DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
By Ivan G. Goldman
The way the Iraq war is structured, very few Americans are conscious of what it’s doing to them. Unlike the scattered families whose children come home in coffins that, by White House edict, can’t be photographed, or like the Iraqis who go to the market for a leg of lamb and return minus a leg of their own, most middle-class Americans just go on about their business.
They pay their taxes, go to work, go out to dinner, make love, chuckle over The Daily Show, buy crappy Chinese stuff at discount stores rung up by desperately poor people obeying edicts to smile without health insurance, they fume at this crappy government, but consider themselves mostly untouched.
Meanwhile the horrors deepen. The planet bakes, the fundamentalist churches siphon tax funds to raise more Creationist zombies, the vets come home broken and untreated, there’s no energy policy, Bush lies and lies some more, borrows and borrows some more, allocating the funds to programs that make everything worse and to heck-of-a-job Brownies he's placed throughout the government. He cripples food safety, worker safety, science, education, and access to education, dumbing everything down to his level.
Meanwhile the horrors deepen. The planet bakes, the fundamentalist churches siphon tax funds to raise more Creationist zombies, the vets come home broken and untreated, there’s no energy policy, Bush lies and lies some more, borrows and borrows some more, allocating the funds to programs that make everything worse and to heck-of-a-job Brownies he's placed throughout the government. He cripples food safety, worker safety, science, education, and access to education, dumbing everything down to his level.
Congressional members enjoy their free gym memberships and members-only elevators while the cauldron boils and we count down the days and hope our twisted electoral process will give us something better next time. But those boxes keep coming home.
MARIO SAVIO
The late Mario Savio (pictured above), facing circumstances far less onerous than today's -- when we suffer under an Orwellian regime that despises its own people -- said to a crowd of Berkeley students in 1964,
The late Mario Savio (pictured above), facing circumstances far less onerous than today's -- when we suffer under an Orwellian regime that despises its own people -- said to a crowd of Berkeley students in 1964,
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Now there’s an idea.
Imus lost his job. Excellent, but let's stop patting ourselves on the back. Bush and Cheney still have theirs.
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