Letters to the Editor

• The Missing Emotion in a Missing National Soul

  [Read the article: Shame]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Shame was one of the first things I felt when I found our imbecile President intended to move our military attentions from Afghanistan and the quest for justice over 9/11 in favor of a sham "war" which involved invading a sovereign nation which had done us no harm nor demonstrated even the capacity to do so (unlike some other places I can readily think of). I was ashamed as an American because this is not what we do. This is not America the Global Hero State; it is not even America the Imperialist Pig State; no, we suddenly became simply America the Fucking Lunatic State. And everyone wheezed and weakly waved the flag and muttered about Saddam being some kind of horrible person (and yet we do not prosecute the cause of every "horrible person" on the face of the earth. In fact we've made a practice of proping a lot of them up for various spurious reasons, Saddam being a case in point). So We the People bear a greater burden of responsibility than the idiot Death Dwarf in the Oval Office, because We the People failed to constrain him and his band of swine fronted by Dick Cheney and his leer of "pure, educated evil." No, we just sat back and said "Saddam was a really bad person." So was Idi Amin, but we didn't go after him. So was Pol Pot. So was Noriega. But this is tedious.

  I have continued to feel shame, not because I am an American but because my fellow Americans of all political stripes have allowed the monstrous, evil and profoundly stupid Bush administration to just "Stay the course" regardless of what critical thinking might have told us up front, and regardless of our Constitutional right and, yes, even mandate, to change any government which no longer serves the people. As Americans we hold ourselves (or we used to anyway) to a higher standard than other nations. We were founded as a nation not just to have a place to hang out or to escape religious intolerance (lot of good that did) but to serve as an example to the world of what is possible when a people's motives are pure, humanitarian and profoundly moral. All that shit went out the window in 1981 and since then it has been followed be everything til now we no longer even have a kitchen sink.

  We have sold our collective soul for the supreme luxury of the bliss of ignorance, with a huge helping of willful stupidity.

  George W. Bush and Co. have given us every conceivable reason to fire their asses and start fresh. They did it the day Bush chose to inform us he was invading Iraq for some reason or other, none of which held any water whatsoever, and then flipped off the rest of the civilized world for taking polite issue with that decision.

  Shame. It's not a pretty emotion and most of us don't deal well with it, but it is real, and it needs to be expressed, most profoundly, to the surviving people of Iraq but, even moreso to the citizens of the United States, among themselves. It's time we abandon all pretense of partisan poltics and zealous, mindless domination for kicks, and simply turn to one another and say "Jesus, brother, have we ever fucked up this time." That would be a start, anyway. From the bottom of the heart or the barrel there is no way but up.

  It's time. I'm tired of carrying this weight around for all the assholes who have neither the balls nor the brains to realize we have gutted ourselves for the amusement of a gang of idiots the likes of which the world has not seen at least since the rise of the Third Reich. There's no pride to be had in this, only shame. Let's wallow in it for a moment. We'll all feel better once we have.

  Permalink Tuesday, October 31, 2006 11:16 AM