Author: mythmother

Letter to My Sister in England

Yesterday I sent my sister, who lives and works in England, the following email:

What you think of these statistics?

Published on Monday, July 3, 2006 by Agence France Presse
Britons Tire of Cruel, Vulgar US: Poll

More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.

In answer to other questions, a majority of the Britons questions described Americans as uncaring, divided by class, awash in violent crime, vulgar, preoccupied with money, ignorant of the outside world, racially divided, uncultured and in the most overwhelming result (90 percent of respondents) dominated by big business.

Her response after the flip.

That about sums it up. Britons hate Americans and America. Simply put, the rest of the world does. In fact, I’m surprised that only 77% deemed Bush a poor leader. He’s resoundingly hated and made the butt of jokes here, and is, quite frankly, a laughing stock. His feeble attempts to disguise his gung-ho grasping for world domination as “a fight for freedom and democracy” is insulting to even the thickest of bricklayers and his policies and administration make my life a misery here. I’m caught in an unanswerable dilemma. Do I stay here and continue to be the target of abuse for something in which I have no say, or do I run back to the US and have to deal first hand with his ridiculous policies and be surrounded by flag waving, gun toting sheep? [published with permission]

And my response to her:

Sad that we all have to get blamed for the soulless monster that’s living in the White House.  Especially as IMHO he was never actually elected and therefore does not (I repeat NOT) represent the majority of Americans.  As far as I’m concerned, the US government has become a corporate supremacy and we basically live in a propaganda state since the media is owned by a handful of corporate supremacists who care for nothing besides protecting their right to accumulate and own obscene wealth. Our so-called government is comprised for the most part of their paid shills and sock puppets.  

A couple of nights ago I fell asleep with the TV on and woke up to the documentary “Bush’s Brain” on the Sundance Channel, which was pretty scary.  It’s about Karl Rove the evil mastermind that is driving the current administration.  Long ago Rove came up with a formula for using the mass media to manipulate public opinion and subvert political will.  Not only is Rove’s moral and ethical bankruptcy appalling, but the slavish willingness of the “flag-waving, gun toting sheep” to be influenced by malicious, slanderous gossip and moronic schoolyard-bully slogans is beyond comprehension.  Maybe even more incomprehensible are the mindless multitudes who jump up and fiercely hate America without either the means or inclination to shed light on problems that effect them just much as they do Americans.

And our biggest problem right now, IMHO, is electronic voting.  It has been proven that electronic voting machines are easily hackable from your basic home computer.  Moreover, they are owned by right-wing neocons.  It completely subverts democracy to have an electoral process that is not 100% traceable and transparent.  

However, the “flag waving, gun toting sheep” are just in love with the fact that electronic voting is so “easy.”  It’s just so much f**king trouble to go to the polls for 15 minutes every two years or so to put officials in office who represent their interests, so they want to streamline the process!  These are idiots who’s uneducated simple minds are grist for the Rovian propaganda mill that is driving public opinion in this country.  One of the scariest things for me is the fact that our votes just aren’t counted.

Many Republicans — most notably bu$h — have won under suspicious circumstances.  For example, no one has come up with a cogent explanation of the bizarre statistical anomalies in the 2004 exit polls.  Kerry was 2% ahead in the exit polls on election eve and then bu$h won by 2% the next morning.  Experts put the odds of something like this happening at millions to one, and it would have triggered an instant investigation of election fraud in any other country.  But here, they couldn’t recount all the votes even if they wanted to, thanks to paperless electronic voting.  

Voting reform activists are fighting this tooth and nail, and even got electronic voting machines decertified in California.  But then, suddenly, on the eve of a recent special election, the (Republican) California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson recertified the electronic machines (and a Republican won, naturally).  The result of the election remains in dispute, but what are you going to do, really?  The results of election 2000 are no longer in dispute.  Gore actually won, and no thinking person disagrees with this.  But the “clock” ran out long ago on making any restitution to Al Gore or to the voters who elected him, not to mention those who have lost lives and/or had lives destroyed by bu$h’s illegal and immoral Iraq invasion.  The state-level Secretary of State is a weak link in the electoral process, and this has been exploited to the utmost.  For example, Kathleen Harris, Kenneth Blackwell, Bruce McPherson, to name three.

But the point I’m trying to make is that the Rovian “whisper campaigns” in combination with election high jinx and fan-the-flames wedge issues (such as illegal immigration and gay marriage) are all part of a systematic crusade to dismantle the electoral process in order to permanently install a corporate supremacy at the helm of America and, ultimately, the world.

People go to sleep thinking their candidate won — just because s/he was ahead in both the pre-election and exit polls — and wake up to find out that s/he has been defeated.  It seems incomprehensible, but the big media prints story after story about how the extreme religious right was suddenly mobilized to stampede the polls at the last minute to “Save America” because Ann Richards is a lesbian, or John McCain has an illegitimate Black daughter, or Max Cleland is holding hands with Islamist extremists, or John Kerry is a coward, or illegal aliens are destroying the US economy, or homosexuals are polluting marriage, or whatever, you get my drift.  All lies, and I really wonder if any of these lies really drive majority-voter behavior, or just put us all to sleep while our democracy was hijacked?

So my answer to your question is that there are no easy answers.  However, education happens one mind at a time, so if it is in your power to diffuse the rabid identity politics and educate even one person in your circle, then you can be part of the solution.  The corporate supremacy is global and should concern every human being on the face of this planet.  By hating America instead of thinking and acting rationally to address the problems we are all facing, they are helping bu$hco destroy the world as we know it.   There is obviously hope, even in this poll:

With much of the worst criticism aimed at the US administration, the poll showed that 70 percent of Britons like Americans a lot or a little.

Anyway, are these people really so proud of that horse’s ass Tony Blair who is ultimately responsible for helping bu$h commit the Iraq atrocity?

There are so many good resources for progressive activism on the internet.  I wish you would visit Booman Tribune, which also has a European Tribune counterpart, or Daily Kos and ask some of these same questions. We desperately need your intelligence and your voice and your passion!

If anyone here has any thoughts, advice, or encouragement to send to my sister in England, it would be greatly appreciated!

The exploitation of grieving moms

You have to see it to believe it.  This Christian Science Monitor article attacks the “frame”of the grieving mother by exploiting language to differentiate between grieving families opposed to the war and anti-war activists who oppose the war to serve their own political agendas.

EXCUSE ME?
The Iraq war and the politics of grief

By Brendan O’Neill

LONDON –  In America and Britain, the grief of parents who lost sons or daughters in Iraq has become a potent political weapon – much more so than in other recent wars.

What a scary thing, that grief can become a weapon, a potent political force.  (with a Jon Stewart accent) DAMN YOU FAMILIES, grieving for you loved ones in a senseless war based on greed!

How has the grief of families become, in the words of a Scottish newspaper columnist, a “significant political force on both sides of the Atlantic”? In wars gone by, the sorrow felt by parents was no less intense than that experienced over Iraq, yet it was rare for personal grief to go so public.

Personal grief goes public and resonates with my personal grief for the hijacking of my country by neocon war mongers.

Today, doubt and uncertainty – and even shame – about the Iraq war from the top of society down has turned families’ grief into bitterness, and even public rage. In the past, bereaved families took comfort in the belief that their son or daughter died for a greater cause; traditional notions of honor, patriotism, and duty would have given their loved one’s death on the battlefield some meaning.

Now, families have few ways to make sense of the deaths in Iraq. The casus belli that their sons and daughters gave their lives for – the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein’s deadly WMD – turned out to be false.

It’s all false!  And we knew it was false!  That’s why we were against the war in the first place.  I would like to tell you about another family, marching in the streets of Hollywood to voice our objections to this obscene war, but no one listened to us.  They were mesmerized by the neocon war mongers (who also happened to own the propaganda machines that were disseminating their message.)

And how could such deaths be seen as a source of pride, as they might have been in earlier periods, when even our leaders seem embarrassed by the Iraqi debacle? The Pentagon ban on releasing photographs of returning military coffins suggested it is ashamed of the war dead, seeking to sneak them through the back door and hurry them into the earth without anybody noticing. (That policy was changed last week – more than two years after the war began – in a settlement of a Freedom of Information suit.) President Bush has been criticized for failing to attend the funerals of slain servicemen and women.

Embarrassed by the Iraqi debacle?  Suppressing photos of the coffins of the honored dead?  Ashamed of the war that killed them?  Oh, excuse me, what was my suspect political agenda in being opposed to this war from Day One and now supporting Cindy Sheehan who SPEAKS FOR ME??? Did you think that I just came across an article about her one fine day and said OMG here is grief I can exploit to make my point that this war is an OBSCENITY?    

There’s another reason grief has become a “significant political force” – some in the antiwar movement are exploiting it. As the Los Angeles Times said of Sheehan’s camp-out in Crawford, “leading liberal and antiwar activists [are] parachuting in to try to make her their long-sought voice.” Michael Moore made Lila Lipscomb’s grief into an international issue. Antiwar author Naomi Klein has described the image of a grieving mom or dad as “the mother of all antiwar forces.”

HELLO!!!! Mothers are people.  Mothers have issues.  Come back from the other side of the looking glass.  These are HUMAN BEINGS who are outraged by the way that their children were murdered (oh, maybe I should have said exploited) in the cause of an unjust war, AND WE SUPPORT THEM.  They need our support, and we give it with love and generosity.

There is something deeply cynical and morbid – and I say this as one who was implacably opposed to the war – about these attempts to further publicize and politicize the families’ grief. It’s almost as if some in the antiwar lobby want the families of the dead to do their dirty work for them, as if it is enough to point to a weeping mom to make the case against war. They are relying on images of hardship and sorrow rather than making the hard political case against Western military intervention abroad.

Do their dirty work?  We want to end a war that should never have been waged, which it totally unjustified, based on lies, and should never have been waged in the first place.  How deeply cynical and morbid is that?

On one side, warmakers have left military families to work through their grief alone and confused, and on the other, antiwar forces push these families further into the spotlight. This is a sorry substitute for a serious political debate about Iraq – and it is likely only to exacerbate families’ grief.

Cindy, were you pushed into the spotlight by cynical and morbid forces, or did you just step in there because your son was murdered by an embarrassing, suspect war?  Are you a pawn in the cynical and morbid protest movement against an illegal, immoral, unjust, illegitimate, illegal, cynical, and morbid (as in death-producing) war that should never have happened in the first place?

 I can’t tell you how much grief I felt during the Bike Guy’s march to war.   I went to anti-war demonstrations, my whole family went to anti-war demonstrations, we marched on CNN in Hollywood in our thousands understanding the inner workings of the way the media was promoting this political obscenity.  CNN never covered it.

But now, suddenly, there is a distinction between anti-war activism and the legitimate grief of families who have suffered the loss of loved ones in a meaningless war and have become anti-war activists.  I would just like to know exactly what that distinction is.