TOMORROW, TODAY & YESTERDAY
Watching & listening to a freely perspiring Tony Blair on TV, the neon smile on maximum wattage, the voice urgent, beguiling, unctuous, I felt almost sorry for him. There was something so endearingly English about it: the polite soliciting, the ostensible interest in & respect for the opposing viewpoint, the plausible earnestness of it all, somehow aggressive & mild at the same time. Clearly the man was conscious of the increasing isolation of his position. Just Tony & a cadre of similarly be-suited, middle-aged socialists-turned-pragmatists surrounded by a buzzing multitude of bus drivers, midwives, teachers, tree surgeons, bishops, schoolgirls, all deaf to the tired, flabby rhetoric, the patronizing acknowledgement of their right to have the wrong opinion.
And then, in the same newscast, George Bush, cut loose from his autocue, scrabbled around in his homespun ragbag for a few frontier wisdoms & came out more Deputy Dawg than Will Rogers. What a pitiful spectacle the man is when denied the words of his backstage wiz kids. In terms of comparative political acumen & vision he lends dignity to Gerald Ford & Ronald Reagan.
And these are the men who lead the free world. These are the exemplars that we present to emergent nations still exploring the possibilities of democracy. These are the men who will, within the next few weeks, determine political history for countless years ahead. From what they will do next will flow the concatenation of events that will comprise the history of the 21st century. And from what kind of a world will we look back on that history? Only one thing can be certain about that: it will be a very different world from the one so many people are so energetically trying to conserve now.
History now throws up some interesting & illuminating perceptions that have great resonance as we look into the immediate future. At the end of World War II, as the new Labour government took power, father of the National Health Service Ernest Bevin had this to say:
"There has never been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man is the greatest protection against war".
Three years later, in the year immediately following India's independence from the British Empire, Ghandi said:
"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
Meanwhile, presaging current American propositions for Iraq, U.S. Army General Bruce C. Halloway said at the pitch of the Vietnam War:
"Deterrence is our primary mission. And peace is our profession. We have a mixed force of bombers and missiles to carry out this mission".
And, lest any innocent Iraqi in the streets of Baghdad should hope for a more merciful, enlightened prosecution of warfare today, the USAF manual 'Fundamentals of Aerospace Weapons Systems' will offer little comfort. It defines a Military Target with refreshing candour as being:
"…any person, thing, idea, entity or location selected for destruction, inactivation, or rendering non-usable with weapons which will reduce or destroy the will or ability of the enemy to resist".
Art Jacobson headed today's excellent Ojo Caliente weblog with this piece of ancient hubris.
"Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and patriotism, will offer up all of their rights to the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Julius Caesar".
The last, very telling statement goes to a predecessor of George W. Bush:
"Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty". George Washington.
12:04:06 AM 
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