Just Saying

When all the evidence has been presented and nothing’s left to be said that hasn’t been said, what to say? State sponsored hysteria is easier to generate and easier to manage than boring hard work of peace, and besides, peace reveals the problems of governance that hysteria obscures. It is easy to be brave with other people’s children when such bravery, and its defense, demonizes all calls for honest accountability.

Yesterday the Attorney General announces that the President himself quashed an investigation into the suspect legality of the actions of the President. Unlike Nixon’s AG, Eliot Richardson, who resigned in principle rather than fire Archibald Cox, Gonzalez just smirked and moved on to his rehearsed impugning of the patriotism of anyone who questioned the President’s integrity, and no one seems to care. And there's more. You know there's more.

Your wife is pregnant with your first child, and in that child’s genes are odds for Parkinson’s or diabetes or heart disease or cancer or Alzheimers, and because the President is either beholden to the Religious Right and/or actually believes their mythological nonsense, the cure for your child should she be afflicted by any of these diseases is now postponed (if not scrubbed), and as far as your brother with Parkinsons and your aunt with diabetes and your uncle with heart disease and your father with cancer and your mother with Alzheimers, let’s just tell them that Baby Jesus wants them to suffer.

CNN is reporting that 14,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed in the first half of 2006. Since the logicians of Cheneystan deduced a direct connection between Iraq, al-Qaeda, and the attacks of 911, that makes 4.66 innocent Iraqi civilian death for every 1 innocent American citizen death in the twin towers. Just this year. Now there are reports that Turkey is preparing to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, taking advantage of the general shitstorm to mop up their own agenda, and increasing the likelihood of a general civil war in Iraq, which there is already, depending on semantics.

And the Right is pissed at the President. More war is the answer, as predicted, and they’ve little faith that this asshole is asshole enough. The clenched sniffiness that is Charles Krauthammer’s madness demands that Israel attack and destroy anyone and everything in the Middle East that displeases Charles Krauthammer. Max Boot, who probably regimented his bug-torturing as a child (and who was handed a serious smackdown on Tuesday’s Diane Rehm show by Bill Odom), seems unaware that the US military can’t handle what he's dismissed as a low-grade insurrection in Iraq, while damning Syria to obliteration with the clicks of his brave keyboard in Los Angeles.

There are the Armageddonists, hankering for end-time, justifying their racism and bloodlust with scripture. And there are Krauthammers and Boots and severely religiously retarded morons on the other side, wishing right back on America gruesome pain and anguished death infinity, may vultures eat your liver and maggots feast on your eyes.

Just saying. Just because cycles of history suggest that all this will pass, past cycles of history did not have a ubiquitous media competing for immediate and sensational gruesomeness and an ever-present internet and everything surveilled always and a video-gamed public triggeraddicted to graphic synaptic gratification. Something going on. Beyond the solipsism that makes each of us think our time is crucial, something significant is going on. Some of us keep saying this and saying this and saying this, and I hope we're wrong. I'll gladly be proven wrong. Until I am, I'm just saying, over and over.