Archive for May, 2008

           I, for one, spell relief as the end of the Bush/Cheney “oil ticket” reign of terror.  If the rumors, founded on “leaks” in the White House to Andrew Cockburn of “Counterpunch”, are correct, the gruesome twosome have signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against Iran, among others, unprecedented in scope.  Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area stretching from Lebanon to Afghanistan and includes strategic assassinations of targeted officials.  The source for these assertions comes from a former official on the National Security Council.

          According to CBS sources, the State Department is at work drafting an ultimatum to Iran demanding they cease all current activities in Iraq.  The fact that allegations of Iran’s involvement in Iraq have never been proven seems of no concern to a man whose policies are based more on faith than fact. A curious side benefit to the most ridiculous foreign policy in this nation’s history is a near bankruptcy of Citigroup, the world’s largest financial services company.  This company avoided immediate ruin by selling an 11% interest to, are you ready for this, the Arabs.  The fact that a direct result of the war in the Middle East has driven oil prices to the point where major industries, airlines and trucking to mention just two, are on the verge of collapse, hasn’t dawned on the war hawks yet.  As higher oil prices put ever larger chunks of American capital in Arab hands, the Arab countries turn around and buy ever larger chunks of America.

          Could we possibly be doing anything stupider or more damaging to our country than continuing, let alone increasing, our involvement in the middle east?

Who is telling the truth? 

Except for the liars, everyone is.

Unfortunately, we all view history through the lens of our own upbringing.  An ever-changing kaleidoscope of world events refracts the “truth” into a thousand prisms.  We each eventually pick a point of view of the world which is most pleasing, or least terrifying, to ourselves.  That view is focused and shaped by what we see and read daily.

Saul Bellow once said about the media, “nobody will be heard, who doesn’t speak in short bursts of truth”.  Bill Moyers recently reflected that news people need to speak in “bumper sticker” snippets to hold our attention.  Media mavens have seven seconds to grab us and make an impression before we are “gone” and on to something else mentally.

It would be simple arithmetic to hold the media responsible for our loss of depth perception.  But that would be wrong.  We are conditioned to accept specially crafted sound bytes.  Marshall McLuhan, back in the 70’s, wrote a blockbuster book exposing the medium as the message.  People have always had a tendency to view what they read as “truth, so help me God”.  Today people view what they see as the “truth”.  But as the written word is just a sound byte, the video is just an action byte, and only as real as we perceive it to be.

Here is a case in point.  The Bush administration focused our attention on terrorism after 9/11 and in true Barnum and Bailey sleight of hand switched our focus to Iraq.  Although one had nothing to do with the other, we followed the sound bytes and believed the video clips, and “agreed” Iraq needed to be punished.  Most recently, a concerted military effort has been made to link the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq to Iran.  Over 20,000 weapons were assembled from various armed engagements, and military experts were tasked to find a link back to the source — Iran.  Of course, no tangible link exists.  But many will follow this “sleight-of-hand” maneuver and accept the inevitability of a war with Iran.

We would do well to remember a former writer named Len de Caux, who said in “Armies Of The Poor”: “Sometimes I’d hear a Communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme I’d feel embarrassed.  Then I’d look around at the unemployed audience — shabby clothes, expressions worried and sour.  Faces would start to glow, heads to nod, and hands to clap.”  So here we are again, and to the thousands who protested before the war began and the hundreds of thousands since, the Bush administration says, more or less, “So?”  Well, my face is glowing, my head is nodding, and I’m clapping my hands!  And I am no communist.

Governments of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy are never sustainable; such empires always fall from within.  The wealthy have been leading this charge over the cliff with their golden parachutes and laser guided bombs.  Hopefully we will learn that arrogance and greed have no place in a democracy.  And we will reorganize ourselves accordingly.

Imagine walking through the forest one day and discovering an apparently unguarded or abandoned bee’s nest hanging within easy reach. Thinking a snack of rich honey can be had for little or no effort, you approach the nest. Suddenly your plan is interrupted by an angry buzzing.  You look around you and discover a hornet buzzing about your feet.  Following your first instinct you attempt to stomp on the hornet, and after several misses you successfully squash the pesky bugger.  However, without you noticing, your stomping has shaken the ground and you now have several angry hornets buzzing about your feet.  You immediately launch into an Indian war dance, hooting and stomping around, until you feel the sharp pain of a sting.  This angers you further so you increase your efforts to exact revenge upon the culprit and his cohorts by flailing madly in all directions.  You attempt to obliterate the source of these angry hornets by closing the hole from which they came.  However, by now you are not fighting just one or several angry hornets, but the entire nest has erupted around you and you are getting stung repeatedly. Too late you realize that although you easily stomped the first soldier who attempted to defend his nest, and the several that followed, they are striking back.  Further, you realize they are coming from more than one hole in the ground, and they appear to be everywhere.

The moral of the story is simple.  Although our daydreamer was infinitely superior in size and weaponry, and although he was able to inflict serious damage to the pesky tribe, er nest, his victory was never accomplished, and in the meantime, he incurred some serious damage. The longer he stays the more damage he suffers until he leaves with his tail between his legs.

Mission accomplished.