Blog For Arizona

Up For Anything

Up For Anything

I guess this guy sort of pissed me off. Note the Bush-Cheney advert on his side bar. It's obvious this guy's troll, but a dog like me sometimes can't help but grabbing hold and shaking anyhow. He wrote about how Dean is a hypocrite for wanting to pop the caps. I wrote back, and sort of unloaded on the guy. Hyperbolistically, perhaps. But we liberals are too tame and reasonable at times. I think a dire warning about fascistic horrors is good for the soul once in while. We have gotten too far away from evil as a people to spot it. We think we glipse it on television now and then, but most of that is full-on rage and madness. Evil is much more civilized a pursuit. It can look oddly like everday life- until you tote up the costs.

Related to the whole flag flap, how much like everyday life did slavery look? Did a person who went to the slave market and bought a person with the skills he need to run the foundry on his estate think to himself, "I'm engaged in evil." Of course not. In fact, that person was probably not evil at all, in the sense we conceive it. But those everyday, self-justifications, looking the other ways, callously distancing yourself from the suffering of others, adds up. If creates a system. A mechanism of evil. Where evil flourishes and happens everyday, but the people involved needn't feel responsible, or even know.

I sometime wonder if that is what is building in our midst, what we've unleashed and sanctioned our of our pain at 9/11. I worry that it is already happening. That now, as we speak evil is being done in my name, for my 'benefit', for my own good. And at those times, I want to grab the throat of every self-satisfied, complacent, or bigotted xenophobe who dares say things like, "Let's just nuke all them rag-heads and be done with it."

It makes my skin crawl. It makes me want to pick up a weapon a stike that person down lest their appathetic, soulless, banality, lead our nation, and myself by association, into committing crimes that will stain us all forever.

Here's my rant:

You know, CJ, people might be inclined to take your criticims more seriously if you didn't have a BUSH-CHENEY advert on your front page. You are obviously a GOP supporter trying in you own pitifully inept fashion to sow desent and doubt in the 'enemy' camp.

The hypocracy I see around here is not Dean wanting to 'pop the caps', but that you support a candidate for whom it is perfectly acceptable that he should raise over 80 million for a primary season in which he is unopposed, while his oppents slog though a field of candiates capped at 44.6 million. You think it perfectly fair for the Democrat to arrive at the convention, bled out of all funds facing the largest war chest in American political history. It would surely please you immensely for Dean to stick to a 'principle' which would result in such a state of affairs. You don't care about principle, about fairness, or about anything but winning. Just like your candidate; Bush. Don't speak of hypocrisy to me from the same mouth that sings the praises of that butcher, that killer of American freedoms and values, that human embodiment of hypocrisy.

Our candidate will be a different kind of politican, a unique and unheralded thing in Democratic politics - a winner. Because he not going to face Bush with one hand tied behind his back on principle. We'll reform campaign finance reform AFTER we get the biggest abuser of the system out of office. After we break the facsistic combination of corporate and political power that the Bush family made it's fortune off, and now seek to recreate on our own shores, THEN we will reform campaign finance.

That's not hypocrisy, which, as is apparent from your support of Bush, is not something you are incapable of even perceiving, it is pragmatic political warfare.

Dean is going to crush your candidate. The funny part will be when Bush is claiming that limiting donors to $2000 apiece is unfair because Dean has so many more. When Dean outspends Bush and Bush begins to whine about it, as he already has whined about likely being outspent, the true humor of the situation will settle in for a good belly laugh. You see, the real people of this country are begining to realize the suffering Bush is causing, and will cause, our nation. They are going to give till their eyes bleed to prevent Bush from being re-elected.

You don't realize it yet, and you will continue to deny it until even your own denials are hollow in your ears, but Bush is the moral nadir of our age. He has cozened and courted the industrialists to back his bid for power, promised them fantastic treasure in war and chaos, dedicated himself to attacking and destroying the public welfare in favor of the private, engaged in a war of purely merchantile and imperialist intent under the guise of the highest of America priciples (as opposed to those highest of German principles- Volk, Vaterland, und Leibenstraum).

Are the camps far away? No, they are here today. Even now, in the secretive corners of the world, a network of prisons and camps, under guard by the military, protected by the wieght of national security law, people of a despised ethnicity and a despised religion are held without legal sanction, without representation, without charges, often for simply who they are, or what they are alleged, not proven, to have done. In contravention of international law. In contravention of a American law. In contravention of the lessons of history that tell us what happens when one people begins to scapegoat another for every problem in their society. There hasn't been gassing yet, there may never be, the reminder would be too stark. But we claim the right to kill them, after trial under a kangroo system of justice in which all the peices on the board belong to but one King, King George, and the final appeal is to him and him alone. This isn't a system of justice, it's a system of elaborately justified murder.

Go on thinking that you are right. Go on thinking that it can't happen here; after all, it's what the Germans thought until they woke up one morning with the shame of having committed crimes so vile, their entire nation still crawls with the silent guilt of it. Go on thinking that your moron King wants make this country a better place. I take consolation that one day, perhaps a far distant day, perhaps not, you will awaken and no longer be able to deny that you were one of the grey men. One of those who ignorantly, blindly, happily assisted evil into the world. You helped it to grow, you advocated it, you paid for it. How that thought, that sudden conviction, that buried within you are the seeds of what Hannah Arendt termed the "banality of evil" will haunt you; I pity you that. Banal evil is nothing more that the hard heartedness not to feel compassion for those below you, those harmed by policies you know hurt people. It's the brutal efficency of seeing though tasks expeditiously without questioning their goals; without wanting to know. It's a clever tongue put in service of monstrous ends, instead of the selling of tooth-paste and singing a love song. That's all evil is; little decisions to muddle by, get on, get ahead, look away, not question, not think; to be less than human, to be a cog.

When that day comes. And it will. Go hug a Muslim child of middle eastern descent. Tell him that you are sorry for what you almost did to him, if it were not for President Howard Dean.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 11/06/2003 09:10:00 AM