It’s 497 days until Bush leaves office and it is the week that General Petraeus tells us that all is going swell in Iraq. Underneath it all will be the reports of newly deceased American soldiers, the unimportance of Osama Bin Laden, a frustrating pile of Democrats in Congress who will compromise with the White House and probably keep funding the war while bitterly opposing that funding.
In other words, I don’t expect anything to change.
Protesters will descend on Washington on the 15th, but Bush will ignore them as he ignored the majority of voters in the last election. Tomorrow, on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks, we will hear out of the bowels of the government how Iran was involved in it, although we all know it wasn’t, and more of a foundation will be laid for an attack in a new division of the war.
Children in schools where they probably can’t afford new books will pledge allegiance to the flag and know that what they are pledging allegiance to is “under God”, as if that meant some amount of protection is granted to us and our world. They may make it to adulthood, having passed endless multiple choice tests that show they have not been left behind (without, of course, learning how to think or create or be artistic), only to find that the God they are under didn’t do anything for all those years and an ongoing war is still waiting to suck them in.
Republicans will, as a unit, continue to support the war whether they really believe in it or not, more concerned with retaining their Christian domination of the American bedroom (while ignoring the American men’s room) than with the spread of poverty and and the loss of the middle class.
As for me, I’m packing to move out of my home in the DC Metro to a rather quite place in Western Maryland (and, eventually – by October, say – to a sleepy college town in the West Virginia panhandle) where there is less concern with the economics of this Government in day-to-day life.
Good luck, my friends. Good luck.