[kj] OT: Bad Weather over USA

[sade1]

Bottom line --
Do you MIND** being lied to?

**not "do you like or not like" but 
do you Mind being lied to? That's all.

Saul


--- wardance <wardance@wardance.net> wrote:
> [kj] OT: Bad Weather over USAVERY pertinent text, and VERY pertinent questions !!
> Needless to say I totally share this viewpoint in its main lines.
> 
> Hans Wehrwolf
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Alexander Smith 
>   To: gathering@misera.net 
>   Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2003 9:27 PM
>   Subject: [kj] OT: Bad Weather over USA
> 
> 
> 
>     Make of this what you will --- but some interesting points raised - Alex in NYC
> 
> 
> 
>   The Bad Weather Over America
>   By James Carroll
>   The Boston Globe
>   Tuesday 27 May 2003
> 
>   When will the bad weather end?
>   Why the distance between what is and what ought to be?
>   Where are Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?
>   If he was such a threat, why did his army perform so poorly?
>   Does it matter where he is?
>   If the war in Iraq was not about oil, why does the United States insist on
>   its indefinite control?
>   If the war was, instead, about democracy, why are the Iraqi people,
>   including Saddam's proven enemies, excluded from authority?
>   Is Iraq to be like Afghanistan, where war lords rule and heroin thrives?
>   Are there more suicide-bombers now than ever?
>   Has the American war on terrorism advanced safety?
>   How did relations between the United States and its European allies become
>   so fragile? 
>   Will history recognize the 21st century Anglo-American combine as a mere
>   continuation of the 19th century British Empire?
>   What do good intentions count for if they cut a wake of wreckage?
>   And is the bad weather the result of an atmospheric low that will not lift
>   without the answers?
>   Why are taxes being cut when teachers and librarians are being laid off?
>   What happened to campaign finance reform?
>   Why is the United States more divided by race than ever?
>   When did its citizens ever decide to forgo privacy?
>   How can low-income wage-earners support their families?
>   How much longer will the middle class be able to afford health insurance?
>   Why are Americans eating so much bad food?
>   Does prime time television hold a mirror up to the nation?
>   Who teaches children to bring guns to school?
>   What happens to teenagers who fulfill every graduation requirement except
>   the test they can't pass?
>   How many more will fail that test because their teachers were laid off?
> 
>   Such impossible questions go a long way toward explaining the American mood.
>   We cannot answer them, so we do not ask them, and the emotional weather is
>   lousy. Thus, the patently false ebullience of George W. Bush -- the
>   doubtless man -- is the perfect emblem of a nation so adrift that it dares
>   not look twice at its real condition. Whatever the technical reasons for it,
>   the economy that refuses to recover matches perfectly a broad psychological
>   stagnation that precludes self-knowledge. Why are Americans incapable of
>   looking directly at what we are doing and what we are becoming?
> 
>   Abroad, the United States wages war on such vaporous pretexts that when they
>   dissipate in the first breeze of mourners wailing, Americans take no notice.
>   A strong tradition of multilateral internationalism is overthrown without
>   political controversy or even debate. An old liberal dream of world
>   federalism, nations united as democratic partners in global governance, is
>   replaced by a program of American unipolarity, world government administered
>   by fiat from Washington. And who in Washington questions this?
> 
>   At home, an anxious sadness underlies the civic life. Careers feel terribly
>   uncertain. Leisure is a forgotten luxury, which is not all bad because blank
>   spaces in the datebook spark insecurities most of all. Intimate
>   relationships are burdened by what is not discussed, and the
>   confessional to which many people might once have carried such secrets is
>   now dangerous.
> 
>   The Catholic crisis, cutting an entire community loose from moorings of
>   authority and meaning, directly affects only a part of the national
>   population, yet it, too, seems very American. The sadness is as religious as
>   it is political.
> 
>   In America each boon seems now to carry a curse. Is our freedom secured?
>   Yes, by a government that can eavesdrop on every conversation. Are we well
>   fed? Yes, to the point of obesity. Is our medical care superb? To the point
>   of bankruptcy. Are we the most heavily armed people in history?
>   Frighteningly so. Does the unprecedented success of the national
>   project over the last generation bode well for the next generation?
>   Obviously not. Can we dare to ask why?
>    
>   An answer is apparent this very day in Iraq. The distance between what is
>   and what ought to be is so vast there that only an act of communal
>   self-blinding can keep Americans ignorant of it. The dark national mood has
>   many causes, but one cries out to be reckoned with immediately. The Iraqi
>   war was a pack of lies, and Washington's war on terrorism is a cynical
>   manipulation of fears for the sake of power. So far, the citizens of the
>   United States have willfully participated in this Bush-led charade. We have
>   done so out of the very insecurity they tell us not to feel, as if the
>   charade, however much it wrecks the world, will protect us. But our
>   underlying sadness indicates what we need to know.
> 
>   America was not meant to be like this. We are no longer ourselves. The bad
>   weather will not end until we face this cold truth and change it.
> 
> 
> 
> 


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