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The movie "Stop Loss" (2007) outlines, in dramatic and personal ways, the cost of this obscene war in Iraq. This is not the economic cost, which is astronomical; it will take our children decades to pay it off, since the war has cost approximately three trillion (million million) dollars.
All this money was used to feed the greed of oil-executives and the politicians in their pockets. But the war went tragically wrong, and was a stupid idea in the first place. Nearly one million people have been killed in the Middle East-- all due to this war and its aftermath; and an astonishing number have been women and children. The movie, however, speaks to a higher cost of the war-- much higher. For its cost in terms of emotion are immense. And when a person has served his time in the army, and then, is expected to return to duty, the horrors are even deeper, and worse.
Lives, and entire families, are destroyed by this careless policy. And the lives of so many who survive the war are so irreversibly ruined that one might say that the "lucky" ones were those four thousand American girls and boys who so tragically and horrifyingly perished there. The movie also gives us a glimpse into the nightmare of some who survived, but might have wished that they had died.
This movie will move your heart; if you are a sensitive type, it will bring you to tears-- several times. The movie is a touching protest to a war that has killed thousands of American girls and boys and hundreds of thousands of Islamic people-- all to be laid at the door of careless American imperialism and greed for oil.
When are we finally going to drop the most expensive habit in the world-- that of relentless, incessant greed? It is far more dangerous, expensive, and harmful than any drug-habit. We would never consider electing anyone with a serious drug-habit to the White House. So, let us refuse also to elect anyone who has this more terrible habit-- that of unquenchable greed and obscene violence.
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Showing posts with label Iraq war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq war. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2008
Monday, October 08, 2007
The Evil Clown
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If Dr. Frank Burns, the notorious dysfunctional doc of M*A*S*H*, combined personalities with Alfred E. Newman, of Mad magazine fame, the result would be hilarious! It would be a clown of immense, hysterical proportions! But this kind of caricature, guiding the world's most powerful and destructive army, is not funny!
As a caricature of incompetence, george bush has transformed the world's most beautiful experiment in democracy into a hideous nightmare bristling with murder, torture, and ghastly weapons, including nuclear. America, the hope of the world, has become the horror of the world. This transformation occurred because the world's greatest, and only, superpower offensively and violently attacked a third-world country whose "soldiers" are often twelve-year-old boys!
And why? Bush tried to lie, and say that it was all about terrorism. But the entire world saw through this transparent tissue of lies. Everyone now knows that the war was always about oil-- getting an ocean of free oil because the U.S. "owned" the land under which it lay.
This naive and simplistic notion had bush and billionaire-buddies laughing and lapping up all the free oil that they wanted, and then, selling it for huge profits. But this occurred only in twisted imaginations. Their great, greedy dream never materialized.
Also, another real reason for this despicable war is that bush's father had a price on his head, threatened by Saddam due to the previous war. To accomplish their dark, evil task, bush and buddies were willing to sell out the environment. And they did, ignoring sound ecological laws that went back decades, and even reversing them, giving us all a blacker and bleaker world.
Today, it is not as easy to breathe in the U.S. as it was in twenty hundred. And Americans are suffering from bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma in record numbers-- a bonanza for bush's buddies in the pharmacology industry! For bush's pocketbook, ecological Armageddon is a win-win!
For this incompetent and sociopathic man suffers from the belief that he is Caesar or Napoleon, when in actuality, a village in Texas is missing its resident idiot! This one regime has done more damage than any of America's enemies. His war has been solely and singly responsible for the death of over three thousand American girls and boys, and for an estimated over one million Middle Eastern men, women, and children. Many young Americans have died, and will never again give anything to their country-- or to their horrified husbands, wives, or kids, still, and permanently, shell-shocked!
His "Shock and Awe" campaign, which rained down fire and terror from the skies, had the surrealistic feeling of a video-game being played by a madman. One has the compelling intuition that these dead and ruined Americans are just numbers in the "score-card" of bush's calculating, frigid mind. He refused even to attend the sad funerals of most.
Bush seems personally untouched by the death of thousands, or by the ruination of tens of thousands of irreversibly ruined American lives. (These were survivors who lost eyes, brains, arms, and legs.)
It is time that, as a people, we worked to restore America as a shining land of peace-- not the world's greatest terrorist organization or bloodiest "empire." It is time that we called murderous greed to task, recognizing that unleashed greed has terrible --often, irreversible-- consequences. It has already irrevocably ruined lives; and it threatens to ruin our planet.
*******
If Dr. Frank Burns, the notorious dysfunctional doc of M*A*S*H*, combined personalities with Alfred E. Newman, of Mad magazine fame, the result would be hilarious! It would be a clown of immense, hysterical proportions! But this kind of caricature, guiding the world's most powerful and destructive army, is not funny!
As a caricature of incompetence, george bush has transformed the world's most beautiful experiment in democracy into a hideous nightmare bristling with murder, torture, and ghastly weapons, including nuclear. America, the hope of the world, has become the horror of the world. This transformation occurred because the world's greatest, and only, superpower offensively and violently attacked a third-world country whose "soldiers" are often twelve-year-old boys!
And why? Bush tried to lie, and say that it was all about terrorism. But the entire world saw through this transparent tissue of lies. Everyone now knows that the war was always about oil-- getting an ocean of free oil because the U.S. "owned" the land under which it lay.
This naive and simplistic notion had bush and billionaire-buddies laughing and lapping up all the free oil that they wanted, and then, selling it for huge profits. But this occurred only in twisted imaginations. Their great, greedy dream never materialized.
Also, another real reason for this despicable war is that bush's father had a price on his head, threatened by Saddam due to the previous war. To accomplish their dark, evil task, bush and buddies were willing to sell out the environment. And they did, ignoring sound ecological laws that went back decades, and even reversing them, giving us all a blacker and bleaker world.
Today, it is not as easy to breathe in the U.S. as it was in twenty hundred. And Americans are suffering from bronchitis, emphysema, and asthma in record numbers-- a bonanza for bush's buddies in the pharmacology industry! For bush's pocketbook, ecological Armageddon is a win-win!
For this incompetent and sociopathic man suffers from the belief that he is Caesar or Napoleon, when in actuality, a village in Texas is missing its resident idiot! This one regime has done more damage than any of America's enemies. His war has been solely and singly responsible for the death of over three thousand American girls and boys, and for an estimated over one million Middle Eastern men, women, and children. Many young Americans have died, and will never again give anything to their country-- or to their horrified husbands, wives, or kids, still, and permanently, shell-shocked!
His "Shock and Awe" campaign, which rained down fire and terror from the skies, had the surrealistic feeling of a video-game being played by a madman. One has the compelling intuition that these dead and ruined Americans are just numbers in the "score-card" of bush's calculating, frigid mind. He refused even to attend the sad funerals of most.
Bush seems personally untouched by the death of thousands, or by the ruination of tens of thousands of irreversibly ruined American lives. (These were survivors who lost eyes, brains, arms, and legs.)
It is time that, as a people, we worked to restore America as a shining land of peace-- not the world's greatest terrorist organization or bloodiest "empire." It is time that we called murderous greed to task, recognizing that unleashed greed has terrible --often, irreversible-- consequences. It has already irrevocably ruined lives; and it threatens to ruin our planet.
*******
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