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Isn’t Ignorance Bliss? Or is it Manipulation Sometimes?
By Teresa Simon-Noble
opednews.com

Isn’t ignorance bliss? What could possibly have motivated Laura Bush to say, “We haven’t seen that many protests. But we have seen many American flags and people welcoming us”?

If, during their trip, Laura Bush tuned in to CNN, FOX NEWS, MSNBC, or any other American television station beaming its news to the United States and to the rest of the world, then Laura Bush is right. She could not have seen many protests, or protesters, because the corporate American media, from Judy Woodruff to Wolf Blitzer at CNN, to Lester Holt, to Bill Press, to Pat Buchanan and Chris Matthews at MSNBC and the others at FOX NEWS, was consumed with making Michael Jackson’s alleged sexual deviance the All-Important-Must-Know-All-News-of-All-Times. While Photo-Op beamings of a coward’s ridiculous drive in an armored Cadillac with a five inch steel plated door, from the palace’s back yard entrance to its only 100 yards away front entrance, for a welcoming ceremony by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip and an inspection of the Buckingham Palace Guard encased the virtual black out in our corporate media of the toppling of George W. Bush’s statue at Trafalgar Square by a reported 110,000 to 2000,000 people protesting Bush’s iron hand, his illegal and criminal Iraq war, his anti-environment policies, his arrogance, his Me-And-Only-Me childlike stance in a dangerous world which is hungry for dialogue, and for a coming together by all nations in searching for ways to solve, through peaceful means, the problems facing our world.

If Laura Bush never looked beyond the black and gold wrought iron gates of Buckingham Palace, if her ears were stopped up by a buildup of wax or any other ear plugging device which prevented her from listening to the sounds of the bullhorns, behind the solid yellow-vested police line across the street, of people clamoring “Bush the Butcher Go Home”, if the security bubble in which she traveled was more of a fortress than a bubble, if her heart has become hardened to the coarse policies of her husband’s administration—then, she is probably right: she never saw or heard protesters protesting her husband’s arrogant stance in the world. And, as for her claim that she saw many American flags and people welcoming them—well, that is what Fidel Castro also sees (many adoring fans with Cuban flags) in any given Cuban city when people are carted off like cattle {trucked in by force from the countryside or far away towns} to anyone of his historically long and mostly paranoid speeches.

Although the people welcoming the Bushes were not “forced” into welcoming Laura or George, they certainly were “selected” by Bush operatives and security forces that advanced them into the SURE FIRE SEE BY THE BUSHES’ FIELD OF VISION. They, the selected ones, in their flag waving arms, stood, waving at a man who pays lip service to freedom of expression and whose idea of democracy and of a democratic country befuddles the imagination.

A sea of flags waved by arms energized by the realization that they had been “selected” to burst the 8.5 billion dollars security operation of … a coward who wants to see reflections of him only in the mirror of public world opinion. What a fete accompli for a coward who sends soldiers to face bullets and die but, who, himself, cannot face the posters and the chanting of concerned human hearts opposed to his butchery and to the shock and awe effects of his bombastic policies.

Perhaps Laura Bush just simply served the press the same muddied up, reality denying words with which she struggled during that period of drinking in George Bush’s life, long before she could muster the courage to face her truth and share it with her husband that George had better well choose between his bottle and his drinking, or her. It is interesting that this truth-facing came to Laura Bush when the birth of her twins must have been a life empowering source for Laura.

Perhaps, despite lip service, Laura Bush has not made a life empowering connection with the American people.

Teresa Simon-Noble fchiok@bellsouth.net is a computer activist for peace and social justice. She is a former mental health clinician. A poet and a freelance writer, her work has been published in several online publications. This article, copyright by Teresa Simon-Noble, originally published by opednews.com Permission is granted to forward this or to place it on a website as long as the article is included intact, including this statement