The Speech, Aruba, Iraq; and connections

Twenty-seven more. Dead. Ended. No more life. More than eighteen hundred. Every morning, the first thing I do upon rising is turn on NPR, in order to learn - straight from the shoulder without the pap - if my friends have been killed. Dreary. I have a friend fighting in Iraq, you see.

Every weekend, it's perhaps worse. At the coffee shop my friends and I frequent, I'm reminded again and again that days before we invaded Iraq on the asinine but apparently successful pretext that it had something to do with "terror" and the World Trade Center attack, I predicted all but exactly what would happen and where we would be now. A couple of friends are pretty close to demanding that I do something.

This weekend, it'll be worse. I'll ask my friends how many letters they've written in order to add their voices to those opposing the Bush League and its self-serving war. I get some hang-dog looks. "Americans" - there are 34 nations in the Americas, you know - are a people singularly concerned with only their interests, just like their miscreant president. They just talk over coffee. They forgot to write the letters they promised me they would. But they do worry about Lonnie, our police officer friend who has gone to Iraq. That's nice.

Lonnie was back a couple of months ago, by the way, on leave. I think we made his time with us a little difficult. When we asked how things were going, he struggled before he said, "It's . . . difficult." Lonnie is a loyal soldier, you see. He was also one of those who heard me predict before we invaded what would happen and what's happening now. It's difficult, all right.

Meanwhile, corporate "America's" hideous profit soar. Industrial Military Complex companies like Halliburton's profits are not announced, of course. Neither does anyone - except me, I guess - wonder how anyone can stoop so low as to profit from a war being fought by your own country. Isn't their freedom being protected too? If our families can contribute the bodies and lives of our young people, why can't our corporations contribute their goods and services? If was isn't profitable, doesn't that guarantee - especially in a capitalist nation - that there will be found every possible pretext for war?

Remember the reasons we were given for our being in Iraq? Remember the truth?

Remember Luis Diaz? Diaz got out of jail today after twenty years. DNA has finally proved he wasn't guilty. Why do I mention Luis? I mention him because his life meant little or nothing to the rest of us, either. Like soldiers and others who have no way to defend themselves - people who can't afford to pay lawyers whose hourly fee is more than a social security dependent person's monthly income - against the vicious mad dog that is government, Luis Diaz lost his life. A lot of it, anyway.

But I can't get my friends to so much as write a letter in protest. And that, my fellow "Americans," is why more than eighteen hundred of our best are dead, hundreds - no, thousands - maimed for life. That is why our legal system is a bad accident looking for somewhere to happen (and that while our addled media bloviates concerning Aruba and its handling of the Holloway matter). That is why a judge was obliged recently to order a state to provide proper medical care to its inmates (while our government and is sycophant media can get away with continuing to rail about prison conditions in Cuba).

You don't have the time to write a letter. You didn't have the time to do even the tiny amount of research that would have been necessary to disprove lies as obvious as an elephant in the bathroom where Iraq was concerned. You don't build weapons of mass destruction in your garage, you know. Neither do you grow bacteriological or chemical weapons in your bathtub. Your government has been bragging for decades that they can read your license plate from outer space - remember? They can (and they do) bug your phone from there, too.

We have the government we deserve. Our president personifies the nation he "leads." He's everything we are, a clumsy, muddled, but rich kid who buys whatever he wants, then ruins it (he did that all the way to the White House - why are we surprised that he's doing the same there?)

But you don't know history. It's another failing common to the people who are too apathetic to write their government a letter. So you won't realize that it's only been since WW-2, where we fought a character who called himself "the Fuehrer," that everyone in government started calling himself a "leader." "Fuehrer" means leader, you know. Do you wonder what that's about? I don't. I read history.