Judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason.Ah, hubris. The two celebrity spokesmen of the Anglo-American empire had a chummy time stroking each other's egos today. Neither the Kandahar massacre nor the Ides of March appeared to faze them a bit. As Business Week reported it:
The prime minister [Cameron] responded by all but endorsing Obama’s re-election in his own nine-minute toast. He cited the U.S.-led coalition effort in Libya, the surge in Afghanistan and the troop withdrawal from Iraq. The president “has pressed the reset button on the moral authority of the entire free world,” he said.Fucking A. Our male heads of state are now so powerful they command the very moral universe to do their bidding. Like in a video game, all they have to do is press reset, and all the dead souls that are marked down on their side of the ledger lift them up to be exalted by us commoners.
This is an old phenomenon.
The Ides of March put me in mind of Shakespeare's opening scene for Julius Caesar, in which the 99% are standing around in their dress clothes and are scorned by a couple of patricians for waiting to cheer triumphant Caesar when "many a time and oft" they had cheered Pompey, whom Caesar has just slain.
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| Source: Daily Mail, UK |
"You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things"Like the poor fool who snapped during his 4th deployment and went about murdering children, tipping the longest invisible war on Afghanistan into the public arena long enough for a wave of revulsion to sweep over us.
It didn't last long. Before 48 hours had passed we were back to the gross canard of a moral reset button, and could get on with the real business of government-media-weapons production.
But the titan stumbles once again. In what Ralph Lopez blogging at WarisaCrime.org described as a
bombshell report which is to Afghanistan what the Pentagon Papers were to Vietnam, "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort" [Lt. Col. Daniel] Davis all but calls his top commanders skilled, habitual, wouldn't-know-truth-if-it-hit-them-in-the-head bald-faced liars about the situation in Afghanistan.See, the empire needs a permanent base in Afghanistan, and to control Pakistan, in order to capture the central, plummy prize: Iran. For what reason? Why, to make you safer.
So ours is not to reason why the Boston subway that moves the 99% to work and school is being slashed again while the CEO of Bank of America earned $6 million+ this year.
Ours is not to reason why the U.S. can have South Korea deny entry to three Vets for Peace organizers headed to defend Jeju Island from being entombed in concrete so Aegis nuclear destroyers can ply the South China Sea.
Ours is not to reason why Bradley Manning is charged with aiding Al Qaida when George W. Bush undoubtedly and Barack Obama certainly have aided all violent terrorist organizations by continually creating new militantly grieving survivors of aerial bombing and night raids and depleted uranium. And rape. Etc. (Besides which, Al Qaida? Really? We are still the laughing stock of the world for our colossal ignorance of facts on the ground.)
Ours is but to do and die in the graveyard of illusory empire.
My reaction to that quip by Cameron was laughter.
ReplyDeleteI mean, just now. I hadn't seen it in previous reports on the meeting.
I was just arguing to an English woman, a retired BBC producer, that Israel would be all done (as they say in Maine) when people laughed at it. She said, is that happening yet? I guess it is.