I'm in a foul mood today. Johnny Cash died, and it's just snowballed from there.
I figured I'd post two things I've written on Fotolog, since they seem to be where I'm at. Two years on, I'm still ruminating on 9/11, but then, I have a brain like a cow has a stomach, so no surprises there.
Comment #1, slightly edited, was on my fotolog for 9/11/2003.
(black picture with white border posted) You can imagine what should go here. Shock. Horror. Anxiety. Vengeance. Fear. Loss. Requiem.I`m tired of the endless media treacle, the twee faux-patriotic displays, and the fascism that seems to be prevailing in this country. I don`t want any more endless intellectual navel-gazing that gets us nowhere. I don`t want to sing "God Bless America" just because otherwise the terrorists have already won. I`m fed up with Todd Beamer being treated as if he was the only person on that plane who resisted. I`m fed up with the snobbish, arrogant anti-Americanism pouring from the mouths of so-called intellegent people, and I`ve equally had it with the pro-American jingoists who wave aside any reasonable question with some equivocation of the query to not being a true patriot. And, most of all, I`m weary of a war of terrorism whose fruits are hundreds of dead Americans, thousands of dead civilians, and a certain Saudi ass still alive and well and living in Pakistan.
What I want is for 3,000 people to still be living and not senselessly annihilated by hate. I want the world that existed on September 10th back. That, however, is impossible. Time is linear. I have to live with the immutability of the final acts of nineteen cowardly men fueled by the policies of my government and the governments of the Middle East.
We`re all human beings, regardless of what we believe or where we were born. The evil that lives in this world thrives on the inflammatory hatred that comes from the streets and the informed hatred that comes from the so-called elite. And it must stop, before another man is tortured for knowing the wrong people or another truck delivers another incendiary payload....
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. -- G.K. Chesterson
Comment #2 I left in the comments for this picture.
We try our best as Americans to be good people, give to charity, show some civility. Yeah, we're cluefucks when it comes to geography and what goes on outside our borders, but we give billions in foreign aid, and we respond when there's a disaster by sending immense quantities of aid. We're not the best at rebuilding, but we try. And, yet, all we get is endless anger from the rest of the world. Laughing Brazilian morons laughing at our misfortune. It's like a crowd in a soccer stadium cheering because the best player on a hated rival just got severely injured by a vicious tackle from a player on the home team. Then they boo because the player is still alive at the end of it.No one deserves to be murdered, just as no one deserves to die of starvation or disease. Showing your support for murder or starvation or disease just because you think the victim "deserved it" is a sign of ignorance and cowardice and hate. Ignorance and cowardice and hate is what terrorism thrives on.
I'm starting to understand why there are so many in the USA who think we should cut off foreign aid. Even though we give far too little to help the less fortunate, we rarely get a word of gratitude, and if we do we can't hear it above the anti-American snobs with the blood-soaked words of hate pouring from their mouths and pens.
Shakespeare was right:
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones; -- Julius Caesar, Act III Sc. 2
