Long after the majority has turned heavily against the war, the men who started it and the President who has bungled it, the Ridiculous Right still persists in behaving as though this failing occupation of a country at war with itself is akin to World War II, where if we lose, we will be invaded, where winning or losing are clear possibilities, where we are fighting a declared war against a declared enemy.
Long after a majority of the nation is disgusted with George Bush, they are able to pretend that the Dixie Chicks are traitors for voicing what a majority of Americans feel, they are able to call anyone a traitor for putting up a Christmas display that expresses dislike of Bush or seems to call for peace in the season of peace. Fake Newspapers owned by anti-American immigrants are able to talk about “surrender” and print childish pictures of the Iraq Study Group chairmen, calling them “Surrender Monkeys” We still get idiotic insults hurled at the French as though they betrayed us by telling us not to do that which we dearly wish we had not done and for being right about Saddam’s nuclear non-program.
Perhaps the problem is with people who only think in metaphors and confuse the metaphorical with the actual. Perhaps we have a hundred million or so paranoid schizophrenics lurking in towns and cities all over the country, but perhaps the problem is simply with traitorous war mongering bastards whom the world would be far better off without. Either way, judging from the
8 comments:
Great minds think alike.
Isn't it amazing, though, that the warmongers do not enlist?
Are you sure that by 'metaphores' you didn't mean 'hypotheticals'? I just can't imagine that the brains of those to whom we're referring are capable of thinking in the abstract, even at the level of the metaphore. May I go a step further and suggest that their intellectual frames of reference are informed by childhood fables, and that from these they seek to understand the human condition? Or am I giving them still too much credit? It's a serious question...
And I regreat not looking up the spelling of 'metaphor.' Arghhh.
Metaphor - metafive - I never cared much for spelling anyway. But I think hypothetical is a better word, you're right. Childhood fables, adult fables, politcal frameworks or models - they seem to see everything in terms of some ideological scenario and expect us to do the same. If there's a war, for instance, there must be an enemy, so whoever we're fighting with is the enemn and because we're always the good guy, they are the evil enemy.
Somehow we never see ourselves as the enemy. And of coure their kids never enlist - war is for the peasants, the peonls, the proletariat.
The Vietnam syndrome begat Iran-Contra; the Iran-Contra syndrome begat Iraq-Nam. How do we break the chain of the malicious history?
I suppose we could teach history in the schools instead of BS about the glory of America, but that's not going to happen. Parents would never stand for anything as "Liberal" as the truth.
surrender: seems a great many Americans have already surrendered reason -- and surrendered it to ideological fanaticism.
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