Saturday, October 07, 2006
Saturday Spillage
So here we all are, except for those of you have gone to some semi-sane refuge in Canada or The Netherlands… The American juggernaut is careening across the map of the world, a mad series of pin-balls careening through country after country, its own Captain Ahab at the broken helm… It’s disgusting. Just goddam disgusting.
We’ve always been a schitzo sort of country, high ideals over here and base behaviors over there. Are we finally collapsing? I remember years and years ago, Jerry Garcia saying, “the revolution is already over, this is just the mopping up operation.”
That’s almost as good as Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” I hate to say it. I really really want to believe there’s hope—or at least a reason or two to hope there’s hope, but I don’t know. The FBI has a free hand to operate in Canada (Vichy Canada?), it’s always operated in Mexico, and they’re technology just gets more and more impressive, their skills of manipulation and coercion more polished...The government, from Federal to local, has always been able to basically do what it wants. Once in a while the government will act in a way that gets its sorry ass dragged into court, and then it gets chastised, but then the government goes out and does it again. I’m thinking of various demonstrations where police, acting on federal orders (or so I believe), simply rounded up demonstrators, regardless of whether their actions were lawful or unlawful, and locked them up for unconscionable periods of time. Of course the courts tossed out these arrests, but the goals had already been met: the demonstrations had been demonized, and various demonstrators suddenly had various kinds of police records. We went through the same thing back during the Viet Nam War.
Viet Nam. I’ve been reading some I.F. Stone reports from that era. How familiar it all seems: government spokesmen, totally isolated from reality, blither on about progress and blame foreign governments for egging on the other side. Substitute Iran for China or the Soviet Union, Islamofascists for International Communism and the scripts are almost identical. It means there were no lessons learned from Viet Nam; in fact some learnings might have been erased from military minds. Once again we’re trying to use massive military force to stamp out ideas; once again we have zero support in the field; and once again, our ally, the Iraqi armed forces, are extremely unpredictable.
Bad news. Bad moon rising. OK, it’s already risen. There’s a very bad moon in the sky, and I don’t look for it to set anytime soon.
We’ve always been a schitzo sort of country, high ideals over here and base behaviors over there. Are we finally collapsing? I remember years and years ago, Jerry Garcia saying, “the revolution is already over, this is just the mopping up operation.”
That’s almost as good as Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.” I hate to say it. I really really want to believe there’s hope—or at least a reason or two to hope there’s hope, but I don’t know. The FBI has a free hand to operate in Canada (Vichy Canada?), it’s always operated in Mexico, and they’re technology just gets more and more impressive, their skills of manipulation and coercion more polished...The government, from Federal to local, has always been able to basically do what it wants. Once in a while the government will act in a way that gets its sorry ass dragged into court, and then it gets chastised, but then the government goes out and does it again. I’m thinking of various demonstrations where police, acting on federal orders (or so I believe), simply rounded up demonstrators, regardless of whether their actions were lawful or unlawful, and locked them up for unconscionable periods of time. Of course the courts tossed out these arrests, but the goals had already been met: the demonstrations had been demonized, and various demonstrators suddenly had various kinds of police records. We went through the same thing back during the Viet Nam War.
Viet Nam. I’ve been reading some I.F. Stone reports from that era. How familiar it all seems: government spokesmen, totally isolated from reality, blither on about progress and blame foreign governments for egging on the other side. Substitute Iran for China or the Soviet Union, Islamofascists for International Communism and the scripts are almost identical. It means there were no lessons learned from Viet Nam; in fact some learnings might have been erased from military minds. Once again we’re trying to use massive military force to stamp out ideas; once again we have zero support in the field; and once again, our ally, the Iraqi armed forces, are extremely unpredictable.
Bad news. Bad moon rising. OK, it’s already risen. There’s a very bad moon in the sky, and I don’t look for it to set anytime soon.
