Posted by pancho (64.165.200.111) on December 21, 2001 at 21:25:22:
Let's not say the United States propped up Communism all those years...let's not say politicians here used a fear of the country that couldn't make enough butter to feed its own people, or any more than one car...at a time... that was never a threat to the United States. Let's not admit that communism was a great unifying fear that brought together the same elements in Puritanical American society we see congregating around Islamic Terrorists today...that they used the same fear of the outsider the one "jealous" of our toys to drive away and prosecute and jail and break any number of loyal and true and great Americans who dared ask the same questions we are being made afraid to ask today.
Leave us not remember that it was the Soviet Union that had every reason to be afraid of the United States...that it was the United States that landed a military expedition on Russian soil after their revolution...that it was the United States that had the Soviets ringed with missles and nuclear warheads from Turkey to Greece to within every square mile they could manage it...that the piddling few missles in Cuba were merely a response to broken American promises to remove all those warheads aimed at the Soviets.
That entire era saw an erosion of civil liberties and freedom in this country...saw J Edgar Hoover, a man who couldn't see the Mafia through his thick eyelashes and couldn't run after them in high heels...not cause they didn't exist but because they had pictures of him down on his knees in a public toilet and they held that over his and his boyfriends head all those years he went chasing after the dreaded Commies instead.
Let's not tell the story of every peasant boy and girl who rebelled against the succession of evil dictators this country supported in Latin America...calling them communists when all they wanted was to stop being raped and abused and worked to death...that once you label some kid a communist...or an Islamic Terrorist, you can do whatever you want with him and his little sister because he and she have been identified as enemies of Freedom and Goodness and are now Evil Incarnate.
Let's not admit that America has been hijacked by a succession of politicians bought and paid for by Global Hot shots who have no loyalty or understanding of what America means...what a precious document the Constitution is...men who lie and cheat and steal the very bread out of the mouths of the Developing World...who have deserved the righteous anger of any number of people caught barely able to breathe in the face of this Globalism and Free Trade which brings Americans cheap gas after they've killed enough people to earn it..and shoes and stereos they could never pay for with their piddling wages kept low enough so that corporate dividends fatten the few...and leave them unable to get their own teeth fixed.
America's love of greed and its now unchecked status as the last Super Duper power will simply mean an even faster deterioration of what it once could have meant to be American...traded in now for more profits than one goon of a Tycoon could hope to spend in a hundred lifetimes...but that isn't the point anymore...America has gone mad...like lotto fever everyone convinced that if they just cut back on milk and aspirin they stand a helluva good chance of winning big because they KNOW damn well they ain't never gonna earn a damn thing...no better off than the Egyptians who labored for Pharoah and crawled off through rush hour traffic down the Nile to their miserable huts, lit with that assinine screen that keeps them chasing phantoms while their bones are plucked dry from their souls.
Islamic terrorists are all the rage now, now that we milked communism for all it was worth. Don't let's say that from the day Raygun and Pappy Bush and his little shrub took office they haven't been working trielessly to create a new bugaboo for the American people...how else you gonna get 200 million people to accept that nerd as president...where we used to get footbal heroes we get cheerleaders instead...the guys who wiggled their asses in front of yesterday's quarterbacks. Since the day Shrub took office he has been goading Iraq and his client Sharon has been pushing the Palestinians...waiting, each of them waiting for someone somewhere to say ENOUGH!!! And they walked right into it again...took the bait and supplied the excuse these politician businessmen were waiting for and now even the religious Right can come out of hiding and together they can roll back the Constitution even more...these guys give a damn about a fetus...any more than they care about that criminal we are so "soft" on...or the starving children everywhere...in New York. These were their cloaks and daggers to get us to go along on what seemed like such a noble and Christian jihad when all along the entire point was to get those judges and ignorant politicians into office who could be counted upon to roll back product safety laws...banking regulations...insurance regulations...environmental protection and logging and chemical spills and arsenic in the water and legal rights and patient's rights and your ability to sue an HMO ...THAT'S what all those tears over the fetus were for...and the weepy eyed bellowing about God and the Ten Commandments and on and on.
It's a slow, long haul...but we'll get there or perish...the way every single empire has back to the dawn of history...this one will be no different.