Tuesday, September 19, 2006

If you want it


Due to the release of the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, I have been exposed to the above image many times in recent weeks.

And I am going to admit to you that every time I see it, my eyes well up with tears and my throat hurts.

Because it seems like we've learned nothing in the past 35 years. Sure, I was a kid, but I remember Richard Nixon. I remember what it was like the first time our government became our worst enemy. And now, we've let another awful, greedy, lying pig take over our country and change us. And fill us with fear. And divide us over words like "patriot" and "freedom."

Like we aren't all patriots. Like we all don't want to be free to live in our own fashion.

Our young men and women are dying for no reason. No reason. And despite the fact that all of their lies about why we needed them to die have been proven to be lies, they tell us that if they had it to do over, they wouldn't change a thing.

That's how arrogant they are. That's how craven they are. That's how entrenched they are in their own sense of entitlement, that they can spend our lives as if they were nothing.

They would do it all again. And not for any bullshit about freedom or safety. If you have any doubt about why we are in Iraq, you read this article about who we have brought into that country to work on reconstruction, and what their priorities have been, and you tell me, YOU TELL ME why we're there. We are building a certain kind of government in Iraq, with certain kinds of businesses entrenched, and you tell me that isn't why we went in in the first place.

Blood for oil. It may be an oversimplification, but if you think about it, it's not much of one.

7 comments:

SJ said...

It's all about money, making money for the same corporations that run this country and the political machine. You're dead right. I sometimes can't be mad ENOUGH at how everyone poo-poos Michael Moore. He's always so fucking right and has been so from the beginning.

vikkitikkitavi said...

Spooney: I have to hope we can.

SJ: 'Zackly! MM's methods sometimes suck pretty bad, but he's usually, um, right.

Anonymous said...

When I feel like that I like ot read history to remind me this country has been fucked up for a long time.

vikkitikkitavi said...

Phil: Yeah, but I'll bet that Teapot Dome wasn't quite as upsetting as the history books make it out to be.

Phil said...

Vik,

You're right. Hiroshima wasn't really all that.

Anonymous said...

I have read a couple of books about Bush. His father was always bailing him out of trouble, usually through his friends and connections. Dubya failed in the oil business many times, drank excessively, and was a big cocaine user and womanizer. Nothing to be proud of. He wanted to succeed at something.

G.H.W. Bush thought this about Iraq,"We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability." - George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998

So when Dubya got the chance to show his father he had a bigger more powerful penus, he took it. Then he went and prayed to God that he made the proper move.

I can't help it that I think this way. I took a path to become more healthy and at times it seems everything is about who has the biggest and most powerful dick. Go ahead a prove that I am wrong.

vikkitikkitavi said...

NC Blogman: No, YOU put the goat down.

Phil: Oh, well, if you're going to invoke the bombing of millions of innocent civilians...

Dad: I think, for W, it might have been a dick size thing. I think the people behind Bush's policy are much more calculating (and greedy) and exploited his rivalry with his father in order to manipulate him.