|
how strange that a thread on the ongoing israeli massacre of civilians in lebanon gets diverted onto a debate about religion. seems to mirror the general nature of the idiotic "debates" that attempt to reduce the conflict to yet another instance of some imaginary eternal conflict between jews and muslims...blah blah blah, explaining nothing, contextualizing nothing, throwing up your hands rather than trying to understand, its always the same, nothing to be done kill them all let god sort em out.
i am also not convinced of the utility of linking the bush administration's loathesome actions relative to this conflict to any set of far right protestant millenarian ideologies--you could also link it to incomptence--you could link it to the ongoing refusal of the neocon cadre within the administration to face reality (demonstrated by their having used the SAME LOGIC to rationalize standing by and watching a mssacre as that used to rationalize triggering a civil war in iraq)--you could link it to good old fashioned american racism deployed in a western film mode--the function of arab women and children is to die in great anonymous numbers--the heroic American Destiny unfolds across piles of anonymous bodies, less than human, less than us--History Will Absolve Us--see we pay for films that absolve us---we pay for press that absolves us----we are absolution itself----we forgive us...
what seems to me to emerge through the exercize in sustained foulness that is the bush administration is a requirement for some type of systemic reform that would enable votes of no confidence that would bring down a government as a function of ongoing ineptness rather than waiting for freedom to burst out one day every four years.
if there was a god who watched over the united states in particular, she is apparently on vacation. perhaps she is embarrassed by the idiocy of those who speak in her name. who knows. maybe she doesnt exist.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|