Despair is Never Out-of-Date
I am really saddened and ashamed. First, let me apologize to anyone who is trying to "avoid" politics out of disgust and despair, but I stumbled across a blog that really got to me. I know that this blog was just a nice little series of recommendations for stories and things that I thought worth checking out, but I don't see a problem with breaking form. Sorry to anyone who's upset at not finding what they thought they would this post. But here's something else worth reading, even if it doesn't contain a single Elf or Ring. http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com is a post from a girl in Iraq about living through the occupation. It is very intelligently and movingly put forth. Anyone who thinks that they just don't want to hear about it anymore--imagine being in her shoes, and those of the people around her. They cannot simply turn off the tv and change the subject when they are "tired of hearing about it." They don't have that option. If you want the truth, there's no where better to go than to the eyes of someone who's living it. Is this the "complete truth"? No, and I don't claim it is; nothing is ever the "complete truth." Everything has more than one side and a million shades of nuance. But here's at least a facet of the Truth, and it hits home far more than a hundred pictures on the television ever could.
I realize that it's not "current" to be talking about Iraq or the election of a few months ago right now. I "should" be bemoaning the tragedy of the tsunami--and that is horrible, and a disaster, and I'm not trying to say it isn't. But we can't just keep flying off to the latest story on the news and forgetting about what they showed yesterday or the week before or even never. In our constant quest for new stimuli to keep our disordered minds amused, we forget that not everything can be solved in the half-hour span of a tv series. Things have consequences and they keep going even when everyone has looked away and is watching the "new" news. But the old stuff's still there. So maybe I'm not current, maybe I'm behind the times and maybe I'm going to annoy some people because of this.
But that really doesn't matter. Because whether you want to look or not, this is still happening. And I just have to wonder now...what is coming next? He has four years. What's his next action going to be, and will we ever recover from it? It will take Iraq years to recover from America's last act of "global awareness." What will happen to the world if we decide to stay involved? Maybe isolationism wasn't as bad a policy as I always thought it was. At least then, we weren't screwing everyone else over. Maybe we should all stick our heads back in the sand. That's a recipe for disaster, of course, but a slower-cooking one than our current course.
All I can say is, I hope every single one of the assholes who voted for Bush feels like a scumbag now that he's been re-elected and we--and the rest of the world--have to deal with four more years of him.
More information and a more detached viewpoint available at Informed Comment, a blog by a Professor of History at the Universtiy of Michigan.
posted by Tathrin | 7:10 PM
2 Comments:
Well stated. Unfortunate, but true. Our Newspeakian “liberation” is so fucked that it sounds like Orwell wrote it himself—oh, wait, he sort of did. 1984...2004. Optimistic man that he must have been, he predicted the fall to occur 20 years before it began.
Excellently lucid truth commentary, too.
My father believes that this is just the beginning of what will become known as “the oil wars,” and I agree with him. Blood for resources. Blood for you cushioned lifestyle—for your padded SUV and big-screen TV. Imperialistic groping to keep the behemoth machine going—to stretch out the dying, moaning, protracted last gasp of the Western civilization that we have debauched with a particularly vapid brand of selfish ridiculousness with which we now attempt to soil the rest of the globe in our bitter death-trip-in-denial.
Sure, it’s always been this way—since the dawn of human history, since the dawn of everything—but there is such a thing as evolution, despite what those strange people in Dover believe.
It’s 2005 (Gregorian-wise, anyway), for fuck’s sake. Have we progressed so little? I’m ashamed, personally; not only with myself, but with the rest of the species.
Spider always has words of wisdom regarding these topics (replace "vermin woman" with "American"):
Who did you
vote for, vermin
woman? Did you
vote? Can you
read? Have you
got thumbs?
Show
me your
fucking
thumbs!THUMBS!(By the way, the Informed Comment link is botched—it has two “http://”s and redirects you to Microsoft’s homepage.)
Heh. Beautiful.
Sucks, doesn't it? Loved the Transmet quote, too.
And thanks, the link should be fixed now!
(Sorry, I'd write more, but I have this art project that kind of needs to be done by tomorrow morning and I've been putting it off all day trying to de-virus my computer...*sigh* Yeah, that was lots of fun...)
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