Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics.

Antidote? One reading of The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase. Substitute, in the above overall-meaningless sentence - the symbol blab for each of the words which renders it meaningless:

decent, intelligent, responsible, and especially! the execrable morally nuanced. Why? Because in this context they are as vague, personalized-in-connotation and thus useless as the much more common blab-words,

Freedom, Liberty, Goodness or say, "The American Way..".

And that's just ONE SENTENCE. No wonder the possibilities for anything resembling a rational political discussion in the US of A have sunk to.. vanishingly small. And THAT was true - before the chaos of 9/11 and the generation of the entire gamut of newer Newspeak: from maudlin sentimentality through, the occasional small piece of wisdom uttered amidst the flood of Jingoism and understandable shock.

But we're supposed to realize that humans mutter crazy stuff when in shock; we KNOW this from life experience. Eventually there's 'supposed' to be a return to the desire to place events in some honest perspective, with all previous history. And naturally enough - that ideal cannot be achieved. It's rendered even more difficult: for our daily casual abuse of Language in the name of Commerce 24/7; Commerce as Our Most Important raison d'etre: Commerce with its EZ, casual, *expected* tissue of small lies, so as to sell stuff.

{sigh}

Maybe in 2004 or 5, there will occur some "decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced)" non-revisionist history of the events we are still too close to.

But THIS bafflegab won't be anywhere near a pile of possible future candidates IMhO.

I Go Pogo. We have met the enemy and He is Us.



Ashton

.who hopes that by 2004-5, the New Ashcroftian Repression experiment shall have failed utterly and - by then, we CAN look for some sincere, if only barely-honest dissection of our position in the world. (If.. the New Ashcroftian / Prescott-Bushian military budget for Space War has not reached 40% of GNP, that is. If we get caught up in Hermann Kahn spasm war, well - - bend over and kiss your ass(es) Goodbye.)