“The enemy is aiming his destruction at our way of life.” TONY BLAIR. 5/17/07
“What?!” I screamed in disbelief at the television screen as CNN scrolled the above words on its crawler crediting them to Tony Blair whose lips I could see moving but whose words I could not hear since I had purposely muted the sound. “Do they have nothing else to offer the world but this constant seeding of fear planting—a clear act of desperation and perhaps anger on the part of Tony Blair who is having to let go of the reigns in Britain because of public outcry against the occupation of Iraq, and may think that he is himself the martyr while he continues to martyrize us?” It is as if the Rove crowd has begun to prepare his speeches—something, an idea which has been playing in my ears since I heard Blair give his step-down speech in England not so long ago. He sounded much like George W. Bush with his fear planting and his fear seeding in that speech even to the point of imitating some of Bush’s mannerisms while speaking, and he did so again today in those words printed on the CNN crawler!
“What more of the destruction of our way of life than Bush and Blair have already served us with could the enemy possibly want for us?”
Of course, one could use Blair’s words to identify both Bush and Blair as the enemies against us, they are the ones who are martyrizing and tormenting us with their constant need for fear planting and paranoia seeding about terrorists are out to get us here if they (Bush and Blair) don’t fight them there. They are the ones who have instituted a spy system against us, prying into our telephone calls, into our e-mails, into whatever part of our lives they want to, under the pretense of terrorists plots, just to see who stands with them and who stands on the side of true democracy, freedom of speech and the right to say, “NO”, to either, or both of them, their abuses and George’s power grab. They are the ones who intimidate the press into silence or submission.
Bush and Blair are the ones who have made our world less safe. They are the ones who are using our blood, not theirs, to occupy a country which does not want to be occupied. Perhaps by way of exculpating their guilt and their bloody hands, they want us to know that we are the ones who are going to pay for their sins—not them... and, isn’t that all too honorable of them? That is what they want us to think.
In stepping down, Blair is continuing to sell Bush’s irrational need to hold on to war, to hold on to oil and to Iraq, to hold on to the notion that this is an unsafe world—and all the while, Prince Harry gets a stand-down order. He will not be going to Iraq. Why should he, anyhow? Whether the terrorists have actually threatened to go after him if he goes there, or whether Blair and his government are bluffing the public to keep Harry from going to Iraq it does not matter. Blue blood is not going and neither is any of the Bush blood. But our red blooded sons and daughters are—theirs is the blood which will be spilt running out of their veins like the milk or water which runs out of a shattered container. Bush and Blair could care less or they would be stopping the madness.
Joan Didion said in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, “I cannot think until I write” ... and maybe America needs to be given the gift of pen and paper. Putting words down on a piece of paper can help people obtain distance from emotionality and objectivity from subjectivity. Perhaps if people could sit down and address Bush and Blair through thought out words written on pieces of paper, rather than through blurts of emotionality as often happens in the mainstream media with talk show hosts like Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, Larry King and others ... perhaps people, perhaps we, could be free from all the emotionality and fear being pushed on us by them. Perhaps then we could begin to see clearly; if we could manage to find a way to step outside all of the emotionality, and attain some distance and clarity, and begin to think for ourselves rather than being pushed, like cattle, into the Bush and Blair thought-cart.
This morning I listened to Claude Debussy’s La Mer. He is credited with giving composers, “new ways to think about writing orchestral music.”
Our American political sea needs a Claude Debussy who will give us new ways of thinking about Bush and Blair and their fear planting and fear mongering.
We also need a Claude Debussy who will give us a new way of thinking about the roles of corporations in our democracy; the impetus of the military-industrial complex to launch us into wars.
We need an impressionistic brush stroke in politics who will paint for us all of the benefits of peace in a, “we can all get along”, peaceful world.
So far, none of our current aspirants to the role of presidential-commander-in-chief-white-house-oval-office-retainer is painting the right kind of landscape nor giving us the right kind of symphonic arrangement that would truly make a great deal of difference on the current political scene/world scenario.
