Only in America would the citizenry watch thousands upon thousands of their countrymen die a slow agonizing death, some penned by armed gunmen in filthy enclaves with murderers and child rapists, and accept it as the will of their government.
Today I do not know if I am sadder about the massacre of New Orleans, the loss of the all the people, the city that was those people, or the fact that the public, even the reviled themselves, watched it live
on TV and the streets of Washington are still free from hordes. As were the roads into the city. There were not that many soldiers. Nothing that could have held back millions, had they taken exception to the decision.
Not even the reviled target groups marched in millions, to Washington, to New Orleans, to overpower the relatively small number of gunmen sent by (God Speaks Through) Bush to prevent rogue citizens from saving their brothers and sisters.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, in impoverished pueblitos of Central America inaccessible to any vehicle, the people formed human chains to pass water and food, hand to hand down the gorges and up the mountains to the mothers and babies and grandfathers and uncles. They had little to pass, but all day and all night they stood in the mud and hefted buckets of rice, and beans and water, to the next pair of aching hands. Had any gunmen tried to stop them, God help those gunmen. And in those pueblitos, they did not have CNN, or Fox, or MSNBC to show them the dying children, the gasping elderly, the mothers falling from thirst.
Oh, America had its moments, when even the most patriotic of media figures shouted, “Let the people out!” and here and there there were some who felt an unfamiliar stirring of something as the media showed scenes of horror on one side of the screen, while officials on the other side explained that it was not so. Enough of a stirring, or perhaps simply enough time had elapsed, thought Washington, that most of this troublesome population, as Wolf Blitzer calls them, so poor, so black, would have perished and it would therefore be OK to magnanimously allow some lives to be spared.
And there have been tales of true generosity and heroism, even before permission was given. That old Miep Gies gene lives, and every heart in which it lives is precious.
In all fairness no one in Washington expected so many of them to still be not only alive, but ambulatory, by Thursday.
It was felt that the point had been made and on Friday the TV images began to show trucks coming in, soldiers. Naturally it took a while for them to get set up and get to work. The number of survivors continued to surprise. They had almost a week.
A week during which no million man marches were seen.
A week during which Americans who had long since learned not only to accept but to praise torturers and sexual predators as the divinely mandated manifestation of their will, of their destiny, now applied those skills to accepting the genocide of their own fellow taxpayers.
In any other country, it would have been necessary to bar the media from the scene. In any other country, there would have been to say the least “unrest.”
But not in America. There is no nation on earth with a leader more beloved than George Bush, a government more revered.
Americans make the “good Germans” look positively rebellious.
From time to time it has been asked, “is there a limit?”
This week, the world got its answer. There is not.
