I just ran across this eerily prescient article by Indian novelist, journalist and activist, Arundhati Roy, published by The Guardian on September 29, 2001, less than three weeks after 911. The New York Times refused to publish the article. They probably thought she was a dangerous Commie. And she is. Look at her face.
Here’s the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html
Read’em and weep.
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When I was a child at school we were taught the importance of individuality, how different we all were from one another. Now that I’m an old codger I feel more and more like everybody else. All of us old codgers want the same thing: for our kids and grandkids to be healthy and happy. So please bear with me while I give you a quick rundown on ours.
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In a week in which it comes to light that President George W. Bush revealed that God told him to invade Iraq–with all that implies–and former Repulican presidential candidate–and pretender to the vice-presidential slot along with John McCain–Mike Huckabee made a supposedly jocular comment in the middle of a speech to the American Rifle Association to the effect that his Democratic opponent, Barak Obama, was taking cover as someone had him in their sights, I am at a loss for words.
“Sinister?” “Grotesque?” “Macabre?” “Surreal?” “Bizarre?” “Perverse?” “Ominous?” “Sordid?” “Infamous?”
None of these words seems grand enough to express the magnitude of the villainy at large in the United States of America these days, villainy which continuously stretches our credulity beyond the breaking point.
I cannot make a comment which is commensurate with the circumstances. If I were a Buddhist monk I would immolate myself. But I’m not a monk unfortunately. I’m not even a Buddhist.
If I were a poet I would write:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
But I’m not a poet. Besides nobody listened to Yeats, either.
So I give up. I’m at a loss for words.
Filed under: Iraq, The Impending Apocalypse, US primary elections, United States, gringos, politics | Tagged: American Rifle Association, Barak Obama, George W. Bush, God, John McCain, vileness, Yeats | Leave a Comment »
Last March 13-16 some 250 American veterans of the Iraq and Afghan occupations gathered at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, MD for the “Winter Soldier – Iraq and Afghanistan” conference, a replica of a similar event which took place in Detroit in 1971, during the Vietnam War. This recent weekend was devoted to the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ first-hand testimonies regarding the events which they both witnessed and participated in during their tours of duty in those two countries, events which included abuses and atrocities from the destruction of homes to the cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians.
What seems remarkable to me in all of this is not that there were U.S. abuses, even atrocities, in Iraq. We suspected that all along. What boggles the mind is that this mass confession by more than 200 American veterans, which took place in Silver Spring, MD, not 25 miles up Georgia Ave. NW from Washington DC, received virtually no coverage in the American mainstream press. It’s as if the “normal” media, the papers that most people read, the TV news programs that most people watch, had universally boycotted this uncomfortable news event. Because a group of American soldiers, “our boys,” sitting in front of cameras and microphones recounting first-hand experiences of cold-blooded murder of Iraqi civilians, however uncomfortable, is certainly news. But CNN was not there, nor ABC, nor NBC. In order for American citizens to learn about these events they had to read reports from the alternate Internet news websites such as alternet.org, truthout.com, Democracy Now, The Real News, or Indy Media, or through the coverage of foreign news organizations who sent teams to Maryland to cover the event. Read more »
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Asia Times Online published an article on May 10, 2008 entitled “An oil-addicted ex-superpower.” The American author, Michael T. Klare, Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, makes a chillingly convincing case for the fact that the United States’ massive borrowing to pay for its oil habit has already cost them their superpower status.
The fact is, says Klare, America’s wealth and power has long rested on the abundance of cheap petroleum. The United States was, for a long time, the world’s leading producer of oil, supplying its own needs while generating a healthy surplus for export.
From the end of World War II through the height of the Cold War, the US claim to superpower status rested on a vast sea of oil.
But those times are long past, according to Klare. Read more »
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U.S. Artists Mount Countrywide Art Protest
A couple of fine-art printmakers and veteran art activists have recently started a very interesting politiical ball rolling in the United States. Stephen Fredericks, of the New York Society of Etchers, and Art Hazelwood, longtime member of the California Society of Printmakers, have founded a movement–which they call a “national coalition”–of artists who will be mounting and participating in a series of political art exhibitions this fall.
Fredericks and Hazelwood declare in the introduction to the Art of Democracy website: “We chose this time when the nation is particularly politically aware to bring into focus overlooked and under-represented voices and views on the state of politics, and the state of democracy today.” Let’s let them tell their own story. Read more »
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- In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.- So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Pentagon Plan Re-Defines Surrealism
According to an article in this morning’s Guardian, the Pentagon has plans to emulate Samuel Taylor Coleridge and convert the Baghdad Green Zone into a stately pleasure dome with the new billion-dollar American Embassy surrounded by “fashion boutiques, swanky cafés, and shiny glass office towers.” There are even luxury hotels and a golf course in their plans. Read more »
Filed under: I don't know whether to laugh or cry, Iraq, The Impending Apocalypse, United States, gringos, politics | Tagged: Baghdad, black propaganda, golf, Green Zone, Luxury hotels, Pentagon, The Guardian, Xanadu | 6 Comments »
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