Saturday, December 13, 2003
And I'm Proud to Be an American, Hiding Under the Bed
As the Kucinich people are fond of noting, Howard Dean ain't that far left, really. In The Atlantic's DC Dispatch, Jonathan Rauch suggests that Dean is actually to the right of Bill Clinton--or at least where Bill Clinton was when he ran for president in 1992. Even though I am fairly far left as lefties go, Dean's centrism doesn't bother me all that much. I have said elsewhere that I would like to live in a country where Kucinich could be elected president, but this is not that country. What I want more, at this moment, is to live in a country where George W. Bush cannot be president anymore. If Dean can't take him down, who can?
It's clear that win or lose in November, the legacy of Bush isn't going to go away within a couple of weeks of Inauguration Day. His administration has transformed not just American politics and policy, but the very psyche of the American people. Writing in The Nation, Robert Jay Lifton analyzes the "American Apocalypse." "The war on terrorism," Lifton writes, "is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil…The projected 'victory' becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending 'Fourth World War" and a mythic cleansing--of terrorists, of evil, of our own fear." Howard Dean--or anybody else--ain't going to turn the clock back on that psychological mindset right away, that's for damn sure.
Elsewhere, H. N. Arendt analyzes the crossroads between the war on terror and the cultural war conservatives are fighting. Some of us saw it already on the afternoon of September 11--that the Bush Administration would use the attacks not only as an excuse to pull up the drawbridges and hunker down in fear of the whole world, but as a club with which to beat anything they could characterize as liberal.
And finally: I believe that high achievement should be recognized--even high achievements in stupidity. Pacifica High School in Oxnard, California (originally to be named Pacifico until somebody noticed that "Pacifico" is the name of a popular Mexican beer) is preparing a big spring pageant in which the big finale will involve 200 students singing Lee Greenwood's "I Love the USA." Now, I know what you're thinking--isn't it "God Bless the USA"? Well, yeah. But school officials figured they'd better change it to avoid a potential lawsuit. You can guess what happened next. The high achievement in stupidity belongs to the school officials who thought they could change the song and nobody would notice, instead of PICKING A DIFFERENT SONG YOU FREAKIN' MORONS WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Sorry.
As the Kucinich people are fond of noting, Howard Dean ain't that far left, really. In The Atlantic's DC Dispatch, Jonathan Rauch suggests that Dean is actually to the right of Bill Clinton--or at least where Bill Clinton was when he ran for president in 1992. Even though I am fairly far left as lefties go, Dean's centrism doesn't bother me all that much. I have said elsewhere that I would like to live in a country where Kucinich could be elected president, but this is not that country. What I want more, at this moment, is to live in a country where George W. Bush cannot be president anymore. If Dean can't take him down, who can?
It's clear that win or lose in November, the legacy of Bush isn't going to go away within a couple of weeks of Inauguration Day. His administration has transformed not just American politics and policy, but the very psyche of the American people. Writing in The Nation, Robert Jay Lifton analyzes the "American Apocalypse." "The war on terrorism," Lifton writes, "is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil…The projected 'victory' becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending 'Fourth World War" and a mythic cleansing--of terrorists, of evil, of our own fear." Howard Dean--or anybody else--ain't going to turn the clock back on that psychological mindset right away, that's for damn sure.
Elsewhere, H. N. Arendt analyzes the crossroads between the war on terror and the cultural war conservatives are fighting. Some of us saw it already on the afternoon of September 11--that the Bush Administration would use the attacks not only as an excuse to pull up the drawbridges and hunker down in fear of the whole world, but as a club with which to beat anything they could characterize as liberal.
And finally: I believe that high achievement should be recognized--even high achievements in stupidity. Pacifica High School in Oxnard, California (originally to be named Pacifico until somebody noticed that "Pacifico" is the name of a popular Mexican beer) is preparing a big spring pageant in which the big finale will involve 200 students singing Lee Greenwood's "I Love the USA." Now, I know what you're thinking--isn't it "God Bless the USA"? Well, yeah. But school officials figured they'd better change it to avoid a potential lawsuit. You can guess what happened next. The high achievement in stupidity belongs to the school officials who thought they could change the song and nobody would notice, instead of PICKING A DIFFERENT SONG YOU FREAKIN' MORONS WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Sorry.
