Editor’s Note: There’s been no word from Belacqua. I assume he’s in transit. His absence gives me an opportunity make a few personal observations.
I found these quotes in Mark Crispin Miller book, Cruel and Unusual, which sounds a warning bell about the abuse of our civil rights by the Cheney/Bush crew.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
Hermann Goering
April 18, 1946
Nuremberg,
Germany
To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics could only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.
John Ashcroft
Post 9/11
Washington D.C.
They make a frightening juxtaposition.
In the past, I would describe my politics as left-leaning apathy. This apathy has pretty much been displaced by a growing anger over the actions and inactions of the Bushits. The anger is grounded in an incident that touched me deeply. My wife worked on the 35th floor of One World Trade Center. By the grace of God she was late getting to work on 9/11. She was in a cab a block from the twin towers when the first plane struck. Debris showered her cab. She jumped out and ran into the nearest building. She was looking for a pay phone when the second plane struck. While waiting on the pier for the ferry back to New Jersey, the towers collapsed. She said it was as if night had fallen.
For me, there was an agonizing four-hour period when I did not know if she was dead or alive. It was a tearful reunion.
She lost one close friend and fifteen to twenty people she worked with professionally. We had neighbors and friends who lost loved ones. (We live in Middletown, NJ, which was particularly hard hit by the tragedy). We attended funerals, comforted friends and I stood by her as she went through a year of mourning. It’s still with her. She didn’t want to see Fahrenheit 9/11 because it showed the tragedy.
The invasion of Afghanistan made sense. After 9/11, there was but one priority, the rolling up of the Al Qaeda network and the capture of Osama Bin Laden. What I can not forgive the Bushits for is their flip-flopping invasion of Iraq, especially in light of the truths that have emerged. It had nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with a Neocon pipe dream about bringing democracy to the Middle East. (Of course, our definition of democracy is any government that agrees with us, whether elected or not.) They impoverished the war on terror and enriched Halliburton. They floated the war on a sea of lies and a propaganda campaign that surely has Goebbels grinning in his grave. And then they proceeded to botch it up, wasting lives and resources on a fantasy.
It is interesting to compare 9/11 with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Both events had the same goal: to bring the towers down. The ’93 bombers placed their van in such a manner that they thought it would cause the one tower to tip and crash into the other tower. They failed, 9/11 succeeded. The irony is that the ’93 perpetrators were captured, tried and jailed. There was no quashing of our civil liberties; there were no gulags, no mass arrests, no military tribunals. Yet with 9/11 we have quashed civil liberties, gulags, mass arrests and military tribunals, while Osama is still running loose and Al Qaeda is stronger then ever. Bush claims that we are safer, and then he raises the warning level to orange+. His incompetence as commander-in-chief demands his replacement. One term of an arrested adolescent who lost the alcohol but not the “ism” is enough.
With time, my anger has crystallized and hardened until it has found its outlet in the dark satire of Belacqua Jones’s letters. My fear is Bush’s reelection. My hope is that if he is, two more years of his ineptitude will be enough to turn public opinion against him. Hopefully this will be clear the path for a Democratic sweep of the ’06 Congressional elections. Then the impeachment proceeding can begin. That is assuming the Democrats can get their act together.
7:09:24 AM 
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