America, Narcoleptic Pit Bull

From The San Francisco Gate, 2/24/06:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2006/02/24/notes022406.DTL&feed=rss.mmorford

America, Narcoleptic Pit Bull

Once the (tarnished) beacon of peace and democracy, now just another
global flamethrower

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist


Violence, as we seem to forget in some sort of collective denial,
begets violence.

Intolerance breeds intolerance.

And war begets war.

It self-perpetuates,

feeds on itself,

sucking and teething on the blood and exploded limbs and the punctured
hearts of the dead,

growing in the soil of hate and ignorance and
my-God-can-beat-up-your-God.

Go ahead, try it yourself.

Launch a major war.

Watch how the flies of death and rage and religious sanctimony swarm
to your bloody hate pile in abject glee.

Watch how every other war hawk/terrorist/dictator with a major bone to
pick looks over at your nasty war and giggles like a Republican in a
gun shop and jumps right in,

how your enemies quickly join together in mutual recoil and take up
arms in retaliation,

how they all instigate or enflame their own battles in eager
reflection of/deference to yours, as they feel that side of them that
so desperately wants to find something, someone to hate, to beat down,
to feel sanctimonious and righteous over, emerge like a pair of
engorged horns from their head.

And then the real fun begins.

Because then this latent hate turns back on us, right here at home.

Then this dank feeling spreads like a disease, the culture shifts and
coagulates and turns black to accommodate the new cancer, the taint
seeps into the water supply, the collective flesh, the national
mind-set.

The national temper flares more easily, depression rates rise,
self-medication becomes the national pastime.

Laws become thick with paranoia and dread (the Patriot Act et al.),
and everyone with any sense of history or spiritual love or pacifist
leanings walks around looking like their dog just died.

Sound familiar?

At this moment in American history, we are surrounded, infiltrated,
soaked to the bone with warmongers and fear dealers and hate poppers.

The GOP has been positively masterful in cultivating a culture of
intolerance and disgust and Taliban-like fanaticism, instilling a
brilliant kind of poisonous fear into middle 'Merka that equates gays
with terrorists and terrorists with the Middle East and the Middle
East with the Devil and the Devil with liberals and liberals with,
well, gays.

Isn't that clever?

As it goes with America, so it goes with the world.

You want to know why there's vicious rioting and people dying across
the world right now, from Iran to Pakistan, Libya to Nigeria, all in
the name of a mediocre cartoon featuring Allah and a cute turban bomb?

Why otherwise rational Muslims are protesting by the thousands from
London to Cairo?

Here's a hint: It has nothing to do with the cartoon.

It has nothing to do with Muslims loathing Christianity, or even with
the Islamic fundamentalists who teach their children to hate pretty
much everyone (but especially America) from birth.

But it has a great deal to do with the world's foremost peace-keeping
superpower becoming the world's foremost thug, turning into a
self-righteous torture-happy God-monger and a grand perpetuator of
war.

It has much to do with the U.S.-led stoking of an already white-hot
Middle East tinderbox via launching two brutal, unwinnable wars and
fueling the fires of division and separation and rage.

Once we were the great beacon of peace and diplomacy.

But now the beacon has become bloody and malicious and hollow.

It has become a brutal joke.

Are we to blame for all the eternal tension and raging religious
hatreds in the Middle East?

Of course not.

Are we largely responsible for making them far, far worse than they
were just five years ago by deciding, under Bush's pampered thumb, to
become the planet's sanctimonious hell-bent Jesus-crazed
bitch-slapper?

Hell yes.

We are, right now, the biggest brute in the sandbox, taunting everyone
to a fight and drawing the world more and more into our bilious
screw-you, kill-'em-all attitude, even as we suffer cultural asthma
and our national infrastructure crumbles and our hospitals fail and
school systems collapse and our coffers are bled dry by the most
corrupt and irresponsible federal administration in your lifetime.

In short, we make it more OK for the rest of the world to rage,
despoil, hate.

We set the tone.

We're not merely tormenting unfriendly nations, we're actively messing
with them, rigging their political systems and steamrolling their
beliefs.

We are, by way of toxic foreign policy and a mad rush to war and a
leader who is about as world-wise and savvy as a trailer hitch, making
the world a nastier place in which to live.

It's a far cry from even 10 years ago, when the nation was flush and
the economy was healthy and the general feeling was buzzingly positive
and every channel and radio station and news headline didn't feature
frothing religious bonk-jobs screaming about exposed nipples and evil
gays and the need for more media censorship.

Do you remember how it felt then?

Oh sure, the GOP demonized Bill Clinton like no president in history.

Funny thing was, their bank accounts were flush, too.

The economic boom was on.

The nation was at peace.

There seemed to be far fewer dangerous, oppressive socioeconomic woes,
militant media crackdowns, deflections, scandals, redirections,
misprisions, outright lies.

We enjoyed something resembling, dare I say, balance.

No more.

Now, a complete reversal.

Now, we are the world's unstable, drooling pit bull, lying and
torturing and wiretapping our way to "victory."

And no, our downturn is not the fault of Sept. 11.

It is not the fault of terrorism.

But it is almost directly a result of our reaction to terrorism,
BushCo's leveraging of the most heartbreaking event in our recent
history and turning it into a vile excuse to burn all bridges and turn
our playground into a hostile war-thick free-for-all.

It is far from over.

We have, by many accounts, helped set the stage for a perfect storm of
perpetual war and even more explosive hate.

But until this dark BushCo cloud begins to lift, much of the world
will only look to us the way a battered wife looks at her violently
alcoholic husband.

And haven't we had just about enough of that?

.

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