Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Shoes of the Monster
Woke up this morning with a vision of President Bush melodically banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations and with every bang, a vision of that other long-ago country unveiled itself. Probably just the remnants of a bad dream. So I pulled out the ol' Book of Dreams (not really, I surfed the Net) to see what it could mean...
There are few political memories from my childhood, but Nikita Khrushchev is definitely in the top ten. He was a real Grandpa-looking teddy bear with a fierce agenda. He wanted everyone to be just like him. I can still see the photos of him wielding his shoe at the table at the United Nations. But I really didn't know why. According to an article from the Word Times, Khrushchev was reacting to a speech that accused the Soviet Union of "swallowing up Eastern Europe, depriving it of political and civil rights". Gee. How scary. How appropriate. How Now.
We thought the Soviets were guilty of imperialism they took over country after country turned them into satellites and spread themselves so thin, militarily and financially, they collapsed.
Now, it seems to me, there is a reason we have history books and history classes. And ignoring the lessons is not it. Not that I have an answer. We invaded another country that never once attacked us. We used our bigotry and racism against similar cultures to nurture our fervor, puffed ourselves up, and went thundering into another people's land.
Even during the worst of our history would I have ever tolerated another country's interference. What if Russia would have invaded us during the horrendous days of the Sixties, when our own National Guard was ordered to shoot college students or when Local Police were ordered to beat African Americans. No matter how good-intentioned the Russians could have meant to be in saving us from our tyrants, it has always been our right and our duty to change and heal ourselves.
But now we are the invaders. It is too late. We have destroyed their infrastructures, their economy, their day-to-day lives, their right to be governed by their own tyrants. Now, we have invoked their hatred and martyrdom. We have created a far-worse enemy then the one we sought to destroy. We created a Holy Underdog with the Right to Defend against the superpower in a world that cheers for underdogs. If we were right to attack we can never prove it we attacked first, albeit with plenty of warning, and found no proof of deviltry.
"Now we are in a war over there no matter the winner we can't pay the costs. There's a monster on the lose, he's stuck our heads into a noose, and we sit there watching...watching..." (Steppenwolf)
Woke up this morning with a vision of President Bush melodically banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations and with every bang, a vision of that other long-ago country unveiled itself. Probably just the remnants of a bad dream. So I pulled out the ol' Book of Dreams (not really, I surfed the Net) to see what it could mean...
There are few political memories from my childhood, but Nikita Khrushchev is definitely in the top ten. He was a real Grandpa-looking teddy bear with a fierce agenda. He wanted everyone to be just like him. I can still see the photos of him wielding his shoe at the table at the United Nations. But I really didn't know why. According to an article from the Word Times, Khrushchev was reacting to a speech that accused the Soviet Union of "swallowing up Eastern Europe, depriving it of political and civil rights". Gee. How scary. How appropriate. How Now.
We thought the Soviets were guilty of imperialism they took over country after country turned them into satellites and spread themselves so thin, militarily and financially, they collapsed.
Now, it seems to me, there is a reason we have history books and history classes. And ignoring the lessons is not it. Not that I have an answer. We invaded another country that never once attacked us. We used our bigotry and racism against similar cultures to nurture our fervor, puffed ourselves up, and went thundering into another people's land.
Even during the worst of our history would I have ever tolerated another country's interference. What if Russia would have invaded us during the horrendous days of the Sixties, when our own National Guard was ordered to shoot college students or when Local Police were ordered to beat African Americans. No matter how good-intentioned the Russians could have meant to be in saving us from our tyrants, it has always been our right and our duty to change and heal ourselves.
But now we are the invaders. It is too late. We have destroyed their infrastructures, their economy, their day-to-day lives, their right to be governed by their own tyrants. Now, we have invoked their hatred and martyrdom. We have created a far-worse enemy then the one we sought to destroy. We created a Holy Underdog with the Right to Defend against the superpower in a world that cheers for underdogs. If we were right to attack we can never prove it we attacked first, albeit with plenty of warning, and found no proof of deviltry.
"Now we are in a war over there no matter the winner we can't pay the costs. There's a monster on the lose, he's stuck our heads into a noose, and we sit there watching...watching..." (Steppenwolf)
