Very likely, Mr. BL, but we'll never get the truth from the Cunning Coney--she's a tough one . . .
Setanta
Your last reply was an excellent EXCELLENT reply and analysis.
Oops, make that your next to last. That last one got sneaked in as I was writing up my comment.
Something which has been much on my mind lately: lying. We've talked and linked and argued about this lying administration. In answer to the question of this thread, I'd like to opine that America has become a country of willing self-deluders, and the administration wouldn't get away with its lies if we weren't willing to live our own lies.
Lying? America? Yes. We lie to ourselves. If you've lived in other countries, you know the extent to which most countries lie to themselves about their history and their nobility and their goodness. But (having lived for extended periods in European countries, north and south), I've never lived in a place like America of the past +/- three decades which cons itself day in and day out, aggressively, about who we are. We have developed ideas about our moral and cultural superiority, our political savvy, our ability to develop goods and services, our spiritual lives.... and on and on... which are 'way wide of the mark. We've decided we're best and that's that.
Bad move. Having enormous military and economic strength does not compensate for all-important self-knowledge and understanding. We are allowing our (lazy) passion for believing We're #1 to cloud our judgment about our real strengths and weaknesses. Most military leaders know that turning a blind eye to one's weaknesses means certain defeat. But we're doing that as a nation of the willing blind. We've allowed successive administrations -- and all three branches of government -- to become an arrogant oligarchy closely tied to financial interests. We've allowed our infrastructure, and our educational and healthcare systems, to sink below those in countries with more limited resources. We've given up the independence required of those who live in a free society. That's why, when so many of our overseas friends say "It's not America doing all that, it's Bush" they often add, "But why are Americans continuing to let him get away with it?"
I think that if we want to know if America is "really that bad," we first have to ask who we really are -- how we're really doing -- and who would rather we didn't ask those questions.
Thanks, Boss . . . i've had unpleasant experiences of Mr. Hobshawm in the past. His "Age of Empire" three volume set is a wonderful analysis of the process of the rise and the beginning of the decline of the British empire--and it is based almost entirely upon conclusions drawn from statistical analysis--which makes it deadly dull reading for most folks. But i then read a passage in a review journal in which he commented on others writing on the subject, and he was a total ****. I then looked up other papers of his--my guess is that he hasn't a friend in his own profession.
Setana,
...Cunnning Connie didn't look so cunning on Meet the Press. Tim had her on the ropes, babbling. I was pissed off because he didn't deliver the knock-out blow. she only escaped, bcause he was a gentleman, or not a great finisher.
( God, I miss Spivak!
)
I'll take yer word for it, Boo . . . however, when i write Cunning Coney, i'm referring to our Miss Bunny--Dlowan. Coney is a middle english word for rabbit . . . an' i'm sure you know our Miss Bunny is very Cunning indeed . . .
DO'H...
(I gotta' find that Wizard...I hope Scarecrow didn't get the last one.
)
Here's a letter to the 6/23 Nation in response to an article on war by Chris Hedges, the war correspondent who has a new book out about war and (as another letter writer expresses it) "the seductive lures of the myth [that] are spread by the media under the guise of glory, honor and patriotism, and act to obscure the underlying obscenity of war..."
Hedges is a respected and admired journalist who has been close to and in battle. The letter quoted below is from a woman in Sarasota. We share a viewpoint about recent wars and TV coverage of them:
Chris Hedges expresses with excruciating eloquence what I have long known to be essential truth. I simply sat out the war, refusing to watch TV coverage or even to read detailed accounts. Children are lured into military service with promises of vocational training, bright futures, eternal benefits, being all that they can be, without a hint that they are being recruited as hit men (and women). If "all that they can be" turns out to be "dead," well, then, the American Legion will be there on every holiday to extol them for having died "in defense of their country." So far as I am aware, the last American to die in what might be truthfully called defense of his country did so in 1945. Those who have perished since have done so in defense of the agendas of lying politicians. My local newspaper recently carried a huge piece on the new war toys being cooked up by Hasbro et al. for the Christmas season (their collections never seem to feature little paraplegic GI Joes in wheelchairs). Lest anyone had a doubt, we are going to keep teaching our children that war is fun.
(The letters column isn't available online, unfortunately...)
This administration is very good at using patriotism as a propoganda tool. Must have learned it from pops. c.i.
McGentrix
It sure does take you a long time to digest!
If he has trouble digesting, that would make him fulla'.....sh-
ame on you, for suggesting that!
(I got your back McG. :wink: )
Oh, well, I never.... stomp, stomp, stomp....
"Wolfowitz's comments were hardly supportive of deeper democratic principles." (WashPost per Blatham)
I'm shocked, shocked, shocked.
Tartarin
Well, I suppose so long as those principles are deep, that's something. Democractic, facist...whatever.
These guys really do want to take over. Democracy, in any traditional sense of what we have meant by that term, is their impediment, and that's why they are subverting it.
Somewhere along the line the idjits who insist we lived in a democratic republic came to believe that capitalism and democracy are interchangeable. A necessary myth, promoted by the oligarchs....
Montana wrote:McGentrix
It sure does take you a long time to digest!
I am having a hard time finding any corrabative evidence other than the MassNews (A slightly opinionated place I must say) website. It appears to be a very localized phenomenom as I still haven't found info on it from another source. While I am saddened that it happened to you, or to anyone, to say that you had to flee America to escape it seems somewhat over stated. You should have done like other Americans do and hired Johnny Cochran.
Tartarin
I was just thinking about your post...about how this particular idea evolved and has been promoted and how it is gained such depressingly unreflective acceptance...and about other equally unreflected and potentially disastrous ideas presently running amok in the psyche of many Americans...how those are influencing the rest of the world...and I began to wistfully yearn for a rapidly advancing space technology that might allow folks to try again, somewhere else. The irony that the past America was founded to escape the future America is a sigh producer.
