Polyticks in Post-Modern Amerika

Well, let’s see, first, the title: “poly” because there’s a flat-out shitload of ‘em, “poly” being a Greek prefix for “a flat-out shitload”, or close enough. “Ticks” are parasites. ‘Nuff said there. “Post” modern because, while it’s ‘way too late in the day to be pre modern, and it sure as Hell isn’t modern anymore; personally, I expect to see Bush appoint official government witch-prickers any day now. Back to the future, and no lie. “Amerika”: you may as well get used to the spelling. Damned if I’ll use the proper name of a place I once loved and revered so much after it’s been dishonored and turned into a cesspool, especially as she no longer exists and cannot defend herself.

Watching the antics of the president and Congress plus their assorted hangers-on (like any other ticks) is like watching Adolph Hitler slowly crawl up between the legs of Miss Liberty – it’s sickening. Not only have the so-called “neocons” (a nonsense word that sounds neat and implies things that aren’t true, which makes it perfect for them) already taken her brazen hymen, they’ve spat on it and announced their intention to, I believe the street phrase is “turn her out”. They do and will treat that Grand Lady as though she were as common a hooker as they are pimps, and it doesn’t just hurt me, it pisses me off. Some concepts, while immaterial, are more real than stone, and this one should have the respect it has earned, even in defeat. I suppose that, as they did it by taking advantage of her generosity, openness and highest ideals to stab her from behind, I couldn’t really expect any more than that.

I have to say here though that you God-hucksters have really put both feet in the manure pile this time, and you will pay for it along with the rest of us when it all comes down. You’ve earned worse, damn you. If you’d pull your heads out of God’s and each others’ asses for five minutes and look at what’s actually happening instead of steering your course by what these idiots tell you is in front of you, you could still save us all a lot of pain, and maybe even our own extinction. I know: fat chance. Count on it, though: the day you’ve worked so hard for will come when you bury your daughters who’ve bled to death from back-alley abortions, when you cannot find work that pays a living wage, or fill your gas tanks, or buy groceries or pay your mortgages or afford decent medical care for you or your own because the people you trusted blindly have been lining their own pockets with your hard-earned taxes, and are so shut in and isolated in their mansions they couldn’t hear you if they wanted to, which they don’t and never did anyway.

In maybe half a million years of being human, of greed, torture, needless suffering, intolerance, of slavery and the trampling underfoot of the gentle and creative by the violent and ignorant, of a least a few of us striving for something better, we finally created something pure and good (not perfect, but trying, dammit!) for everyone but the greedy destroyers like you; we actually made a decent start on making it a concrete reality, and you couldn’t stand it, could you? You just had to piss in it, make it stink, take it away, or you couldn’t live with yourselves.

But damn you again, my daughters and sons and granddaughters and grandsons will pay for your laziness and stupidity too.

Ian MacLeod

Oregon

January 24^th, 2006

They Will Make Us Savages Again, Just Like Them

Just today I wrote, hopefully to a Middle Eastern readership, that: “If we were to take up arms against our own government as many have suggested, we would desecrate the spirit of America and all that our ancestors died to procure and defend for us, their descendents, even more than the NeoCons have done, who took over the government here mostly using the law, even though they did it by self-serving, out-of-context and other warped, lying, "interpretations" of the Law. Whatever we do, IT MUST BE DONE WITHIN THE LAW, else we are no longer who we believe, who we choose to be. By that way we would finish our own destruction even more thoroughly than the fanatic NeoCons ever could. “ I wanted them to know that we are not a country of unthinking, murderous, Christianesque, fanatic, thieving conquerors, and that is the only impression they could possibly get from their experience with our troops, who are under- and wrongly- trained, under-equipped, poorly supervised, over-utilized and wrongly used.

(For any errors in the following, I ask your forgiveness in advance; I am exhausted, in more pain than usual, and absolutely livid).

I have read about rendition, and about torture, sometimes to death. These are unbelievable, intolerable evils, and they are being committed by my own country. Not only are they horrors that we should not be doing for any reason whatsoever, they are having exactly the opposite effect to the one those who have authorized them intend for them to have. They do NOT gain us information we need in a timely fashion; they gain us almost no useful information at all. At most, they gain us a name to go after, supplied by some poor, desperate, innocent soul who has given us the name of someone he doesn’t care for, probably figuring that if he’s to be forced to name someone, he may as well cause trouble from someone he doesn’t like. And that circle grows and grows.

Just now, I read again about innocent people – or suspects, which damned well should be the same thing! – who are women as old as seventy, as young as twelve, being stripped naked, raped, beaten, tortured in other ways, held without charge or hope of any help for the flimsiest of reasons. I read about their being kept in conditions that would gain the owners of dogs in this country substantial jail time and fines should they treat dogs in such an inhumane fashion. I read about a young woman left in a jail cell with the rotting corpse of her brother. Surely a certain way to “win hearts and minds” there.

Here in our own country, more and more, it seems we do the same thing: take someone poor and blackmail them into naming someone, anyone. If they can, great, they cut a deal. If there’s just no one to give up to the police, maybe because they were framed by police anyway, then they can go to jail for essentially a lifetime, for a crime without a victim.

But back to the Middle East. We now torture and hold as long as we like, it seems, people of all ages – who are subject to rape along with the usual tortures – males ranging from ten to their late sixties, and small boys, as young as eight or ten. I have read about adult males raped with broom handles and such. And then there’s the other humiliation, a regular practice too.

For anyone who has read anything about Middle Eastern customs and history, it is immediately apparent that the insurgency now needs no explanation other than this kind of behavior. Never mind that we won’t let them own their own businesses, that they have little or no vital infrastructure almost four years after being “liberated”, that the only ways we allow them to fulfill the necessary role of provider makes them targets, creating more widows and orphans. They are all treated like The Enemy: shot at random if a soldier’s had a bad day, their children or spouse killed before their eyes for no good reason… The men are humiliated before their wives and other women, before their own children, if they haven’t been killed, their neighbors. The women are used as whores before their husbands.

And no one does anything, no one says anything. The military hides it all unless they’re caught out. Business as usual.

We are creating a whole area of the Earth that will remember this evil for as long as people continue to live in those places. Our leaders will listen to no expert advice, do not bother to learn anything about the language, customs, cultures, religions – nothing at all. Our soldiers end up killing – and now even suspicion isn’t necessary, just the desire to kill – simply because they too have no notion of how to communicate with the people who live in Iraq. And to top it off, we are there under false pretenses and illegally.

No – let’s start in the right place. It has become clear the President and his party stole the election by gerrymandering, Jim Crow laws, cheating at registration by tossing legitimate registrations, calling people and telling them to go to the wrong voting places, machines that err on the side of their own candidates, judges that stop what recounts are possible and declare for their candidate, and on and on and on and on. The President of the United States of America is a liar, a fanatic and a thief, and he and his Vice President occupy those offices against the clearly expressed Will of The People. We didn’t want him, we voted him out of office, so he stole the office anyway. He is a religious demagogue who also believes in a Christian fringe cult (Dominionism – look it up). They have spent over thirty years infiltrating the government for a specific purpose: they intend to take over the government and legislate Old Testament laws, discard the Constitution, destroy the Social Contract by which we care for the poor, the aged, those caught in disasters – for each other. He is an alcoholic/drug addict who found better drugs: power and God. He intends to destroy what remains of our school system and turn it over to corporations and churches.

Their intent is to destroy America no matter what the People want and make it into a corporate theocracy. They also believe in the old Adam Smith trickle-down economic theory (with a Hobbsian/religious twist), which has been shown to be good for nothing at all save bankrupting countries, creating massive numbers of poor people out of what was a solid working class, and enriching the wealthy.

That religious twist is this: if you are poor, it is because you are out of favor with God. Obviously, you are lazy, sinful and so on, and God is punishing you. If you are rich, born so or not (though they stack the deck against the working poor, another creation of theirs, ever climbing into the next stratum, figuring that if God favors you, nothing will stand in the way), the God obviously loves you.

All of their appointees are either incompetents who don’t belong where they are but are being rewarded for their financial support, or they are plants representing the industries that the agencies they now control are supposed to regulate, with the intent of destroying those agencies, freeing business to steal, lie, poison our air, food, water, land and anything else that happens to get in the way, to take any of the commons they can at no cost to them, nothing returned to the country or the People until there is nothing left but poisoned land, air, and water. And some super-rich people. These NeoCons are creating an American Empire that is more abusive than any since ancient times, but is far more powerful and careless of people and resources. They believe nothing they do not want to believe, as though their deliberate blindness creates the reality they choose, as if science were nothing but superstition, easily ignored.

By the time they are done, there will be a United States that is totally bankrupt (that way they can say there’s no money for social programs), has no medical system to speak of except for the very wealthy, has no natural resources, no wild areas or the animals or plants that used to live there remaining. The government will control all aspects of all lives save the very wealthy. There will be no free press or free speech – which will be sedition - no right to privacy, no right to an education, a roof over our heads, to worship as we see fit, to dissent or protest – we will have only the right to do as we’re told, work hard for so little it may as well be nothing, and to die when we get sick for lack of medical care, and to obey the church or end up slave labor and die there, in prison or a concentration camp.

And that, my fellow credulous Americans, is what all our forefathers fought and died for – so that we could be slaves to the wealthy, live in poverty and shame in an industrial wasteland, go to war to conquer other countries that have what our leaders want, and to die young one way or another, fighting for no benefit to ourselves at all.

Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps there comes a time when you either pick up a weapon – a rifle, a handgun, a rock, your bare hands – and fight for your life and the lives of those you love, and those who, God willing, will come after you, or you become a founder of the lower class - trash. Sometimes you can only take the path left open to you. They own the lawmaking machinery of the country, then ignore the very laws they made if they suddenly become inconvenient, they own the judges, the military and the weapons, the banks and the industries, the machines that count the votes – they own everything worth owning. Now they want our souls, and our children’s souls. So what path remains to retention of our Selves, our dignity? I hope and pray that in my exhaustion and limited perception, I am wrong.

If that doesn’t say it’s time to fight, what ever will? With three million of us in jail, mostly for crimes that harmed no one and that most people don’t consider to be crimes anyway, what will it take? Will we have to fight our own children, the military, in the streets of our own country? Will it take the entire military, the citizenry, everyone who can get there, to surround the White House and drag the miscreants out by force for a trial, and probably an execution after? They have made us into war criminals! And if they will do all this to our own military and to the innocents of other countries, I doubt – no, I KNOW – they will not hesitate to use deadly force on us, the citizens, the rightful rulers of this country, in order to retain the power they stole; they already have. And it will take a country-wide rebellion exactly like that: the military, the police, the courts, the citizens, everyone, everywhere, refusing to serve this illegal, immoral, greedy, lying, thieving, hypocritical government, to make us a free people again.

They have made certain of that. There comes a time, very soon now, when we either circle the wagons with those who must stay and fight, send out riders to attack what must be attacked, and take the bastards down or go down fighting ourselves if we want our children to inherit anything but slavery in a wasteland. Damn them all; we were well on the way to a really decent, honoring and honorable civilization before they and their vengeful, lying, hypocritical god (for Whom only they speak, of course), showed up . Now, one way or another, they will make us savages again, just like them.

NOTE: Cross-posted at Truthout, at: http://forum.truthout.org/blog/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/6/28/19517/2433

You will need to register, but they ask little info, unlike WaPo or the NYT, which I refuse to register at because they want everything but my underwear size. I suggested that they ask the NSA, but have yet to hear back.

Ian MacLeod

June 27^th, 2006

Oregon

An Open Letter to Congress

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am a Vietnam Era veteran, now disabled. My service wasn't particularly distinguished save that I joined up during a dangerous time, a time when such a thing was a very unpopular thing to do. Both of my parents were wartime veterans, as was every male member of my family as far back as I can learn. I thought the war was wrong, I knew the way it was being prosecuted was wrong, but it was still my country - America. I am no longer certain of that.

I don't understand what I see happening, and I am, for the first time in my life, afraid for my country - afraid, and ashamed. Please read this in open session. You may not agree with it, though I hope to God you do, but I think that my family and I have earned the right to be heard, and there seems to be no other way left save for Internet news and blogs; how long those will last I do not know, as this administration deems anything it doesn't control a threat. The government or it's cronies own every other route I might have used, so that I and the many others like me can only be heard by people who already know what's happening, and preaching to the choir is only good for practice.

If you are afraid to be tarred by the contents of this letter, you can always say it's a request from a constituent you felt obligated to honor. I will hope that is true.

I also ask that you be careful with my name and address, which I know you can find easily enough (just ask me for it): I am poor, in constant pain and poor health, so is my wife, and I cannot defend myself against a vengeful neocon bureaucrat. Even loss of treatment could easily be a death sentence for both of us. For what it's worth, my pen name the couple of times I've been published on the Net is an old family name: Ian MacLeod. If you need it though, ask for any of my information relevant to your reading. I swore an oath to defend my country a long time ago; my feelings haven't changed. Whatever happens to me, if it wakes someone there up, it's worth it.

An Open Letter to Congress

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, My Fellow Citizens of America,

First, please note that I will use the address, "To the Honorable Congress of the United States" when I can direct it to those who have proven themselves to deserve it. So many of you have shown the opposite that the above salutation is far shorter, and every moment I spend at typing costs me more pain. To you who do deserve it, know that I (and others) are aware of you and your efforts, and honor you for them.

This letter is to the Democrats mostly; it is also to the few Republicans left who aren't caught up in the smell of Democrat blood and power floating around loose to be just picked up, no matter how it got there.

First, George Bush did not win on "moral" grounds. He won by spreading fear and intimidation, lies, suppression and disenfranchisement of dissenters and voters, and deliberate delays in fixing the way votes are counted - cheating, in other words. Stop trying to turn yourselves into Republicrats or Demopublicans or whatever it is you're trying to do by moving to the right - it won't work! Have the guts to stand up for what you believe in; if you believe in only what wins for you, quit. Get out of politics and let people in who still have some passion and who still remember what America is about have their chance!

Presidents Nixon and Clinton both had to face impeachment during their terms for relatively small infractions. President Clinton had to be maneuvered into a lie in order to make any charge at all. Now let me list things about president George W. Bush, all of which can be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, any one of which should be enough not just to bring the Articles of Impeachment against him but to convict him, his cronies, and to add war crimes:

He has chosen self-serving interpretations of domestic and international laws which essentially give him the powers of a king. He believes he can ignore or change any law at all, order anything he wants to have done, and that he and those who serve him are immune from any prosecution. In doing this, he and his fanatic administration have gutted the Bill of Rights; they've run roughshod over the Constitution and the rule of law itself, and turned my beloved country into a surveillance and police state that is almost ready to compete with the old Soviet Union. He has turned us into a corporate/theocratic dictatorship that is unconcerned with individual rights and liberties to the extent that we are now, ourselves, a rogue, terrorist state. Keep this quote in mind: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini. Can you describe Washington these days any better than that?

The commons are being given away to corporations for liquidation as fast as it can be done. Environmental protections have been gutted for corporate convenience. Privacy is no longer a right. Freedom from unreasonable, reasonless search and seizure is no longer a right. Habeas Corpus and Posse Comitatus no longer apply, so that citizens can be spied upon, have our homes and data raided without probable cause or even suspicion, much less actual charges, we can be arrested and held indefinitely (by the military if the government wishes) without charges, representation, or any rights at all. We can be tortured, then forced to sign a paper that says we were not tortured. We can have our citizenship reft from us and be deported to a country that has no functioning government. We can be shot on suspicion of being terrorists. We can have our homes forfeited without charges against us, sometimes just because some official or county wanted the property and drug charges - often a simple frame-up - were easier. People have been killed this way by cops bursting into private homes, guns drawn; no charges have ever, to my knowledge, been brought. Oops.

The Hatch Act no longer applies, nor do any of the laws forbidding subjecting the citizens of this country to propaganda. Candidates are now officially allowed to lie, and the American people should "...be able to tell for themselves when they're being lied to". This is hard to do when, between punishment of journalists and companies by the government for printing or saying things the administration doesn't like, ownership of almost all of the major media by neocon corporate cronies - the source of news for most of the country - and the corporate media's need for sensationalism in order to make a profit, most of us have no source wherein we can find the truth.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Carl Rove, Condoleezza Rice - in fact, all of the major players in this administration - lie constantly. They quote pieces of studies that make it sound as though those studies came to a conclusion opposite to the one they did reach; they quote studies that were conducted by organizations owned by administration members or cronies, or that were blackmailed into reaching the desired conclusions. Sometimes they just lie with no real source, but those lies are repeated over and over, by them and by a sycophantic press, until people think the lies are true. Advisors who tell unpleasant truths are fired, sometimes persecuted, and that continues until someone is found who will reach the "proper" conclusion that can be used to justify a desired course of action. Information that the public truly does need to know is routinely classified and kept from the public. The brain drain is terrifying. Remember that Germany lost essentially because a handful of scientists were driven out and went over to the enemy: us.

A party that thinks suppression and disenfranchisement of voters from the opposing side is a valid tactic for winning elections, for that alone, deserves to lose automatically, at the very least. Now, having cheated, won, and gotten away with it again, they are trying to disenfranchise, in effect if not in actuality, all who oppose them. We have gone from two parties to one party to a handful of extremists who think we should rule the world, as they rule the country - no dissent permitted. Other countries are justifiably afraid of us. Our hypocrisy as a country is astounding! We do not spread democracy - we trample it underfoot!

One of the things that glares out as wrong is that dissent, disagreement with the President and his administration is not treason, nor is it an attack on our military, who are only doing what they are supposed to do: following orders; the military does not set policy. Yet here in the Land of the Free, that is exactly how any criticism of George Bush and his fanatic neocons is treated. It reminds me too much of the McCarthy era, and I can't believe it's happening again, but there it is: instead of communists under every bed and in every closet, the government is seeing terrorists in every minority, every refugee and every dissenter. They are trying to keep us all ignorant and afraid, and are using 9-11, tired, disproved lies and all, to turn us into George Orwell's nightmare. How can weakening the Constitution and gutting all laws designed to protect our citizens` civil rights and jobs, our environment, all laws designed to protect us against monopolies, cronyism and corrupt relationships between government and big business, possibly do anything but harm? How can those to whom we say, "We're bringing you freedom, like ours!" feel anything but threatened?

Then there's freedom like we brought to Iraq: hundreds of thousands starved through sanctions, violations of which we turned a blind eye to for the sake of profits. Then we destroyed an infrastructure that was frail to begin with, over a hundred thousand unacknowledged civilian dead, an unknown number of prisoners, some just snatched up off the street; men, women and children held without charge or evidence, their relatives only aware they were - and are! - gone. Some of them, including children, have been tortured, and everyone knows by whom and on whose orders, whether we scapegoat the entire enlisted military or not. Buildings, often occupied by families, have been bombed to oblivion on unreliable intelligence. In Fallujah there is almost nothing but devastation; the people there are treated as though all are convicted criminals. Rigged government, rigged elections, rigged (or shot - oops again) media. And on and on - and we tell them "We've brought you freedom!" You say, "They don't understand democracy"; well, I don't either - not this kind of democracy. Again, it reminds me of Orwell's "doublespeak".

Money for rebuilding Iraq goes into the pockets of American contractors and subcontractors with little work, poor work or none being done for exorbitant prices, when Iraqi workers could do the work for much less, and at better quality.

We threaten other countries for having any nuclear programs even as we are developing "better" tactical nukes, along with, I have no doubt, other WMDs, all following a plan written years ago by religious-fringe fanatics, and implemented using 9-11 as an excuse. We target civilians and civilian areas, knowing that children pay the highest price, as we're deriding others for doing the same. Why are they terrorists, and we are not? Again, we have murdered over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, men, women and children; I have no idea how many Afghans (the warlords are still in charge of much of that country, and are still growing more opium than anyone else), and their women and children are not safe in either country from religious extremists or from us. Instead of helping the opium growers survive some other way, we destroy their crops so that they end up selling their children to avoid being killed by the warlords or others they borrowed from to get started. Now we're sending secret commandos into other countries, as well as using them here in the US.

My God, we're torturing people, sometimes children! And it was ordered by our own president! That alone should be enough for you, if there is no alternative, to march on the White House, armed and determined to arrest Bush, Gonzales and everyone else involved, or to die trying. The detainees are suspects, sometimes just grabbed off the street, and they have to prove they are not the enemy! Could you prove you're not the enemy, with no evidence, no help of any sort, with nothing, not even the clothes you were wearing? I couldn't! Then, refugees applying for asylum are being held with, and treated like, criminals. That's a poor, sad welcome for people who had the guts and the luck to get here to us, where they thought they'd be safe. For you to sit there and babble at each other about things like who should be allowed to marry whom while this is happening is ludicrous and cowardly! There are no other words for dodging the true priorities like that. Our house is on fire, people with matches are running around lighting more fires, and you who were placed in charge of managing our home sit judging the gay couple next door for immorality and trying to figure out how to pick the owner's pockets and maybe steal the property! Or what's left of it.

Then there are our troops: miserably underpaid (save for officers, who can even collect what used to be Hazardous Duty or Combat pay for 48 hours in some safe place in-country, then they can go home!), fighting with old, worn out equipment that gets them killed or maimed in unconscionable numbers. Then they're left to their own devices and often left homeless and without work or care of any sort after they come home. I am being treated through the VA, and I have watched the funding slowly being bled away while I have to try to pay more and more out of a small, fixed income. This is how we "care for own" now: our young heroes are going homeless, traumatized, committing suicide... There is one guardsman I know of who not only has to contend with being totally disabled - now the Guard wants it's signup bonus back! Damn you people for your self-absorption, greed, and selective blindness!

Our president fires scientists and political and military advisors who dare tell him what he doesn't want to hear or who answer his questions truthfully; that isn't what he wants. He asks questions to get answers that allow him to do what he wants, not to get real information. In the Beltway the word is, take what he tells you he wants to do as the answer, then work backwards and find or manufacture facts to justify it. Or you will be gotten rid of, often with prejudice. A general - no, two now - forced to retire, cabinet members who suddenly "want to spend more time with... [their] famil[ies]", respected scientists who suddenly work elsewhere or get fired and can't find work, journalists who suddenly can't find work (at least two have committed suicide) - this is now the norm. Neocons actually mock "those of you in what we call the `reality-based' community". As though their falsehood/fantasy-based community is better. George Bush seems to think that if 700 respected scientists tell him that what he is doing is going to cause the collapse of the economy or destroy the ability of the Earth to provide an environment that humans can survive in, all he has to do is find, bribe, threaten or otherwise acquire one or two scientists to provide the opposite opinion that he wants, and that's what will happen. Problem solved.

Besides, God wants him to be President, he says; God wanted him to attack Afghanistan; God told him to attack Iraq. Therefore, whatever he wants done, or whatever he said in the pursuance of whatever else he wants must be The Right Thing. Ipso facto: what he wants is what God wants too. And if, in the process, something gets broken that God didn't want to be broken, like say, maybe, chopping down the very last tree to keep American jobs going, or doing something that really does break the environment, Jesus is bound to show up, get rid of all the Democrats - ah, I mean `sinners' - and fix it all again anyway. Right?

Why doesn't this scare anybody but me?

And all of this is just a drop in the bucket! Add the War On Drugs (on doctors, pharmacists, women, the ever-increasing poor and patients in pain is the truth of it), which causes far more damage than the drugs ever could. Add handling bankruptcies due to catastrophic medical costs by making bankruptcy harder - like pulling the smoke alarm battery to solve a fire. Add destructively high, punitive taxes on the workers, poor or no medical insurance (the Medicare "drug benefit" is a bad joke!). Add monopolies, low paying, unbenefited jobs being prevalent, add prosecutors and soulless laws having the power that rightly belongs to judges, add out-sourcing, add deregulation that benefits corporations that have more rights than citizens, benefits other countries and penalizes our own workers, add cabinet members and agency heads in positions designed to protect the interests of the American people who actually represent corporations whose interests are forwarded by the destruction or subversion of those protections; add...well. Add too damned much!

Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress of the United States, you have, to date, been cowards. You've been so busy lining your own pockets or covering your own asses trying to keep your high pay and perks, scrambling for more "turf" or whatever motivates you other than an understanding and a love for what America is, or should be, that you have forgotten which country you are representatives of! You had better remember very soon, or that country will cease to exist, if it has not already. I do not know what the point of no return is, for the economy, for the environment, for our European and other neighbors on this planet, but it cannot be much farther down this road.

Cowards have been known to find their courage; the greedy have been known to remember charity, even generosity - sometimes. Remember who you are and what you are there for! Do what you must to impeach George Bush and charge the rest of this administration for their crimes! If you doubt that they are crimes, again, you don't belong in one of the highest offices in the land! Our laws are being gutted or ignored, our people impoverished, lied to and kept ignorant, almost everything is being run for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy, the gap between rich and poor is widening fast (every penny the poor make is taxed; not so the wealthy), and education - perhaps the single most important ticket to the future - is being chronically shorted. Our "best in the world" medical system ranks more like 29th!

Lying ideologues, fanatics and conscienceless thieves are running the show, people, and no one seems to have the cojones to stand up and say, "Enough!" You all swore oaths, made promises when you took those offices. It's time to keep them, or show yourselves to be the same kind of opportunistic parasites your opponents are: traitors to the ideals, to the essential spirit that founded this country and has kept it alive and vital.

It's time to decide, and time to act. Before America becomes another Nazi Germany or USSR, probably just in time to perish anyway in an environment that is no longer viable for humans. These are not exaggerations, and time is passing quickly.

Now only your courage can stand between us and the void of history that swallowed Rome and all the other failed conquerors. I do not speak here to the cowards who fear for their jobs too much to speak out or act without polls and studies, I will not speak to the greedy liars who pretend to faith to cash in on the gravy train that gets it's substance from the blood and life of Mainstream America. To the fanatics who have twisted the words and beliefs of Christianity beyond recognition: I learned long ago that no amount of reason can affect the beliefs of the insane; I see no cure for you, and because of the horrible damage you've caused, I hope for no pity for you. To those of you with reason, discernment and courage, however, I beg you to listen, and then ACT!

There is a man in jail for 25 years with a ruined spine and damaged nerves for having more pain pills than the state likes, even though medical standards all agree that his treatment was correct; it is for all practical purposes a death sentence. One of the seminal researchers into chronic pain has been attacked by the DEA again and is in jail for life for treating patients as the DEA, the ONDCP and various concerned medical agencies had determined was correct; the DEA changed it's mind and removed those standards from it's website when the defense lawyer tried to use them as evidence. Besides, no one can defend him or herself against a government that can afford to attack forever, that controls the courts and what the jury is allowed to hear as well as the laws, regulations (that can be changed on a moment's notice) and the corporate media. This doctor is one of hundreds, all victims of a fanatic-driven witch hunt. There is another man who was sent to jail by a judge for parole violation when he refused to convert to the religion of the untrained staff of the "faith-based" (federally funded) "treatment center" the state sent him to insisted that his own religion, Catholicism, was a form of witchcraft and he must convert to graduate. The Supreme Court has ruled that there is no inherent right of the individual to vote in this country. The GAO has ruled that the Hatch Act may be ignored, and that the ONDCP, and presumably other government agencies, may lie to the public as needed to achieve their goals without fear of having their veracity questioned; laws against propagandizing American citizens by the government were being ignored anyway. Constitutional Amendments 1,4,5,6,8,10,14,15, 19 and 22 may as well be removed from the Constitution; they have all been removed in practice if not yet in fact. I can only assume that any other inconvenient bits and phrases will follow them soon enough.

Perhaps worst of all, the President of the United States, who swore - twice now - that he would, "...to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," has done and continues to do the exact opposite without meaningful opposition or consequences. Showing clearly his inability to comprehend the Constitution at all, he has "interpreted", perverted, mangled and ignored the one document that lays out the very soul of America for all the world to see, and allows, encourages, even requires others of his administration to do the same. The thing is so old it's not even fit to use as toilet paper anymore, though that's the only fit use remaining that I can see for what this administration has left of it.

And it was such a pretty thing. For all of our stumbling and errors, it was a triumph of the human spirit, of courage and imagination, a tangible piece of practical philosophy that said to half a million years of suffering ancestors and to our hope of a bright if unforeseeable future, "We have come of age at last! We will no longer build the edifice of our own prosperity and joy on a foundation made of the blood and suffering of those who are weaker than we." We have failed a lot; old habits are hard to break, and none are older than the ones this document addresses. Still, it was always there, a compass in the fog, a small candle lit and carefully, lovingly nurtured and protected against the eons-old darkness that we challenged. Still, even though we stumbled, even fell sometimes, we always got up, tried again, corrected that error, kept going, messed up again, got up again and kept going, kept trying. With that small light, even if it wasn't bright enough to show us the path, we always knew which way to go. It was a light the whole world could see, and people from all over the world were drawn to it, because it was the very soul of humanity, long-suffering and short-lived, often foolish and needlessly ignorant, but always trying, put into a poetry of words and ideals like nothing ever written, ever dared before! It was ours, it was us!

Alberto Gonzales thinks it's a "quaint" document; George W. Bush would probably use it to light a barbecue without bothering to read it, or even noticing it had writing on it - he never has before. Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft and the rest of the neocon elite have been busily scrawling the phrase, "...except for..." all over it, like graffiti on a bathroom wall - like the writing on the barn wall in "Animal Farm". As though it were something other than the most magnificent achievement of the human spirit since the Code of Hammurabi, and it was to his Code what the Sistine Chapel was to a piece of carved bone from the Neolithic Age.

It was such a pretty thing.

Very Sincerely,

Ian MacLeod
Madras, OR

Note: This article is cross-posted at Truthout at:

http://forum.truthout.org/blog/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/5/31/173946/881

When evil arises in it’s full might

I envied my parent’s generation. Their generation’s war was WWII; they were called upon to fight genuine evil. It was horrible, it was an awful waste, but there was no doubting who the enemy was, who was in the wrong or what had to be done and why. Vietnam was my generation’s war. Why were we there at all? What were we dying for? Everyone just knew that no heroes came back from that war. Don’t believe me? Show me even one ticker-tape parade. Now this generation after mine is in that first position again, but it’s an even worse nightmare, one my parents could not have imagined, would not have believed: This time it’s our leader! This time we’re the torturers, the invaders, the destroyers! This time we attacked first on a faked-up pretext and murdered, at the least, tens of thousands of innocent people, and all for the greed and fanaticism of a few.

I am angry, yes, but more than that, I am heartbroken.

To paraphrase Stephen R. Donaldson: “When evil arises in it’s full might, it can wear the guise of good without fear of discovery.” So it has indeed proved. George Walker Bush says all the right words if you happen to be a rabid Christian or a Christian who doesn’t have more than three brain cells to rub together. For the latter, you really should know that appearing to pray, going to church, and paying his debts by appointing other fanatics who don’t care about anyone but themselves and other rich people, doesn’t mean that George Bush is a good Christian, or even good at all. He isn’t, believe me.

In the following essay I make a lot of statements, or call them accusations – they are. Were I to include a bibliography, it would multiply the size of this essay to book length. I am aware that George W. Bush has not been convicted of anything as of now. If it were up to me, he would long since have found himself in front of a firing squad or something similar, so don’t blame me for his not having been convicted. I am not a judge (not an official one, anyway), nor am I on a jury, but I am also not stupid or so blinded by wishing or religion or whatever that I cannot think. The evidence is out there so thick on the ground that if you cannot find it, you do not want to find it. If you do want to verify any of this, do what I did: go out and look! I would suggest that you find an Internet source rather than any of the corporate media you find on television. They are pretty much owned and operated by the Right, as in GOP TV. Meanwhile, this is what is happening.

He calls himself a “compassionate moderate”, for instance. He is neither. He has cut funding for every single program for children and the poor that he could. In fact, he’s cut funding for every social program he could get his hands on. Instead of fighting for the people as he should be, he is fighting to keep tax cuts for the richest one percent of the population. His loyalty, what he has of it, is reserved for those who agree with him, back him, give him gifts of money, power, or both.

When he made the decision to go into Iraq, which he did long before 9-11, long before even his election (which he stole, but more on that momentarily), he did so for reasons of profit and distraction, knowing full well that thousands would die, and tens of thousands would be maimed for life. They did not and do not matter to him – they are the children of the poor, of the working poor (whom he has made even poorer), of the racial ‘Others’. They are easily spent.

He clearly – with faked evidence to back it up – lied to the people of this country in order to get us into an unending war that he wanted. He lied through his teeth. His reasons? Control of Iraq’s oil was part of it, certainly, but not all. It also makes a perfect distraction while he grabs up power, does away with civil rights, turns the middle class into the working poor, and hands over every dollar he can to corporations and rich friends and investors (which he calls campaign contributors).

When he was Governor of Texas, he murdered more people using the death penalty than any other governor of any other state. He had a tame lawyer to give him ‘legal interpretations’ that allowed him to feel good about setting aside international law as well as state and federal law in order to do so. He saw to it that even exculpatory evidence was set aside so these people – always people of ‘another race’, always poor people – could be executed, making him look ‘tough on crime’. He was used to killing people when he took – literally – the office of President of the United States.

George Walker Bush lies constantly. he has gone back on every promise he ever made, publicly at least. He has enacted or otherwise enabled legislation to remove the rights and benefits of gays, women, working people, Muslims, Latinos, blacks, children, young people, old people – he is an equal opportunity thief. He has also taken what is essentially Imperial power. He does not wish to be a president – he wants to be a King. And he almost is. Laws he and his cannot pass aboveboard, they sneak in by stealth as hidden riders in last-minute, must pass bills, or Bush makes into law by fiat, called an Executive Order – or he simply ignores current law and does what he pleases.

He has suppressed or ordered suppressed reports that show how badly we are harming the environment, reports on trouble with the oil industry, on the economy, on the efficiency of the agencies that were designed to protect those things and us, on anything and everything that could not serve his purpose with the truth. His faked reports on the so-called benefits of ‘abstinence only’ sex education, coupled with lessened availability of contraception and other medical care, have made our children far more vulnerable to AIDS and teen pregnancy.

He has appointed incompetent cronies to head some agencies, very competent cronies to head others that they then proceed to render useless to anyone but the propaganda agencies, which are also illegal but operating with huge budgets nonetheless. He has removed many of the benefits that were promised to them from veterans and active duty military, including some of the things that would have saved the lives and in many cases the health and wholeness of our people. He has removed funding from all levels of our educational system. He has encouraged the gas-guzzling vehicles that are most expensive and least safe, and done everything else he could to keep America dependent on oil, at the same time making certain that when the oil industry tanks soon – there is only so much oil in the world – that it will be a deadly disaster instead of the manageable crisis it could have been.

Hospital care is much less available to all but the wealthiest Americans. He has legislated ‘relief’ for the wealthy and for corporations so that they can get out of paying the pensions and other benefits they promised employees, while making it almost impossible for ordinary people caught in personal disasters to file bankruptcy. It is also now also all but impossible to file a class-action lawsuit – more protection for corporations.

In the worst of his transgressions, he has made of us, the United States of America, torturers of men, women, children and the aged; this includes rape of all of them without regard to gender or age, and sometimes they die. Again, these are people who don’t count. They aren’t Americans (some who were have had their citizenship removed), they aren’t rich, they aren’t white, they aren’t Christians. Apparently, to him and his, they aren’t human.

Our international credibility and trust is all but gone. We are now feared as the rogue state we are. Having gone into the Middle East to remove a dictator who was suspected of having and using weapons of mass destruction, our own armed forces and those of the ‘coalition of the willing’ – in truth, a fast-disintegrating coalition of the bribed and threatened – have been using weapons of mass destruction that are killing and making our own people ill! They will continue poisoning the people of those lands for centuries. In addition to spreading ‘spent’ uranium over Iraq and Kuwait, they have also used white phosphorus, an internationally banned weapon, as is the napalm which we alone in the ‘civilized’ world now use. Add to that another illegal weapon: cluster bombs; and we leave mines lying around to continue killing and maiming long after we are gone.

George Bush stole both elections that brought him to office with a combination of scams by corporations, lies spread throughout television and the Internet, gerrymandering, illegally disenfranchising felons and ordinary people whose names were similar to those of felons, throwing out non-Republican voter registrations, volunteers who lied to those at the polls and rendered their votes uncountable, simply throwing out votes, and much other underhandedness, some of it foul indeed.

He has fired every competent expert in the government who could help in the crises he has precipitated, and has replaced them with people like himself who will not listen to those who actually understand the situation. He has intimidated or subverted most of the media who are supposed to be our watchdogs; those who do try to warn us are destroyed one way or another. Those who dare tell a truth Bush does not want to be heard are labeled traitors, and if they cannot be prosecuted, they are persecuted.

George Walker Bush does not understand what America is about, what the value of personal freedom and liberty are, and he wants to get rid of them. He does not agree with democracy or with the Constitution of the United States of America, and he is slowly but surely perverting and getting rid of both. We have a Police State in many ways and in many places around the U.S. now. In just a little longer we will have a true Police State, one in which free speech, in which we have a say in our own government, in which we have a right to choose our own lives for ourselves are all illegal. All of these things are often punished already.

more than two million of our own citizens are already in prison for non-violent ‘crimes’ that caused no one harm, with many, many more anticipated. Now, not only do we fight ‘pre-emptive’ wars, we make pre-emptive arrests of protestors and other dissenters, calling them traitors, when in truth they are true patriots! Closer to seven million are caught in the justice system one way or another. There are more of both in America than in any other country on Earth. There should be no such thing as a ‘crime’ with no victim! Such a thing is legislated religion, nothing else. So much, then, for freedom of religion, free speech and separation of church and state. Soon we can look forward to the deaths of our daughters from back-alley abortions after pregnancies that could have been avoided had they been properly educated and given proper medical care in the first place. Our own people will continue being tortured and killed by diseases that stem cell medicine could treat or cure, as it will be doing in Europe and other places – but not here, because our government believes that God doesn’t like it.

There is only one description for all of this: this man and those who back him and rule with him are evil. Period.

In a country that has been used to following the law, in which the rule of law is a vitally important part of the foundation of what this country was and is, a man like George W. Bush who follows no rules except “Win!”, who believes in nothing but power, who is willing to lie, to twist and pervert any principle, to harm anyone to any extent he can get away with in order to get what he wants, the law has actually been made into a handicap. While we faithfully follow the rules, he ignores them. It is like trying to win a race with a man who cuts across the grass, ignoring the track, then lies and has others back his lie, saying he followed the track like everyone else. He uses our very honesty and our willingness to believe in the honesty of others against us.

A Special Prosecutor might be our last chance to take America back by legal means before it is destroyed completely. Either we do take back the government as the Constitution and the law of the land allows for, or we lose everything. Even if the proper legal entities and procedures decide that he must be removed, I have no doubt that if he could keep a few around him who would still defend him, the attempt would be met by deadly force, and given the chance, he would authorize poison gas, spent uranium, plain old rifle bullets – whatever it took, against our own citizens. Having called himself a ‘healer, a communicator’, he has divided us steadily, and would divide us in another civil war if that were what was required in order for him to retain power. After all, it would only cost the lives of peons.

George W. Bush is a divider, a destroyer, a mass murderer, a liar, a war criminal, a thief of position and of trust, and he must be impeached! Our survival as a country, the survival of our children, of the environment in which we came to be and need in order to continue, and of the very principles that made us great once are all at stake.

I was born just after the tag-end of WWII to the sounds of reveille and departing jackboots. Mom had served in Germany, and my step-father, lifer military, had grown up in Brooklyn with a German last name and a father who wept when the National Anthem was played. (Interesting note: Dad was called a “baby killer” as a teen growing up in Brooklyn; in the military many years later during Vietnam, so was I). Dad remembered German POWs at the fence being allowed to accept German dishes from immigrants from the Fatherland that they had prepared for these poor, deluded German boys; they were good boys, really, who had been lied to, that’s all. Patriotism and generosity were the themes of life then, and everyone in the military was a hero. Even in the cartoons I grew up watching, the bad guy almost always had a German accent, (unless it was Russian). I remember thinking that if Hitler had been an American, he would never have gotten so far; ordinary citizens would have pulled him bodily out of the White House if necessary, and the Secret Service and Army would have let them, I was sure, assuming he’s managed to lie his way that far. It seems I was wrong.

I understand Germany a little better now. I can only hope that Europe and the rest of the world will be as understanding and forgiving of us as we were of them when that time comes. Hopefully, when it does come – and it will – we will not have been as thoroughly ruined as Germany was, but that one is a slim hope.

When did we as a people, and especially our ‘representatives’, lose the discernment with which we once knew evil when we saw it? Like all corruption, it happened a little at a time. We’ve been warned about it time and again, starting with Ben Franklin, through Eisenhower to Noam Chomsky to the veritable horde who are now shouting, screaming, writing and doing all they can to get the information out past the neocon filters in the media and elsewhere. How, when and whom matters little now, though; the fact remains: we’ve been taken over by demagogues, by fanatics – well, you’ve seen the list of adjectives – who will destroy us if we fail to act. As for me, I will never kneel to a king, whether he is called President, Leader-for-Life or whatever, nor will I support laws that drain this country , it’s people, it’s resources and it’s future to a dry husk. I will not go quietly.

Will you? Veteran or no, I can only hope not, and disabled and all, I will fight as I can. If all of us will, we still have a chance, but it is dwindling even as you read this. Keep it in mind, for all our sakes.

Sincerely,

Ian MacLeod

Veteran, USN Hospital Corps

Disabled

Oregon

In the Beginning

Well, this is something new. I'll have opinion pieces here, and comments are always welcome. As I learn, there will be room for other long pieces, civil rebuttals, links and so on. My purpose here is mostly political, but poetry, especially on-topic, and other things are welcome - we all need some relief now again.

As to who I am: I'm a 51 year old Vietnam Era vet, disabled, angry and heartbroken over the take-over of my country by religious fanatics, liars and thieves. I live in Central Oregon with my Most Beloved, my best friend, my wife Lady MacLeod (you may hear from her now and again), ten cats, a tarantula and the occasional skunk that sneaks in the back cat-door (not a problem - we're friends). I am a self-avowed patriot, a life-long martial artrist, former rock climber, a singer/songwriter/musician who plays 15 instruments (no venues around here, though), an amateur mycololgist, and a native Texan who needs mountains around, at least somewhere on the horizon. My Cherokee name is Tso i'Wohali; it means "Three Eagles".

So - be welcome, Nvwhtohiyada (Peace to You), and I hope we can do each other and maybe even America some good here.

Please keep discourse civil, and try to keep any rebuttals logical. Trolls, flamers and other such disruptions will not be tolerated. America is a democracy - or so it was intended to be. This blog is NOT. Coulter/Malkin/O'Reilly clones, find some other place to be. This place is mine, and I like the way it smells as it is. And that is literal - to me, certain spiritual warps are like a foul stench, and you may not spray yours here - I prefer skunks (who have remained well-behaved in my home, so try to live up to that at least).

All others, brothers and sisters in spirit, be welcome!

Ian