I’m of the opinion that it’s important to boldly display one’s political colors, particularly in a time of intense political crisis like today. That’s why this blog, typically reserved for mundane fodder like baby photos and noodle shop reviews, is increasingly filled with the kind of acerbic prose you find in recent entries regarding the election. I think it’s best to call a spade a spade, or in the this case to call a lying, incompetent, war-mongering criminal a lying, incompetent, war-mongering criminal .
But blogging politics is dicey business, as you run the risk of pissing people off, or at the very least hurting their feelings if they happen to stand on the opposite side of the political fence. I have, it seems, succeeded in doing just that. It wasn’t intentional. I don’t know anyone (or didn’t, until now) that supports Bush, and as most of my friends are proud, card-carrying liberals, the thought that some of my fauthful readers might actually belong to that 51% percent of America I’ve been calling dullards didn’t occur to me.
Sorry about that. I’ll tone down the vitriol a bit, now that I know that some of you, for whatever misguided and logic-defying reasons, actually signed up for four more years of Bush/Cheney.
And to those who would say I don’t have the right to “bitch about America” because I don’t live there, I think you’ve got it backwards. The correct admonition is, “If you don’t like it you can just leave!”. Which I did, and that actually ENTITLES me to join the rest of the free world in bitching about America.
Not only that, but I’m also more qualified to bitch about America than you folks back home. Being outside of America gives one a valuable opportunity to see beyond the domestic whitewash of patriotism, goodwill, and love for democracy with an objectivity clearly missing in the US media. You get to see America as the world sees it, not as Karl Rove and his cabal would like you to.
The “international” America is waging an unjust, unlitateral war on Iraq that has killed over 100,000 innocent civilians and is certain to unite our enemies against us and incite even more acts of terrorism on Americans at home and abroad. Even more egregious is that no one has bothered to mention this fact to the American people, who still think–even after Abu Ghraib and the murder of thousands of women and children–that what we’re doing there is somehow noble.
This America, the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases, says NO to the Kyoto Protocol even when the evidence of global warming is alarmingly clear, presumably for the reason that US corporations might suffer. Meanwhile, the poles are melting and the waters are rising, and tropical storms churn the oceans like never before. I wonder how many Florida voters voted for that?
This America drops out of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty while “policing” the rest of the world for weapons of mass destruction with threats and outright aggression.
This America is waging war on its own citizens and incarcerating more all the time through the use of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses and harsh “three strikes” laws that have been proven not to deter crime or minimize drug use.
This America is extremely well-armed and poorly educated, a combination that frightens everyone. It doesn’t understand its place in the global community or the community itself. Increasingly insular, myopic, and self-centered, this America looks more and more like its Commander-in-Chief, an oversized 6-year old wandering around the playground with a big club, bored and looking for something to whack.
This, like it or not, is the America the rest of us see. And while everyone recognizes America’s unique role as the world’s sole superpower and sees her as a long-standing symbol of freedom and democracy, we nonetheless feel growing shock and dismay at the country’s dangerous new direction and arrogant unilateralism.
You should, too.