Still it's just a symptom, as is the eternal war, of rotten government, which itself is the poisoned fruit of greed, lust for power and madness -- all nourished by primarily money, some furtively, but most quite blatantly open in the form of campaign contributions, and administered by a noxious cadre of lobbyists, all quite legal in our ex-republic but counter to the criminal code of manyof the world's actually representative governments.
What is the opposition to this governmental putrefaction? One skinny little congressman from Ohio, whom no one pays heed because he's short (!) and a few elected women who get beyond gender issues. All others fall to the money since not to accept it and to represent its interests is to invite their demise in the next election to the better greased candidate.
Quite soon after the arguably unconstitutionalbut obtusely bipartisan endorsement ofBush's War of Lies, there did in fact arise an apparently grassroots -- at least initially -- peace activist movementwhich appeared to offer some promise of opposition. Lamentably, after eight years, all it has produced is an endless array of nifty signs with snazzy slogans, some weekend larks on the Mall, a handful of peace celebrities, a plethora of forgettable rhetoric, a multitude of organizations more concerned each with its individual identity, unique nuance of message,and "organizational refinement," as one of their luminaries phrased it.
What the peace movement -- we must get a grip on integrity now! -- has not produced is any one single united, substantial or credible challenge to a rotten government that it must change its ways. Logic requires the sad conclusion that after eight years of fecklessness we may have no more actual promise from the efforts of the peace movement than eight more years of the same demonstrably pitiful performance, or perhaps a lifetime's.
Well then, what of revolution? Actually it iscurious that a nation born of this means has exhibited little stomach for such since, regardless of the past atrocities perpetrated by its government such as the slaughter of the American native peoples, the long tolerance of slavery as economically advantageous, the war of conquest with Mexico,the crassly commercially driven war against Spain, the senseless submission of our troops to the carnage in the trenches of the First World War, the Korean slaughter, and of course Vietnam. Perhaps we can take a kinder view of WWII since its instigators were possibly even more treacherous than is our wont, if one can conceive of that possibility.
What is there now left for this senior citizen so deeply offended and disgustedby our rotten government and beyond any reasonable threshold of patience with any decent opposition to be mounted against it to recover some semblance of the America we were taught about in school and actually once believed in and trusted?
Emigration to the south of France or a Pacific island is probably too much to expect of these ancient bones and a tongue now geriatricly stiff to a new language. Perhaps I'll return to my jungle by the Gulf in west-central Florida, there to cultivate chickpeas, forage for wild fungi, to forget sufficient of the treachery to accommodate re-immersion in my poetry, and to confront any who test my trip lines with my recently acquired shotgun.
To confront all, that is, except those few friends of intelligence who know our government's rottenness, who have the integrity to admit the charade of activist-hobbyism, and perhaps who could possessthe golden key to finally a decent solution. Such as these I would embrace and support in every possible way. But mind now, I may not have another eight years of biological capability.
