OUR LATEST WAR
(from WALKING JOURNAL, 1/19/03 )

Richard Lewis

            War looms. I can put an antiwar poster on the tail of my little pickup-would I stick one on the car I park prominently at work, where acceptable posters are pro-family, and pro-sports? I'm leaving the place, so maybe. And if I don't make a statement at work, and there are 900 people in my office building, where can I make one? I can spoil middle-class parties: there's one tonight. One couple voted for Bush because he's "handsome."

The problem glares simply: we fabricate enemies who distract us the human issues--peace, poverty, health, hatred, pollution. Whipped by prejudices against demonized foreigners and private gynecological choices, we're incompetent to deal with actual concerns. While we're lathered about irrelevancies, corporate interests thrive, driving an agenda that withholds our incredible wealth from addressing problems inexcusable in a purported civilization.

That's politics, folks: a gigantic hog-trough filled by the unelected (lobbyists), and the hog-feeding media that control access to information and entertainment.

Our public discourse requires the feckless cockiness of a George W. Bush to mouth the script. As they used to say about Goldwater, "Deep down you know he's shallow." He inoculates himself against facts by judging the well-informed "arrogant." Thrilled by his limitations, he perpetuates his Deke and cheerleader adolescence, happily disdainful of experience outside his oily frat.

Blissed-out in ignorance, and by the narcotics of power and narcissism, he's high on the cheap version of Jesus with which he blesses himself-courtesy of a TV evangelist. If history continues, his cockiness will receive harsher judgment than the sadism and debauchery of Nero and Caligula, for his remote-control killing (so much like his addictive TV games) endangers the entire planet and all its beings, over which he rides roughtired playing cowpoke in ATVs--and attack jets he borrows from the taxpayers.