Daily bummer

There’s nothing in the news this week but inhumanity, mass murder, and a total lack of any sort of justice for those who rape kill and fuck over good people.
Last week, in response to terroristic heckling in southern outskirts of their eternally disputed territory, the Israeli army rolled into the Gaza strip for what amounts to the most shameless display of hatred and brutal violence in recent memory. It was done with American tax dollars and with our full political support. Anyone with the illusion that Americans maintain the moral high ground needs to think long and hard about the massacre we all just saw on television. It was a racial hate crime of the highest degree and we picked up the tab. As of yesterday thirteen Israelis had lost their lives as opposed to the nine hundred or so dead in Gaza. But so be it, they’re not god’s chosen race, right? To a Zionist, They’re niggers and their lives are just so much stinking litter to be burned.
Equally shocking is the reaction on this front. Americans have reacted to the daily massacres in Gaza by switching the dial to whatever football game is on the other channel. Even worse has been the so-called Christian response, which we saw a little bit of here in Denver a couple of days ago at the pro-Israel rally in front of the state capitol. The people that turned out for it vomited all manner of unconvincing rhetoric to justify the actions of a small fanatical race cult that has played this country like a violin for decades. The argument in favor of the murders ranged from senseless comparisons to the holocaust to patriotic slogans to the idea of Israel “defending itself.” As if a thing like this can be called defensive. It’s pretty hard for me to accept that people turned out to take pride in this sort of inhumanity. If I had known about the rally in advance I would have gone over there sporting an Israeli flag with a swastika stitched onto it.
It’s not clear what Israel expects, but they seem to believe the Palestinians will simply dry up and die if they keep the jackboot on their throat long enough. But that won’t ever happen. Hatred will escalate forever, and someday Israel may find itself alone and isolated, peering into the next episode of the holocaust without any protection. And that will be perfectly fitting for them. It will be what they earned.
Let’s not get too sentimental about the poor Palestinians though. Just because they are being evicted from their lands and murdered in mass numbers doesn’t necessarily make them innocent. If the tables were somehow turned they would do the same thing to the Jews. It’s too easy to side with the victims in a world where the strong kill and the weak are killed, regardless of who’s who. It’s too easy to demonize those with the power to do wrong, to never think about what the weak would do if they were suddenly empowered. For instance, in America the guilt tends to be loaded onto the archetype of the oppressive white man. But can you imagine what sort of insane and vicious social fist-fuck would have ensued if the blacks were in control instead? There certainly would be no talk about universal tolerance and reparations for slavery. Oh, digressions.
At this time the real crime lies in the general popular apathy about everything. What happens in Israel is someone else’s problem and to the common American it takes too much effort to read a newspaper and care about what it says. Those who back this sort of violence are few and far between, but those who let it happen through their lack of concern are everywhere. And that’s what we’ll be held guilty for if we ever have to stand and be judged. It looks subtle on the surface, but there’s blood on our hands. We mostly looked the other way while crimes were being committed.
There was also yet another nasty bummer at breakfast this morning carried by disappointing articles in the Times. Looks like the new president has no interest whatsoever in launching any sort of criminal investigations into the sleazy fucked up Gestapo tactics that characterized the last administration’s policies and programs. It gives me the impression that he’s afraid to cross the CIA. Obama basically said he respects them too much to put them into circumstances where they would have to be constantly looking over their shoulder while trying to work.
Really?
Seems like people with the power to commit those crimes ought to be considering the consequences and repercussions. Bush was already talking about doing pre-emptive pardons for these unethical creeps until Cheney put an end to that by remarking that pardons are unnecessary for people who haven’t committed a crime. And there’s the catch. They have not technically committed any crimes. The Bush administration has been so insidiously careful in maintaining their legal cover that even while completely unethical acts were made policy, they kept their asses covered. I wish they had been this thoroughly careful while they were theorizing their bungled war. But the difference is that in a botched war there’s someone else to pay the price. When there’s crime or debacle in American politics, those responsible always walk away unscathed while others bleed for it on some foreign soil. There’s no responsibility. You can ruin countless lives, lie to the public, fuck a country over, be it consciously or accidentally, and then just retire. The worst-case scenario is to go home humiliated and live out the rest of your years in wealthy seclusion like Nixon.
Watching the Bush administration slither out that way has me feeling a vicious desire for revenge. Humiliation is not enough. The man and all his accomplices need to be arrested and mercilessly interrogated on national television. Maybe even dragged behind a pickup truck. We’d have the ultimate reality show on our hands. Producers could pitch it with a title like Executive Fear Factor.

January 12, 2009 / Denver