Apologies for the slow-down in postings- it's been a busy few weeks. But eventually something would get my goat enough to post. And don't worry, this one isn't about crap in Israel. No, lucky me, I found bullcrap right in my good ol' USA.
9/11 5 years after. I hate it. I hate every news network splashing a graphic showing a plane hitting a tower. I hate them playing that fucking clip over and over again. I hate the nonstop American flag montages. I know what all these things look like, thank you.
I hate that we still don't have Bin Laden, that Iraq is still a shithole, that Afghanistan is verging ever further out of control, that Iran and North Korea are tooting their war horns, that Putin is engaging in fairly shady-dealings over in Russia, that we're all still driving gas-guzzlers, praising the "moderate Saudis" and that the best Bush and his people can come up with is "people who disagree with me might have maybe liked Hitler, maybe."
I hate that the response to a fraudulent and defamatory movie about 9/11 and the Clinton Administration is to point to that dumb-ass Reagan movie incident. I hate that the collapse of Air America is being used as evidence to suggest that somehow liberalism is an unsuccessful ideology- (half the country voted Democrat in the past two Presidential elections, I don't think Air America going the way of the DoDo really reflects that Democrats are suddenly "waking up").
Am I ashamed of my country? No. But I am saddened by the fact that the political discourse is such that the only way to address questions about the War on Terror (is Iraq a success? Will it be? Is torture justified? Is what we're doing torture? Should US troops be able to be tried for war crimes?), Patriotism, (can you criticize the President? Can you criticize the administration? Can you criticize his opponents? What can you say? What can't you say? Who can you call and not call Hitler? What if you simply think the US flag is ugly?), and basic issues of common sense, accurate research, issues of objectivity, and just plain decency in the media, government, and general society in America today, are being reduced to a zero-sum game.
I don't want to call anybody Hitler. I don't want to pass problems around like the proverbial "doobie". I want to help fix them. I want to have a conversation, understand the other side... and, God forbid, fix something. That's all.
More to come when I have time.
(And no, this doesn't mean I won't still be fisking people. I just might be a little more gentle about it. And stop calling people things like "Chamberlain" or "Goebells-esque".)
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