9/11, the US and the World Seven Years Along

Seven years ago the United States was the victim of a premeditated attack that killed more than 3,000 people. In the days following, as expressions of support and sympathy and offers to help poured in from around the world, our government faced a choice of how to respond.

In the grief and panic that gripped the nation after September 11, 2001, the US faced a choice: Seek immediate vengeance or build the foundations of strong and lasting peace. The US chose retribution and preemptive violence. Today we see the results of that choice: More violent groups are planning attacks on the United States than before the attacks, support for the United States has fallen throughout the world, and here at home government policies are undermining fundamental constitutional principles in the name of national security. It is time to take a new approach to global security and to stop living in constant fear.

Terrorism seeks to suffocate hope, tear apart communities and break spirits. It is heinous and insidious. Can we afford to continue giving in, ceding civil liberties at home and condoning torture and barbarous violence abroad?

Questioning the Faith

The United States is the only Western country that goes to extreme lengths to protect and insulate corruption by its politicians and business executives, to preserve and defend a governing culture in government and industry that is fundamentally diseased and unwilling to change. The military bureaucracy and various intelligence services are insatiable beneficiaries of this racketeering, bullies and tramps in tow who shred and wipe with the Constitution, almost completely unconcerned with the rights enshrined therein. Generally speaking, all the aforementioned apparently lack respect for proper authority, ethical conduct and fail time and again to serve those for whose benefit they ostensibly exist.

The governmental framework given by the Founders has been so twisted and compromised that I now question whether that framework is the ideal blueprint for any democracy, at least as it currently exists in the United States, where the purpose and nature of our government has become self-service and self-preservation, the People a secondary concern, an annoyance.

Government of the people, by the people, for the people has been ceded to the grasping, greedy few, the arrogance, hubris and vice of an unholy military-industrial complex in bed and making plans with criminally incompetent, institutionally-coddled, country-wrecking CEOs and moneyed interests whose depravity, ignorance and myopia may yet assure America’s final decline rather than its place of preeminence in the world as a beacon of peace, progress and hope.

At times, like this morning, I've got such terrible anger consuming me. It stems from feeling utterly powerless, helpless, at the mercy of "everything else."

I so dislike feeling so hopeless, in despair...e.g. several recent polls show almost half to two-thirds of Americans think Gov. Sarah Palin is the bee's knees. Adios Obama? Can it really be that Americans will vote for the senile grandfather and his whiz-bang a-go-go VP pick, not for substance, intellect, vision, a shot at real change? For whatever reasons, many Americans seem better able to relate to this religion-consumed, gun-toting political provincial with a rigid worldview and closed mind. It could be because they don't like change and they resonate with the destructive mythology of rugged individualism.

The truth is that change has always come and will continue to come from the Coasts, where the intellectuals, academics and visionaries are, where there is always more cultural diversity. But Lord, why does it take so damn much time, so long to get to the rest of Wonder Bread America, if and when they can look up from under the hoods of their pick-up trucks?

Hell, 40 years ago one had to drive miles and miles and miles to find anything like a recycling center or even just a county dump. Today, we have curbside recycling. Change comes, but why is it often so damn slow?

I think I've identified part of the reason(s) Middle America just never sat well with me, and I've lived "out there." To a large extent my fellow Americans in between the coasts have struck me as being slow on the uptake, rather set in their ways and routines. For all the praise of the common sense of "average Americans", many may possess it to an extent but only to an extent, e.g. they may know when they feel like they smell a con, but they do not seem to grasp who's doing the conning. Many like to believe it's "those liberal elites" trying to dictate to them, con them, and they will vote against them (as in 2000 and 2004, for example) just like their Lucifer, Karl Rove, has so brilliantly planned. In short, they know when they smell a rat but most cannot seem to identify one.

Do we require an explanatory epic to bring things into focus for these people? Perhaps something like Vergil's Aeneid?

The Georgeid


BOOK I

I sing of malfeasance and of a man: His presidency
had made him a fugitive; he was the first of many
to journey from the coasts of Texas as far as
South America and the Paraguayan shores.
Across the lands and waters he was battered
beneath the violence of High Ones, for
the savage Columbia’s unforgetting anger;
and many sufferings were his because of war and other high crimes
and misdemeanors—
until he brought a city into being
and carried his ill-gotten goods to Paraguay;
from this have come the Master Race, the lords
of Asuncion, and the ramparts of high Margaritaville.

Tell me the reason, Muse: What was the wound
to her dignity, so hurting her
that she, jewel of the Americas, compelled a man
remarkable for licentiousness to endure
so many crises, meet so many trials?
Can such resentment hold the minds of Americans?