Pict Grooving: Poetry, Flash Fiction, Rants.: November 2007

The Registering of Our Purchase

Another thanksgiving arrives and I am reminded again of what it means to be American. Four and a half years into our illegal war, with costs reaching a projected total of $1.6 trillion by 2009, with nearly 3,874 US soldiers dead and tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties (most civilian), we remain as American as the separatists who made their way onto the Massachusetts shoreline in November of 1620—stinking and shivering and surveying the land.

America, I propose, isn't what defines us; we define America.

It is understandable, therefore, that our country has become so foul to so many of us—domestic and abroad. Even as we tuck our flaccid bellies into our Polo shirts and consume the caloric equivalent of a week's worth of food. Even as we arrive early at the mall to spend money we don't have on things we don't need. Even as we shake our heads and then proceed to forget that rules and laws and ethics apply to those who lead as much as to those who follow. More so perhaps.

And with every admission of guilt, every statement from former advisors proving the machinations we spoke of all along, and were taunted for, every dirty dealing laid bare and ignored, every cause taken up and as quickly forgotten, we—you and I—define this country as something wholly un-American. We define it as broken, corrupt, perhaps even festered beyond healing.

Was it ever not thus? When a rum sodden band of colonists began drinking whiskey instead, and dumping tea into the harbor rather than help to pay back the debt incurred by the Crown defending them in the French and Indian War, was it not thus? When we invaded and conquered a third of Mexico and cloaked it in Manifest Destiny, or wiped out thousands of indigenous nations under the same banner, was it not thus? When our government invented the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext to invade Vietnam, was it not thus? When Katherine Harris wiped 40,000 black citizens off the voter registers during the 2000 election, or when the president and his top aides presented falsified evidence to the UN and pressed for an invasion of a sovereign nation, or when Valerie Plame's name was leaked as blowback against her husband, was it not thus?

If it is our actions which define our country, I suggest we pause on this Thanksgiving to consider carefully what we have become. A nation of generous, honorable people or a nation divided, self centered and self interested? I don't know. What I do know is that our actions, and inactions, reflect very poorly on America.

And once again—as on September 11—sometime in the future, our purchase will be registered.

Impeach The Bums. Throw Them Out.

There is absolutely no accountability in this country anymore, if there ever was. I can no longer stand the rank hypocrisy and muddled acquiescence of a country that has lost its soul.

"I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.

There was one problem. It was not true.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff, and the president himself.

The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary.

Sense of Urgency, Anyone?

Climate change is real and is happening at an ever faster pace, a United Nations scientific panel said in a hard-hitting report issued Saturday on tackling global warming.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was delivering its fourth and final report on the science of climate change and the impact of human-produced greenhouse gases at a conference in Valencia, Spain.

The report produced by the Nobel prize-winning panel warns of the devastating impact for developing countries and the threat of species extinction posed by the climate crisis.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, presenting the report, warned that some of the effects of rising levels of greenhouse gases may already be irreversible.

The U.N. head said the situation was already "so severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" could head off the crisis.

(From: CNN)