THE IRONY OF IT ALL "Jazz Funeral For Democracy, A Wake For Peace": War protestors mourn in New Orleans 2005.02.11
Posted by Picasa
So anyway here is a little poem By William ( BILL ) Blake from the Songs of Innocence:
The Divine Image
To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.
For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE: MY RANT FOR THE DAY
The authorities in the US are insisting reporters not take pictures of bodies to save people of America the pain of seeing such things or is it to protect them from the reality of how terrible this disaster has been . This is a real problem for George W. Bush & his inept & heartless administration which is more concerned with the bottom line & public relations to worry too much about a few thousand needless deaths. To these people this disaster is just part of the natural world which is a brutal world red in tooth & claw as John Hobbes I believe said.
Part of the issue here for the Bushites is that maybe by seeing too many bodies on the net or tv some people who like George Bush who are oblivious to the horror of the aftermath & what was not done in preparation for the inevitable maybe then they might feel something but we can't expect any real feeling from the rich & powerful who live in their little protected world or from others on the Right who are True Believers who insist on clinging to their policies even when the reality slaps them in the face showing that these policies are not working. These policies which many believe as I do that they have had disastrous & deadly consequences.
Meanwhile people like Pat Buchanan see the disaster as proof that the poor people in the three states affected are too dependent on government whether at the state or federal level. This he believes is the reason why many of them did not evacuate when they should have & now they are looking hand-outs from the Federal Government like free food & water & temporary shelter what a bunch of con artists eh so Pat would have us believe. This is what he said or implied on The MCLAUGHLIN group on PBS on Friday night .
Pat Buchanan like Barbara Bush & Laura Bush still can not understand why these people- the left behinds didn’t just call a cab or limo or purchase a ticket on an airline. They can not relate to anyone who makes less than a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year let alone some family who’s total income is less than 20,000 or even 10,ooo a year.
It was apparent that Pat Buchanan ‘s sympathy for the people most affected was completely absent as he could sit feeling gleeful that policies like the Great Society of Pres. Johnson of the 1960s were in large part responsible for the extent of the disaster in his view.
He refused to accept that part of the responsibility for the extent of the disaster was a result of decades of neglect for the area by the Federal Government for example reinforcing levees etc. & that no realistic plans for the evacuation of the inhabitants especially those without the means to leave the area had been developed over the years.
Pat Buchanan believes in fact that the Federal Government is doing far more than it should in such natural disasters.
The cut backs on such projects goes back to the Reagan administration & continued under the regimes of Presidents Bush jr. & senior as they went ahead with policies to reduce taxes for the rich & the belief that the Federal Government's role should be limited in times of disaster-
They also believe the Federal Government has little or no role in insuring that the infrastructure of highways , hospitals & schools etc. are kept up to par &that the reality is that the poorest states need the help of the Federal Government to help take care of these basic needs if the poorest states cannot afford to.
The question then arises about the role & purpose of a Federal Government besides that of fighting foreign enemies .
Since Bush & his supporters are in favour of deregulation & that Big Business should be allowed to operate without any regulations or safe-guards or how much they pay employees.
Pres. Bush & Pat Buchanan & Tony Blankley & all their rich friends & Neo-Cons & the Religious Right seem to care so little for the poor in their country & especially those who are poor & black .
To those outside America this most recent natural disaster reveals the heartlessness of their ideology & dogma which rarely includes in their economic equations the human element except in how it relates to the rich & powerful who they see as better & therefore more worthy of any consideration in contrast to the poorest of the poor who are left to fend for themselves. These Conservatives see even the elderly the disabled & children as merely disposable as they adhere to their belief in self-reliance & rugged Individualism & their belief in Social Darwinism of the 19th century which they believe to have been the Golden Age of America.
To the Neo-Cons & religious Right a natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina shows the Will of God & is a way of getting rid of the weakest members in American society so that only the strong should be permitted by God & President Bush to survive. There is no purpose in their view to act contrary to the wishes & will of their old-fashioned God of Fire & Brimstone & of anger who looms large in parts of the Old Testament of the Bible.
These Neo-Cons would probably feel more at home in a country run by a dictator or an Oligarchy of the wealthy supported by a fascistic Military like those in some Latin American countries their heroes include rulers like Pinochet of Chile or The Marcos of the Phillipines before they were ousted by the unruly mob of the unwashed supported by more Communist subversives like the ones who brought down the South African Apartheid regime which a few years back they were constantly defending especially by people like Senator Jesse Helms .
These Neo-Cons & Bushites have no time for all this sentimental nonsense about the suffering of the poor whether adults or children & disabled & elderly whom they see as merely lazy & shiftless out to fleece the tax payers of America.
Is this their way or God's way of punishing the poor & blacks is it their pay back for the Civil Rights movement & Martin Luther King Jr. & LBJ & The Great Society & civil rights legislation & losing a war that America they believed could have won but the liberals & protestors robbed them of that victory.
These are also the people for whom the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the presidential campaign of 1964 they can never forgive the left-wing liberals for.
To them President Johnson stole the election with the help of the Civil Rights Movement & the American Civil Liberties Union & the Eastern elite whom they see as having been backed by Communist Subversives.
Does it go back to that in their view that most evil of times when, FDR( Fraklin Delano Roosevelt) used massive amounts of dollars to rebuild the country in the 1930's.
The other thing one might wonder is what the Bush Administration's real motives are regarding the issue of Journalists taking pictures of bodies combined with some alarming reports of Journalists not being allowed to cover the story of the disaster as freely as they had done for the last two weeks.
Is it as they claim a matter of showing respect for the dead or just a way of keeping everyone in the dark about how many people have died as the result of the Hurricane & its aftermath.
Is the Bush administration going to be honest about how many have actually died or will they just refuse to give out numbers of the dead as they have done & continue to do in regards to Iraqi civilians who have died which they refer to as collateral damage. A nice euphemism for innocent Iraqis shot or blown to pieces by so-called American FRIENDLY-FIRE.
Though of course to most Neo-Cons & the American Religious Right Iraqi civilians don't really matter as they are not Christians & are not white but are of inferior ethnic origins like the Kurds & Arabs.
Ah well as we know according to Bush & his fanatic followers only Christians & Capitalist matter in the eyes of their Wrathful & Jealous GOD.
The situation is like the Embedded reporters in Iraq who agreed to cover the war only in ways which are approved of by the Bush Administration & the Pentagon & Big Corporations like Haliburton who are the real power behind the throne as it were .
So as a Canadian I wonder if this is the sort of inept & heartless government that Stephen Harper & his followers hope to bring to our country as official policy that whatever happens everyone is just left to fend for themselves.
Especially as he takes power to help his rich friends & religious bigots whom he is always defending.
It seems that one of main rationales for a strong centralized government is to protect those who are least able to defend themselves.
See for instance:
Frank Rich’s who does op-ed pieces for the New York Times speech on Tuesday sept. 6, 2005 at Oberlin Convocation series of speeches
as reported in THE OBERLIN REVIEW SEPTEMBER 9, 2005 by Emma Dumain
www.oberlin.edu
And from Los Angeles Times Saturday September 10, 2005
Govt. Backs Off from Media Ban
By Matea Gold and Nicholas Riccardi, Times Staff Writers
The federal government said today it would allow the news media to have access to recovery operations in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, a day after the top military official overseeing the federal relief efforts had announced that reporters would not be allowed to watch the recovery of dead bodies...
www.latimes.com
Anyway see you later,
GORD.
No comments:
Post a Comment