Given the monumental clusterfuck that the inchoate rage and fear born on this day 16 years ago have created across the globe I can't think of any reason for my country or my countrymen to "commemorate" the events of that day in any way that doesn't consist only of a silent, humble, deeply mournful contrition.
We won't, of course, because We the People suck at contrition and have never accepted our own responsibility for excusing or, worse, encouraging a coterie of evil, greedy fools for using the events of 9/11/01 as a hammer to drive the poisoned nails of their ambition and hubris into the wide world as well as into our own society. Instead there will be all the usual solemnity and public waving of the Bloody Shirt of the dead of Manhattan and Virginia, just as if those heaps of dead had not, like the horrible unliving monsters of World War Z, created Alps and Himalayas of dead all across the world.
Instead of ruing the arrogance and stupidity that this day awoke in our nation we will continue to pretend that we were the victims that day, innocent of any wrongdoing and greatly wronged, instead of using a wrong done to us to do a thousandfold wrongs to any and everyone we hated - or were told to hate - and feared.
7 comments:
Bravo.
I know you don't particularly like Taibbi, but he presents an item here that I've felt true for a long time, "Karma"
Have you caught Burns' documentary on Vietnam? He started off on the wrong foot with some in the first episode with the phrase "decent men"
>>We deserve Trump, though. God, do we deserve him. We Americans have some good qualities, too, don't get me wrong. But we're also a bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde nation that subsists on massacres and slave labor and leaves victims half-alive and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on couches and blathering about our "American exceptionalism." We dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win "hearts and minds" that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease – including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of view, of course.<<
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-madness-of-donald-trump-removal-25th-amendment-w504149
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This is, basil, Taibbi was fucking brilliant with his Griftopia. But when Obama didn't go after the banksters the way he wanted he turned around and shit all over Obama and the Democratic Party in a way that helped normalize the Trumpkins. So IMO he has a lot to answer for.
That said, yes; he's spot on there. Only he's about, what...almost 40 years late. Because Hunter Thompson nailed this back in 1979:
“This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
Then it should be evident that 8 years of Oball-less followed by his hopeful successor Her Royal Craptitude would produce The Orange Foolius without any help of the Muddled Musings of a Magazine Opinion Monger or the Murky Malicious Machinations of a rasPutin.
Our recent former prez has settled into the welcoming Pearly Gates of Wall Street Heaven and my Financial Advisor tells me nothing much has changed in national finance since '08.
Oh well then, I think we can agree if the opposition to Prez OF can't get its various shitlits together to make some noise Nov. 2018, we're well on our way to Idiocracy.
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>>How dumbed down are certain Americans to absorb this Russian propaganda? 2016 exit polls didn't test for IQ scores but my own observations have been consistent: Trump voters in general have 2-digit IQs, which makes it difficult to navigate reality. That's the Trump base.<<
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2017/09/how-much-more-than-just-his-facebook-ad.html
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The notion that conservadems produced Trump is as ridiculous as claiming the Weimer produced Hitler, basil. The GOP's forty-year effort to hammer together a room-temperature IQ "base" (as your second quote points out) combined with the arcane electoral setup designed to ensure that rich white people rule the United States was perfectly capable of doing that without any help.
Clinton was a perfectly good center-left candidate that was monkeywrenched by ridiculously awful press coverage that equated her minor private failings with Trump's egregious public and personal (as we're now seeing) crapitude.
And it's worth noting that those of us who would like to see more "populism" from the Left should be careful what we wish for; typically in the U.S. populism has been mixed inextricably with racism and nativist Know-Nothingism. It's just as likely that a Democratic populist would be a Huey Long as a Bernie Sanders, and that the successful rise of a Sanders could lead inevitably to another Long...
That said, it's heartening to see that Sanders has put some spine back into the New Deal Democrats, witness the support for his single-payer bill and the recent introduction of a "let's kill this fucking anti-worker "right-to-work" bullshit" bill.
ISTM, tho, that the single biggest problem, the highest hill to climb, is that there is not and never will be a Left answer to the whole wingnut Fox/Breitbart/Infowars menagerie. CNN and the networks will NEVER accept that the GOP must be destroyed. They'll always find some ridiculous talking point that equates some fringe lefty with Mitch McConnell so they can claim there's a "corrupt duopoly".
*But when Obama didn't go after the banksters the way ( distressed home-owners needed ) he turned around and shit all over Obama and the Democratic Party*
FIFY
I could fix it further by writing VOTERS SHAT all over Oballess and PlaceHolder and the DP.
Nothing like voting for a turdpile like Trump to shit all over both Wall Street bankster parties or just giving up any hope that voting can improve one's lot in life.
>>Few would expect Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department to pursue such a case, but what this sorry episode most highlights is the pathetic disciplining of Wall Street during the Obama administration.
JPMorgan’s litany of acknowledged criminal abuses over the past decade reads like a rap sheet, extending well beyond mortgage fraud to encompass practically every part of the bank’s business. But instead of holding JPMorgan’s executives responsible for what looks like a criminal racket, Obama’s Justice Department negotiated weak settlement after weak settlement. Adding insult to injury, JPMorgan then wriggled out of paying its full penalties by using other people’s money.<<
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-americas-biggest-bank-paid-its-fine-for-the-2008-mortgage-crisis-with-phony-mortgages/
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