After the Pledge of Allegiance

By way of Gary Younge of the Guardian, two quotes I wish I had made:

"If our guys want to poke somebody in the chest to get the name of a bomb maker so they can save the lives of Americans, I'm for it," said Republican senator Jim Talent at a recent hearing on torture. How about ramming someone who does not have the name of a bomb maker in the anus with a truncheon, Mr Talent. Are you for that too?

(snip)

"US troop withdrawal," said Bush last week, "would be done depending upon the ability of Iraqis to defend themselves." They are already defending themselves Mr Bush - from you.


My nation, America, has condoned the use of torture, napalm, cluster bombs, and other assorted depleted-uranium projectiles against hapless Iraqi civilians—and for what?

Dante had the right idea. If there was truly such a thing as justice in this flawed world then George W. Bush and his lying band would have to suffer and re-suffer the same fate as each dead, tortured, and maimed Iraqi innocent in perpetuity.

There’s nothing earth-shattering in the knowledge that George W. Bush doesn’t know what in the hell he’s talking about, but sometimes the irony is too sweet to ignore. Here’s a tidbit from Ronald Aronson, the author of Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. He is also a professor of humanities at Wayne State University.

A careful reading of "The Fall" reveals that President Bush's quote from Albert Camus in Brussels was an astonishing mistake. Many of our European friends may now be laughing up their sleeves at the United States' head of state. To those who know Camus, a White House speechwriter may have created a spectacle, in which the president unwittingly parodied himself.

The quote, "freedom is a long-distance race," was ripped from its context, one that establishes beyond doubt that Camus' words were not meant straightforwardly. No, a careful reading makes clear they were intended as a spoof of the thought of his former good friend, Jean-Paul Sartre.

(snip)

The paragraph from which the president quoted begins by having Clamence extolling slavery, as Camus believed Sartre had done by aligning himself with the French Communist Party. Then Camus has Clamence condemn himself of hypocrisy, for which Camus criticized Sartre in his journal, by saying that that he "was always talking of freedom. At breakfast I used to spread it on my toast, I used to chew it all day long, and in company my breath was delightfully redolent of freedom. With that key word I would bludgeon whoever contradicted me; I made it serve my desires and my power."

(Snip)

Camus' character, while sounding resolute and tireless about pursuing freedom, making it seem daunting and thankless but the mark of a true human being, is really prattling on about freedom. He is intimidating people with it, using it for purposes of self-interest and does not at all believe in it. The grand-sounding phrase about freedom being a "long-distance race" is just another piece of flimflam. Camus, a writer who pondered every phrase, every word, might turn in his grave upon hearing Bush misunderstand his meaning.

Prattling on indeed. Bush is an “ignoranus” – he’s not only stupid, he’s an asshole too.

One of the things that upsets me the most about the present and its plethora of moving images and vast indigestible stream of information is the loss of the imaginative necessity that reading (the only way we could know the world) required.

The world, Africa for example, seemed a fuller place when my access to it was National Geographic and Graham Greene novels, not the blast and surfeit of contemporary information, most of which, even if it has value, can’t be humanly held together in a cohesive whole. Then, a generalist (with a liberal education) had value—now everything it would have taken a lifetime to know can be found with a single click of a computer button. I can’t remember who said it, but this encapsulates the issue, “There is more information in a single Sunday New York Times than it took a man, in Shakespeare’s day, a lifetime to accrue.”

All of which brings me to the thought that unless a person is a specialist in one tiny corner of this welter of information they are by circumstance marginalized by a society which values apparent certainty and expertise. What we’ve lost is the capacity reading gave us for wonder (in its most incredible sense), and I miss it very much. Perhaps this is what’s at the heart of my current feeling of being overwhelmed—the former slowness of the process of learning, and it’s value, have changed dramatically in such a few, short years.

Have we finally exceeded our human ability to process information? Is how I feel a consequence of age? Have all generations experienced the same feeling? Is my complaint merely a time-honored case of sour grapes at being left behind? Perhaps there’s an element of all of this in my current state of mind, but overall, at least in a human sense, I believe we’ve lost more than we’ve gained.

Has anyone stopped to wonder how much Bush’s jaunts around America to hype the Social Security crisis is costing the U.S. taxpayer? I have no idea, really, but if the massive Secret Service security precautions and cost of local police and other authorities (not to mention any lost revenue to local businesses, etc.) are rolled together it must total millions of dollars each time the trained chimp takes his Washington circus on the road. Whatever the actual cost, if his latest European trip is any example the cost is in the millions, and the current travel agenda is 60 stops in 60 days.

What if, instead of taking his phony dog-and-pony show on the road, Bush stayed in Washington and… gulp! read a book, or actually had a real policy meeting? Better yet, what if he took all that wasted propaganda money and put it in the Social Security Trust Fund instead? Just think how many seniors, on a fraction of this unnecessary expense, could live out their lives in security. Would that be asking too much of a man who ran in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative” (a moron’s oxymoron if I ever heard one)?

George Bush is a dry-drunk psychotic (who needs all that AA 12 step apologizing shit?) who is hell-bent on dismantling the most successful government program in America’s history. Any concession to his plan to destroy Social Security would be, and is, a travesty. With the 2006 mid-term elections a soon to be reality, our legislators need to feel our hot breath on their necks. In the meantime we can watch as our favorite fiscal conservative pisses important millions down the drain.

Here’s something to think about. Why should running a country, with all of its costs, be any different than how one runs the smallest social unit… the family? Just think of all the decisions made at the federal government level that would be an anathema at the family level. Who in their right mind would cut the food one child gets to overfeed another? Who would allow one child healthcare and withhold it from a different child? Who would give one child basic education and deny it to another? Who would allow one child to have expensive toys when another child has few or none? No one who cares in the least for their family would be this morally debased, and yet that’s exactly what our present government does to us every day.

Of course, there are limits to what any government can do for each of us, but just as the mark of a good family is in how well they function and increase the welfare of all of their members, the mark of a good government should be reflected in its attempt at equity of distribution and in the increased welfare of all of its citizens. Just consider George W. Bush’s new budget. A government that does anything less is morally bankrupt.