- Well, that's it. The great American electoral agony is
over at last. Now George W. Bush - the duly elected, finally legitimate
president of the United States - can get back to doing what he does best:
killing people for corporate profit and personal aggrandizement.
-
- Yes, it's a hard blow for the world. Yes, it's a deep
shame for American democracy, poisoned by lies, fear, greed and hysteria.
Yes, it means that tens of thousands of innocent people will now be
killed--by
more war, more neglect, more ignorance, more repression, more brutality,
more hatred, more fanaticism. Yes, it means that the planet will be gashed
with more wounds, smeared with more filth, left to wither and die. Yes,
it's a giant step backward for the human spirit, back to the muck of
arbitrary
rule by vicious elites and their ham-fisted goons, their well-wadded
courtiers,
their yapping sycophants. Yes, it means that somewhere out there, in the
blood-dimmed haze of a dark age falling, Lucifer and bin Laden are lighting
cigars and raising a glass to toast the victory of their good friend
George.
-
- These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how
to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments,
cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the
shadows
and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and
broken dreams?
-
- Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high,
laughing
fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers
and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name?
Let's dispense with lamentation--give not a single moment to that emotional
indulgence--and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear
down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still
glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin that Bush and his terrorist partners
have made of the world.
-
- Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist--without
violence,
the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary
backsliders
in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing
up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant.
Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands
on our world and rape it like beasts in mindless rut. Fight them with the
truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people
they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.
-
- This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how
impervious
the Bush Machine--that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen,
Congressional
rubber-stamps, hard-right media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed
theocrats, neo-conservatives, neo-Confederates, war profiteers, think-tank
bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, gun nuts and
woman-haters--might
appear at the moment. Let's look at the facts. Despite four years of the
most relentless barrage of propaganda, deceit, misinformation and
fearmongering
ever hurled against a free society, more than 54 million people voted to
reject Bush and all his works: his Hitlerite policy of aggressive war;
his gulag system of torture and lawless detention; his savage assault on
civil rights, the environment, working people and the poor; his systematic
destruction of social programs; his transfer of sovereignty from
individuals
and communities to the iron grip of his corporate donors; his trashing
of hard-won international agreements on nuclear weapons, conventional arms,
war crimes, global warming, the rights of women and the protection of
children;
his unleashing of rabid religious zealots into the bowels of government
to set policies on science, health, education, welfare, while sucking up
billions in public money to fund their sectarian causes.
-
- Such mass dissent--even in "wartime," in the
face of the Machine--is surely cause for hope. Moreover, recent academic
studies show that a large majority of Bush supporters actually disagree
with him on everything from the Kyoto treaty to missile defense to
international
law to workers' rights--but somehow believe that he shares their views.
Most Bush-backers also still believe that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda
colluded
in the September 11 attacks and that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction--yet
this same majority says that the conquest of Iraq would be illegitimate
if there were no WMD and no 9/11 connection. Thus more than half of the
Bush voters on Tuesday oppose his actual policies, including the criminal
war in Iraq--they just don't know it yet, because they're mired in
carefully-cultivated
delusion.
-
- Of course, many Bush voters are willfully deluded, glad
to be suckered and betrayed. They love the ludicrous puppet-show of his
supposed greatness, his all-seeing wisdom, his mandate from God. They get
teary-eyed at the thought of his honesty and goodness--while he kills
100,000
innocent people in Iraq, as a new medical study shows, with a brutally
stupid military aggression based on lies and fantasies, fomenting more
terrorism with each new barbarity and gorging his cronies on blood money.
This hard core will never respond to the truth.
-
- But if we can enlighten even the smallest percentage
of Bush's razor-thin majority, then support for his murderous folly and
waste will quickly erode. One by one, the puppet-strings will snap, and
America's headlong plunge into tyranny, bigotry and endless imperial war
can perhaps--perhaps--be halted, even reversed.
-
- It's worth the fight. Let's take it on. In the words
of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity
and justice starts now.
-
- Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a
regular contributor to CounterPunch. His new book, Empire Burlesque: The
Secret History of the Bush Regime, is now available at
www.globaleyefloyd.com.
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd11032004.html
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