Not even a quarter century after the Cold War ends, the two great super-powers find themselves scratching their heads. In both cases the gruesomely attacked nations have had a deep history of exploiting and/or murdering the very groups of humans responsible. In entirely separate circumstances two groups of people managed to evolve from being collateral damage, over time in such a way, that the revenge they sought came to fruition in the form of cold-blooded mass murder generations later.
Our point of view as Americans or Russians, being that we are the victims here, are vastly skewed by a philosophical difference of opinion regarding the value of including our respective histories with each group in the discussion. Some folks in the political arena are exhibiting a sense of urgency in ensuring that the concept of motive is demonized and shunned as sick and unpatriotic. The respective governments involved are no doubt appreciative of such efforts. Though as the age of information is now upon us, it’s going to become a harder sell over time.
Of course the downfalls of giving credence to the notion of culpability based on past government actions are that morale will suffer, reparations will be sought, and the legacies of past leaders are skewed. Pride takes a hold of one political side, while accusations and vilification take hold of the other. Segments of the cultures will simply be in denial over it and remain that way for as long as it takes, perhaps straight through till death.
Look no further than to Vietnam veterans who continue to believe that their government used them to fight a just war. The same type of myths the machine is pumping out now regarding why all of this happened, is similar to what parts of the Vietnam generation bought in to. Is it that the leaders felt that we couldn’t handle the truth? Read the rest of this entry
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, History, Military, politics at 6:52 PM GMT+4
No Comments »
The magical mystery jar of Vietnam history now has four hands grasping for the contents inside, with respective campaign riffraff of both the guilty fiends howling indictments at one another for stealing the classified cookies and exploiting their deliciousness for political gain. In terms of legitimate behavior of powerful men and women in this country, the campaign Mafioso, talking heads and the fiends themselves have managed to inspire dictionary publishers all over the world to engage in heated debate over the need for a completely new word to describe it. Scholars, writers and satirists are in a state of panic as these past few weeks of buffoonery have raised the bar, and many fear that old time favorites such as ‘farce’, ‘mockery’ and ‘ludicrous’ just won’t get the job done anymore.
There is no rioting, mass panic or spontaneous combustion to report from all of this just yet, but experts predict that a few more baseless statements and they may have to raise the nation’s irrationality alert level to red for the first time in nearly four years. State governors were notified of the potential crisis and some immediately instructed public access stations to roll continuous emergency broadcast episodes of ‘Mr. Wizard’ and ‘3-2-1 Contact’ in hopes that the swelling would go down.
Many of them attempted to even put their National Guard units on alert, unfortunately, of the soldiers within those units that weren’t already deployed, the rest had schedules booked solid already with grand jury testimony by day, and intense drugging sessions administered by Pentagon officials at night. Who, by the way, have ‘gone off the reservation’ in fingering our royal family as well as the CIA to answer as to why so many prisoners were sodomized with night-sticks instead of glow-sticks as the memos instructed. For the past three years it seems that all of our government agencies in the ‘kicking-ass’ business have been desperately trying to out-scoundrel one another for the president’s affection. We’re all riddled with anticipation over which agency he’s going to hand the rose to, and the latest news concerning coverage is that NBC is offering 50 billion to cover the finale.
So is this the end of the world that ‘Ghostbusters’ warned us about? Has the pendulum swung once more to the days when we burned witches because they failed to drown when thrown into a lake? In prisons across the country young men and women are locked up due to various circumstances such as possession of marijuana, wrongful imprisonment, false accusation and lack of representation. Meanwhile a prerequisite in most universities offering political science degrees now require up to 3 additional requisite courses, the names of some include ‘Introduction to Inaccurate Script Writing Theory’, ‘Bamboozle 101’ and ‘Three Card Monty of the Political Mind’. Basically, dishonesty has become interpretive truth, and dumb luck has become crime. If you’re born with the four-leaf clover in your soul and a silver spoon in your mouth, the world is your pincushion. Otherwise, the government would appreciate it if you could protect the country, work hard, turn sixty-five and then die as soon as possible. Read the rest of this entry
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Words, politics at 1:33 PM GMT+4
No Comments »
Nature has been racking up a significant body count recently in the form of hurricanes, but with the new rapid-fire bullet propulsion toys about to hit the streets, I have no doubt that humans will be on top again before too long. Thinking back to Columbine and the DC sniper attacks, it would be a stretch to say that either one of them led to as much overall damage as the hurricanes have in recent days, but it’s always been a trait of the American spirit to push through and overcome adversity. It won’t be long now before the ban, which just lapsed on assault weapons, allows us to experience another bullet-riddled tragedy to bring us all together once more.
The amount of these mass shootings within our own borders has seemed to have been in decline, which has left us uninspired and confused, but soon enough that will be rectified. The effect they have on us is astounding. There’s rarely a machine-gun massacre in a local human resources office that doesn’t make you realize how precious this life of ours truly is, and how unimportant most of the stuff we worry about can be. Even if the body count doesn’t get above two or three, there’s a collective period of recollection and self-examination that takes place, to which many of us can attest major changes in our lives to over the years. The tragedies make us stronger, they unite us. There’s wisdom at play here.
Our leadership understands this, and they also understand that tragedies aren’t just going to happen on their own! If the attacker doesn’t have a weapon capable of taking out at least a couple of bodies before they’re in custody, the news probably won’t send but a single reporter to the scene. In times of struggle and hardship, our leaders understand the importance of larger body counts, and larger front page headlines. They know that without the tragedies being juicy enough, we won’t be able to experience the kind of self-reflection needed to gain a true understanding of who we are in this life, and why we may even exist in the first place.
This administration is looking out for our souls, as I’ve grown to understand in the past few years. They’re looking at the glass as neither half empty nor half full, but simply too peaceful to be of any use to us. Tranquility is the root of all evil. If we just went through life without tragedies to shake things up, then what would we ever learn? The tradition of tragedies due to gun violence in America is being embraced by our president, and it will be because of him that one day we’ll all get to feel warm and fuzzy about one another over hearing about a kid somewhere who got his hands on one of these new rifles and brought it to the mall. It will shock and sadden us, and it will make us appreciate life and the people we are blessed to share it with that much more.
The evil tree hugging left will attempt to fill your heads this week with the ‘danger’ associated with these weapons and call it a bad thing, but don’t forget how you felt the days following Columbine or 9/11. Understand that the wisdom behind the decisions made by our president is beyond our capacity to comprehend, and in the end, it’s the majority he’s looking out for. If a tragedy takes place, a handful of people die, but thousands are provided a moment of inner reflection over it, then he’s done his job well. In the name of continued tragedies bringing America together, I salute President Bush and his continued fight to inspire all of us. Assault weapons truly do hold the key to inner peace, and I’m glad that our president understands that.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, Words at 1:23 PM GMT+4
2 Comments »
Since the twin towers have fallen, there’s been a consistent approach taken by political strategists and speech writers for the Bush administration to condition each of us to accept two specific non-truths about what is happening in the world today. In lieu of the direction our government has taken in response to the attacks, as well as the words spoken at the republican national convention, it has now become quite transparent. Motive was determined early on to be a word to steer clear of at all costs, and to this day has not factored into the president’s rhetoric in any sort of a logical way. The second non-truth is that the Arab world contains two types of people, terrorists and the oppressed. The terrorists are indistinguishable and not driven by anything but hatred for our way of life. This is the package that has been presented throughout, and tragically it has led to a turn of events such as that in time our nation will have to learn again the forgotten lessons of our own history. An unwillingness to proceed through necessary steps essential to understanding the nature of our opposition has once again allowed politics to triumph over legitimate authority.
Motive is one of the three primary elements, along with method and opportunity, required for a law enforcement investigator or prosecutor to establish a prime suspect in a criminal case. It is literally the natural starting point for humans to determine culpability when they have been done wrong. In his speech at the convention on Monday, John McCain stated, “We were united. First in sorrow and anger – then in the recognition we were attacked not for a wrong we had done, but for who we are.” Osama Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attacks shortly after the towers fell. America’s history with this man is a historically common occurrence as our government over the years has repeatedly used an individual or group to carry out our initiatives abroad, only to turn its back once assistance was no longer necessary. Would the republicans have us believe that Osama closed his eyes and arbitrarily spun a globe one day to determine who’s planes he would hijack? The perpetrator admitted to his crime, yet motive has remained a political interpretation that has directed us from bringing him to justice and instead down a path reminiscent of similar mistakes that sent us to war in Vietnam.
Before and during the Vietnam war the citizens of this country were consistently fed big talk about the communist threat in the world and what it would mean to our country’s survival should we not take the fight to the enemy in the name of preserving democracy and freedom abroad. The public rallied behind this ideal of saving the world, and was reminded quite often of the surprise existence of Russian missiles on the island of Cuba in 1962. The reality of an act such as that of the Russians with no motive other than a desire to destroy us based on who we were, allowed for the politicization of our future actions abroad for the sake of preventing communism from taking over everything we know and hold dear. It was this dynamic that allowed for the leaders of that time to justify irrational decisions and garner the support of the people based on a false premise that communist extremism on another side of the globe was our solemn obligation to combat and rectify in the name of democracy and freedom.
The enemy in today’s scenario is the ‘terrorist’, and besides the fact that they reside in a certain part of the world and use religion to recruit their members, there isn’t much that is said by our leaders about these people. The same can be said for the entire region in which they come from. This is by design, as throughout the childhoods of baby-boomers, the same amount of background knowledge was provided about communists. By diluting the chance of Americans to identify in any way with the people we’re sent off to kill and liberate, the social impact of our actions is not felt in a personal way by those who don’t experience it first hand. By reminding us of the 9/11 attacks as often as possible, republicans manage to ensure that hatred and ignorance is never overcome by logic or reason. Our classification of the entire population of that region being either ‘terrorist’ or ‘oppressed’ suits the political needs of this administration, and in doing so prompts each of us to turn our backs on our own history of prejudice and why we outlawed it.
It’s not until after the last bullet has been fired and the last bomb has been dropped, that the American public becomes aware of the realities their government strategically kept from them. Not until the end do we come to the realization that we all do it the same way. In the late 80’s programs were initiated with students from both Russia and the United States writing pen-pal letters to one another and traveling in groups to visit each others’ country. What the children of both countries realized was that they had much more in common with each other than they’d ever been told. Soldiers returning from Germany after WW2 often spoke of when the enemy had conceded victory, and that they realized during the time spent with them how similar they were to the average German soldier. The idea that it was not the soldiers they were fighting that whole time, but the government who put them up to it, resonated as a lesson learned about the absolute power of government and the amount of damage it could cause with its words.
It has happened again, and the words of the republicans are being broadcast across the nation during these days of the convention. The concept of motive has been slain and buried by these politicians, while truth of what that motive caused in death and destruction is replayed for us over and over again. Republicans are shamefully exploiting the most horrific moment of our recent history, while incorporating absolutely nothing of what we learned from WW2, Vietnam or the Cold War in their leadership or decision-making. For the sake of being able to say that he ‘wasn’t a one-termer’, President Bush has turned back the hands of time and confirmed the opinion a lot of people around the world already had of our country. At this point there seems to be nothing he or the republicans would not be willing to mortgage for four more years. This charade of attacks and non-truths in New York City is truly a low point in our history. Judging from the amount of times Giuliani referred to 9/11 in his speech (11), it’s a celebration of a murder, with the perpetrator still on the loose.
Posted by Al Swearengen as Al Swearengen, History, politics at 3:00 PM GMT+4
2 Comments »
