Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Is It Time to Lose Hope?

As expected, the Rove spin machine is at redline, doing whatever is necessary to maintain power in the hands of the Chimpie regime, doing it without shame, without care or thought of the damage it may do to the people or to the republic. When a gang of criminals and liars seizes control and discovers that the field of "journalism" is largely neutered by its own timidity, they have no reason to believe that they cannot get away with malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and cover-ups yet again and again.

They escaped any accountability for 9/11.

They escaped any accountability for the debacle in Iraq and the lies that got us there.

They escaped any accountability for out a CIA agent in time of war (excepting the Hail Mary pass of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation)

And now they are escaping accountability for a national disaster that occurred nearly FOUR YEARS after the disaster that was supposed to wake us up to how unprepared we were.

I watched the 1968 Costa-Gavras film Z last night and it gave me shivers for in the end, good and right and justice do not triumph because those who opposed the coming of a fascist police state kept playing by the rules, using the courts and hoping for the probing of a free press to keep the truth front and center. But in the face of ruthless, shameless, and unprincipled gangsters who have learned how to play to the stupid, the willfully ignorant, the fanatically religious, and the selfishness of wealthy traitors to democracy, the rules are meaningless, and they fear only force.

If Chimpie and his fucking scumbag cronies get away again, you can kiss this country goodbye. If the people have become so numbed or timid or fooled by Chimpie's lies, then they don't deserve the hope that once survived even a civil war and two world wars. They will have acquiesed to the worst kind of tyranny, imposed not by force but by lies and bluster, lies and bluster embraced as some kind of emblematic American-ness that signals our exceptionalism, but which will prove only exceptional in the scale of the tragedy that will befall this nation.

The shreds of hope grow even more tattered, stretched, and thin.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jeepers, Olaf; please keep in mind that "Z" is only a movie--you know, as in..."fiction." It was intended to stir up, and sell theater tickets to, deranged '60's hippies, and other...We interrupt this comment with the following late-breaking story: The entire state of Texas is reported to have caught fire Tuesday afternoon, in what experts are calling a "freak global-warming occurrence." Animal life has, mercifully, largely been spared, but the human population of the state is believed to have been wiped out entirely, including members of a rogue polygamist sect of the Mormon church. Katrina refugees have miraculously been spared. Experts attribute this to the refugees' "soggy" state. Finally, it is believed that some Texas residents have escaped to Washington, DC and elsewhere, and have, as a result, been spared as well. Back to you, Bob.

Olaf said...

If God really hated Texans that much, he wouldn't let any of 'em get away, no matter where they went.

By the way, have you got a link to that story?

Anonymous said...

Links? We don't need no stinking links! After Betty and me T-boned that Buick in '87, links have been a little vague in the ole noggin. We had our protective 'do-rags on, and everything. I miss her.

Anonymous said...

Olaf, I understand that fiction is often a reflection of reality, and sometimes a comment on it. I watched "Network" the other day... and I felt like my mind had been blown. It's amazing to me that these kinds of radical ideas are a part of our culture already, and perhaps they are silenced by censorship or time or whatever, but they are there, so we should NOT lose hope yet...