What's Come Over Us?
Crammed with Distressful Politics
JULES RABIN, Counterpunch, October 27, 2004

Politics, grown fat on popular outrage and indignation, has taken a seat at the common table.

Breakfast at our house often begins with a rant by me, over some current astonishment that has dropped down on us out of the overnight news; my wife enduring and sympathizing. Hardly a dinner in company, or a convivial Sunday brunch, fails to bring out a session of deploring what the crowd in and around the White House have lately perpetrated: the rigged war in Iraq first and foremost, that improbable man in the White House second, and his Devilish Works third.

We wonder: could his smirk and his duplicity and his strange manner of simultaneously bullying and wheedling actually fit, with lock and key exactness, some streak of character running through our country? What have we become, that we could adopt such a visibly warped man as maximum leader? To what dread place are he and his faction taking us?

The urgent hot breath of Southern and other rising fundamentalisms has reached our faces even in chill, steady New England. The thinly progressive attitudes and legislation of the three-quarters century past that we have come to take for granted as a minimum basis of ordinary civic decency and security, have been dissolving under us like a sandbank scoured by a current grown suddenly swift, dark, and powerful.

Hard-bitten, turned inward, and scared ... will that be the new face of America, a consequence of our cohabitation with this erroneous President? [...more]

- posted by ARYABHATT @ 6:34 pm