Written Thursday afternoon – actually before the first debate and what is posted already for today.


I am worried about the debates. I am worried that W’s asinine platitudes will hold more sway than a reasoned opinion. I miss Bill. I listened to his convention speech three times on NPR. Angela sent me the following yesterday:

Subject: Psalm

Bush is my shepherd, I shall be in want.
He maketh me lie down on park benches.
He leadeth me beside the still factories,
He restores my doubts about the Republican Party.
He leadeth me into the paths of unemployment for his cronies' sake.
Yea, though no weapons of mass destruction have been found, he maketh
me continue to fear evil.
His tax cuts for the rich and his deficit spending discomfit me.
He anointeth me with never-ending debt.
Verily my days of savings and assets are kaput.
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me all the days of his
administration,
And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.

I don’t know the source.

Just recently when Mary and I were on our road trip back from California we stopped at a roadside shrine to the stations of the cross. I’ll write in detail about it when I get the pictures developed (which are still languishing in a disposable camera in the glove box of my dead car). We went into the gift shop of this roadside atrocity and there was an oil painting on the wall of GW as a Roman emperor with a royal staff leading us to the promised land, the twin towers collapsing behind him and the flag waving in front. The mixed messages are worth exploring – here is a Christian gift shop associating GW with the Rome that crucified Christ somehow through a later synchretism with Christianized Rome and a prior Old Testament image of Moses leading his people. Insert GW into vat of iconography and hit blend. This sort of cultural slippage is almost as fucked up, but not quite, as the bronzed roman soldier with Indian headdress whipping Christ on his way to the cross. I have pictures of that scene, we’re talking life sized bronze statues, which are just astounding in their backwoods racism coded into religious symbols.

How can reason fight its best fight against dogma? Religious zealots and dogmatists are not listening, are not in the present moment, they are in some dream realm... they are perhaps the greatest source of practical evil, death, hate, discrimination… all in the name of a Christ who was a pacifist, who forbade judging others. The irony makes me ill when I think about it, and really I try not to.

I was listening to a GW speech yesterday and he was using “us and them” rhetoric to say that we would “fight the good fight” “stay in for the long haul” against an inhuman opponent that was willing to cut off peoples heads. Not to diminish the horror of decapitation, but in contrast with people who decapitate, we are a people who shred limb from limb with bombs. How many hundreds upon thousands have we killed in years of bombing Iraq, decimating two standing armies? We are a people who commit atrocities by which a decapitation is mild. When I talk to people about this they rationalize, “Yeah, but you can’t blame us for collateral damage, they brought us there.” No they didn’t. There is no link between 911 and Iraq – none – zero – nothing. “They are better off then they were under Sadam.” How exactly? Murder and kidnapping off the chart as I understand it. “They hate us for our freedoms.” Until we began supporting oppressive regimes, training and funding Sadam’s army to counter the Iranian threat, training Osama and others to fight Russia and then abandoning them, they couldn’t have cared less about the United States.