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I notice Friday the Thirteenth has come on a Thursday this month. Portentous? I check the headlines every hour these days, wondering if Bush has extended his war onto the people of Iraq.
Congress has nibbled on the President's every suggestion of domestic threat, gobbled down his feast of lies about international crisis. They've fashioned a diet of Secretary of State Powell's spewings about the need for war. To avoid severe indigestion, our leaders will have to decide that the United Nations is irrelevant, that Europe is invalid, that a whole world of opposition has outlived its usefulness. They act as if they believe no one can stand against the United States when it is destined to prevail. After all, it is right. If there is doubt, it is weakness. If there is protest, it is rebellion. If there is resistance, it is futile. These maxims apply at home as well. Legislation in force and pending will criminalize and exterminate the unwise organizers opposed to this administration and cage those simply adverse to U.S. policy. People suspected of counter-ideas will risk severe treatment if the administration sways the legal process. 1984 is a bit late in arriving, but its ferocious teeth shine.
Last night I dreamt of a glory age when religious philosophy assuaged fears
of the stranger by teaching that others were kinspeople welcome in the eyes
of God. We are one humanity. Yet theology somehow corrupted loyalty to
that comforting authority into allegiance to the raised hand of the church
and the sword it held. Are we the one who fashioned that sword in
workshops where we sold our brain and muscle for a living? Did we make the
weapons? If doing so, we granted fearsome power to our leaders. We dread
that power ourselves and obey. We are the congregation in the church of
the bomb, the almighty conveyers of righteousness to those who will not
kneel. As subjects of leaders we carry on our shoulders, have we helped
dispense compliance in accordance with the imperial desires of our masters?
They are clever in subduing the weakest first. They order attacks against
university students, trade unions, a Granada, a Panama, a Somalia before
they order an attack on Iraq. They assault an Iraq before a Korea as a
public lesson demonstrating their terrible wrath for the benefit of those
who weigh their chances against U.S. forces.
President Bush is well aware of his God-like status. Diana Wichtel, a columnist for the New Zealand Herald, wrote today:
Now, emboldened by getting away with sounding increasingly like an Old Testament prophet rather than a 21st century world leader, Bush continues to blur the lines, not just between church and state but between the will of God and the will of George W. Bush.
In journalist Bob Woodward's behind-the-scenes book, Bush at War, we hear this from Bush: 'There is a human condition that we must worry about in times of war. There is a value system that cannot be compromised - God-given values. These aren't United States-created values.'
He is talking about things like freedom and mother love, apparently. But he's also setting up the outrageous notion that if and when America goes to war it will be about upholding Divine law. Nothing to do with American foreign policy.
Mary Riddell, writing in the United Kingdom's Observer, wrote today about British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush:
[God may be]...the coalescing agent of this war, the unifying bond between a prime minister guided by religious certitude and a president in thrall to Bible and gun.
[A Bush and Blair-led war] may become, or lead to, the first nuclear conflict of the century. It will also echo back through 2,500 years of bloodshed justified by the sway of good over evil. Bush should have studied Old Testament prophecy further.
Even the Pope is worried about being upstaged by Bush. As reported by Edward M. Gomez today in the 'World Views' column of the San Francisco Chronicle:
Civilta Cattolica, in a Vatican-approved text, blasted Bush's attempts to justify making war. It scoffed at the 'sort of messianic vocation' that has marked the foreign-policy perspective of the United States since World War II and the Cold War era...
Do we say yes to this condition? Are we obedient? Friday the Thirteenth doesn't arrive until June. Maybe we still have time to consider what should be done and do it. Should we take back the powers we have sacrificed on the alter of false security? Our efforts, one way or the other, will earn a destiny. Which?
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