culture becomes atrophied when the human mind is stifled. And culture--the natural, inherent bubbling up of human creativity--promotes freedom--personal freedom and political freedom.
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny imposed upon the mind of man." --Thomas Jefferson, inscribed in the rotunda around his statue in Washington DC.
That's what I read, in Washington DC, at the Jefferson Memorial, late at night, so long ago. Very inspiring words. I was awed. I had never been taught those words. And anything that Michele Obama can do, to loosen the tyrannies imposed upon the minds of the American people, by the recent Junta, and to make those words once again the cornerstone of our country, is greatly welcomed, by me. The re-democratization of the USA can begin--and perhaps has to begin--with the culture. We may be cursed with 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, all over the country, run by a far rightwing corporation (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold), and getting rid of privatized vote counting may still be doable, but the American people have to BELIEVE that they still have a right to transparent vote counting, for them to restore that bottom line of democracy. That belief begins with the culture. That belief begins with removing "every form of tyranny imposed upon the mind of man." And culture is no trivial thing--a mere matter of organic restaurants and "night life" and artists and chefs and people mixing together and having fun. Culture is who we are--mostly a peace-loving, social justice loving, progressive and very creative people--and it may, I hope, one day, again begin to determine what we do.
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