IP: Mark Morford: 'I'm patriotic, but not the slightest bit reassured by Bush'

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Sender: rberger () imap ultradevices com
> Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 20:32:18 -0700
> From: "Robert J. Berger" <rberger () ultradevices com>
> Mark Morford: 'I'm patriotic, but not the slightest bit reassured by Bush'
> Posted on Friday, October 19 @ 10:01:12 EDT
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> By Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle
> http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
>
>
> This much is true: It really is possible to love your country and value your
> freedoms and still believe the government is full of fools and prevaricators
> and BS artists and Dick Cheney. Really.
>
> It is still possible to feel warmly patriotic in personal and important ways
> and yet believe the military and the generals and the war machine do not
> have your best interests at heart and really couldn't care less what those
> interests are anyway but thank you for sharing now please sit down and do as
> we tell you and by the way, thanks for all the flags and the money.
>
> And it is still possible to feel unified and spiritually connected to all
> that is good and righteous about your generally nonviolent Americanism --
> you know, wine and sex and good music, large dogs and literature and clean
> water and tongue kissing in the streets -- and still be depressed when our
> famously nonintellectual president talks to the country like we're all five
> years old and heavily dosed on Ritalin.
>
> When Bush employs phrases like "bring the evildoers to justice" over and
> over, 17 times in one speech alone, and he furrows his brow like a serious
> Muppet and offers carefully scripted reassurances deliberately lacking in
> polysyllabism and detailed explanation because that would be, you know,
> complicated.
>
> When he repeats primitive little maxims like "There are no negotiations" and
> responds to press-conference questions about the vitriolic anti-US hatred
> that has blossomed around the globe by saying, "I'm amazed. I just can't
> believe it because I know how good we are," thus causing a giant global
> spasm of multinational cringing and openly insulting the intelligence of
> anyone who can walk and breathe at the same time.
>
> When he delivers very earnest speeches he had no part in writing, and when
> he is forced to speak extemporaneously, sans script or TelePrompTer, and is
> reduced to simplistic good-guy/bad-guy platitudes and flustered, rapid
> blinking, and who cannot for the life of him articulate a complex idea, some
> sort of nuanced elucidation of our nation's motives and positioning, that
> contains more than one possible level of meaning.
>
> But perhaps that's too harsh. Unfair. He's the president, after all. He is a
> Good Man. He's our leader right now, he's doing his best and he's all we've
> got. This is our rallying cry, our motto: He's all we've got. There's your
> bumper sticker. And there he is.
>
> Except for Cheney, which isn't exactly reassuring. No one has ever seen this
> man's mouth actually move. No one can take one look at his oddly spiritless
> and wan figure and not think, oh dear God, that man is running on fumes.
> >From a bunker. With ropes and pulleys.
>
> But you're not supposed to. In fact, you really aren't allowed to criticize
> the president or the veep right now, not supposed to feel strangely
> leaderless and adrift, not permitted to look upon the events of the past
> weeks with much wariness or bitterness or a disquieting sense that we're
> setting things in motion that have no predictable outcome -- ugly,
> subterranean, hateful things that could last years and will surely cost
> billions and will deeply entrench the nation in a bizarre and poisonous
> shell game with shadowy opponents of largely unknown capability and do you
> hear that? That soft roaring? That's the sound of the GOP-stroked military
> machine, quietly cheering.
>
> Never mind the staggering multibillion-dollar political mess in Saudi Arabia
> that fueled bin Laden's network for years, or the enormous oil fields that
> are desperately vulnerable to terrorist attack at any moment. Never mind the
> US government's outright rejection of new advancements in alternative fuels
> to get us away from oil and out of the Gulf entirely.
>
> Instead we get: Evildoers. Air strikes. Hundreds of dead civilians. Rumsfeld
> denials. And Bush, squinting, saying things only small children and
> GasMaskExpress.com shoppers find comforting and manly.
>
> It is, Bush tells us, a war on terrorism. We will eradicate terrorism
> through largely violent and aggressive means, because that is what we must
> do and what we always do and everything else takes too damn long. We have to
> do something. This is the common wisdom. Bush said so. Mr. Rumsfeld told him
> so, with his black and shiny hawk eyes all a-glimmer. Disagree? You
> traitorous whiner.
>
> This war, it will be just like the War on Drugs. It will be potent and
> effective and our objectives will be clear. The nation had a nasty drug
> problem and we declared a war on drugs and spent billions over many years
> and now you can't buy drugs anymore. It will be just like that.
>
> There is more than one way to respond to the horror of Sept. 11. And there
> is more than one kind of patriotism. We forget this. You do not have to
> rally around Bush and tolerate Cheney's chthonic creepiness and wave a
> frantic flag and believe every scripted half-truth that drizzles out of the
> Pentagon, applaud the nonstop attacks on an already demolished nation.
> Pro-America does not mean pro-war. Or pro-Bush. Or anti-Afghanistan. Or
> pro-little-flags-on-SUV-antennas.
>
> It means thinking independently and getting better informed and filtering
> your news very carefully and realizing that just because one version of the
> American aggro attitude is currently being ramrodded down society's throat
> doesn't mean you have to swallow.
>
> It means you don't have to find Tomahawk missiles really cool or think all
> those tens of thousands of Europeans and Egyptians and world citizens
> protesting the US bombings must be commie jerks, or feel sad and morally
> depleted when you can't seem to draw any intellectual nourishment whatsoever
> when Bush declaims, "Terrorists want us to stop our lives, stop our flying,
> stop our buying. But this nation will not be intimidated by evildoers." You
> don't have to buy into that infantile hokum for a moment.
>
> After all, this is America.
>
> Thoughts for the author? Email him.
>
> Reprinted from The San Francisco Chronicle:
> http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/
> --


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