george
Sadly, I really don't know what more you and I have to talk about on the subject of American political issues.
I'm a Canadian, completely unafilliated with any political party here. I've been active only in the late sixties, before I could vote, and that was in support of a very unusual man. My interest in world politics arose in late childhood from the pressing fear of nuclear war, and my interest in American politics arose with the incredibly ugly events surrounding the civil rights movement in your country. Our family would, after dinner, watch the news footage of black people being truncheoned, herded, run over by horses, beaten by citizens, or their bodies being dug up. We'd listen to American politicians, and church-going people on the street, who wanted to get the goddamn niggers out of America. The experience was shocking, confusing, unsettling, and...extremely curious. How could a nation, or a large part of a nation, believe such things...do such things? We knew about Washington and the apple tree. We knew about Lincoln and slavery. We knew about Davy Crockett and had our own coonskin caps. We knew about the constitution. We knew, finally, that there was a reality and there was a mythology and that the two were different.
We watched and cheered as the Kennedys, then Johnston, brought the power of your federal government, and the intentions of your constitution, and the humanism of the christian values of equality to bear upon this racist and inhuman horror. Your family may have watched and cheered too, I don't know. But we both know many American families did not cheer. Perhaps there was more cheering on the east coast, or up in San Franciso. I'd think that likely, do you? Another curious phenomenon, that.
A couple of decades or so ago, news reports from down your way began to note instances of an odd and unexpected turn of events...people were taking school boards to court, not because their kids had been beaten up by a schoolyard bully, but because evolution was being taught. They wanted, it seemed, to teach children that the Garden of Eden story was true, and that God had placed those great big bones into the ground merely to test people's faith. It appeared this wasn't happening so much in Manhattan schools, or in Vermont schools, or even in Los Angeles schools. We found this all very curious too.
Last evening, on television, the kindly husband and wife team who are the Van Ip Ministries informed the viewing audience that Pope John Paul II would be succeed by another holy man, but that the Pope who would come immediately after, signalling the endtimes and the second coming, would be an evil one, an agent of beezlebub. We, my daughter and I, were curious, and wondered aloud as to the consequences for the church of Rome in Alabama and Texas or in South Carolina. We thought, probably, diocese in the Northeast would probably be the last to be firebombed. But who knows?
Quote:Consider that the ground for Limbaugh's rapid success was prepared by decades of systematic liberal bias.
How can such a sentence as this be allowed to escape your keyboard, george? How did you come to believe this? How can you know so little about your own country?