I had to
think about this today. Being as how it is Labor Day and I believe it is a
purely American holiday and all. The reason I had to think about it is I read
an article yesterday about how our Constitution is being interpreted. It turns
out it is not being interpreted well at all and I find this extremely dismaying.
We’ve been down this road before, where certain people decide that it’s okay to
interpret the Constitution their way and it's okay to perform some hocus-pocus on
habeas corpus and it’s okay to ignore the War Powers Act and pretend we were
fired on in the Tonkin Gulf and then holler “there will be no wider war” and
then march into Cambodia, but you know what?
It’s not
okay to do any of those things and a thousand other things because we. Don’t. Do.
That. That’s not what being an American is about. But because we’ve gotten all
red/blue state-y and decided we had to start voting platforms we got this
fucked-up mess, which is not the America I was born in. This is NOT the America
people have fought over and died for. This is not the America people have
sacrificed their livelihoods and their futures for. This is some dystopian,
non-functioning, greedy, cutthroat, loosely-conglomerated aggregation of little
nation-states that by their very existence have succeeded in ruining and
destroying countless other nations. Iraq was over there, just being Iraq. Okay,
they had a shithead for a leader, but just because Dubya thought Sadam “tried to
kill mah Daddah” we had to go over there, bomb them to the Iron Age, cause a power vacuum, ruin lives and fuck everything up. There were never any WMDs and I KNEW
it, then. If I, a little violist in Tampa knew it, at the time, how come General Big-Shot Colin Powell
didn’t?
What
really haunts me? Two days before that war was commenced by us, they printed a
picture in the Tampa Tribune of an Iraqi family at a Baghdad McDonald’s. Momma,
Daddy and toddler. Having their Mickey Ds. I always wonder what became of them.
Were they killed outright in the bombing? They looked so happy. The people on
the streets looked prosperous and peaceful. And we destroyed that. We wonder
why people hate us.
Three
days before my father died he called me. My father was an American and proud of
it. Not born here, but naturalized. Proud of that. It was the 4th of
July, 1987. The Contra Hearings were going on and he was bewildered and hurt. Oliver
North had been on the stand. My father couldn’t believe that our government would
knowingly give money raised from Iranian arms sales to the Contras. He was sick
and tired; I could hear it in his voice. “I don’t know this country anymore,”
he said. I didn’t know what to say. He'd fought in 2 wars for this country and loved America. I think I tried to cheer him up with my
dumb tale of locking myself out on the porch. Three days later he died in his
sleep. I used to wonder if he just gave up. He had lived through all the other
shit; McCarthy, Watergate and just was over it.
We need
all of our voices, from Rachel Maddow, to Joe Scarbrough, (yes, I know he’s
Republican, but Chris Matthews did himself no favor by losing it on “Morning
Joe”) and Chris Matthews, also Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher.
There are countless others to listen to. We need people with thoughts and hearts, not
vitriol or hate and spite. We can do without the Fox News, Hannity, Limbaugh
and their ilk. We need free speech to keep the darkness at bay; not just the darkness of Romney and Ryan, but the darkness of any Zealot.
Unfortunately,
I think the red/blue state thing is too deeply entrenched. However, I think
that we need to really look deeply at how our government is treating her
citizens and the citizens of the world and not just dismiss wars as regional
anymore. It all goes much deeper than that and we ignore what happens at our
peril. Yes, the Constitution is framed in such a way that there is plenty of
room for latitude and interpretation, but when do you breach the spirit of the
law? If we are holding to the letter of the law but breaking the spirit, are we
still being constitutionally sound? Where do we cross the line? Is it when we
imprison someone? Take their property? Kill them? And for what? Because it’s
politically expedient, or is it inconvenient, or is there possibility of
exposure?
These are
valid questions and going back to Watergate for example. When all of that
happened, I thought it was beyond boring. Okay, so 2 guys get caught breaking
into some guy’s psychiatrist’s office. I was like sixteen at the time and didn’t
give a shit. It was all viola, all the time for me. Later, I couldn’t get
enough. I bet I watched “Watergate, the Hearings” 80 times on PBS. Unreal. The hearings just
had this unbelievable quality. I couldn’t believe the shit these people had
done in the name of Freedom, Liberty and the Constitution. CREEP. Richard Nixon
and Spiro T. Agnew, E. Howard Hunt, H. R. Haldeman, Richard Kleindiensdt, et
al. How Kissinger escaped I’ll never know. What a sinister bunch. The stupid
thing is, Nixon would have won re-election without all the Macchiavellian
bullshit. This is what’s startling about all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. It
never works. These assholes always get caught with their hands in the cookie
jars. It may not happen right away and it may not happen as soon as we like,
but it happens; It’s axiomatic. Karma baby; it’s a bitch.
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