Category: Politics

it would have been bad kar­ma to bash the amer­i­can media about patri­o­tism yes­ter­day so i held off until today. on my shift wednes­day night i was glanc­ing through a Time and Newsweek and mar­veled at the amount of pro­pa­gan­da that was present in the pub­li­ca­tions. This is eeri­ly like the devel­op­ment of the fas­cist sys­tem in Orwell’s 1984. every arti­cle and many of the adver­tise­ments pro­mot­ed a sort of blind unques­tion­ing alle­giance toward new pol­i­cy and oth­er gov­ern­ment action. Patri­o­tism it appears, has reached the point where either you must sup­port every aspect of gov­ern­ment or be in league with ter­ror­ists. i imag­ine the mccarthy era was like this except instead of being a pinko com­mie, you are help­ing out Islam­ic fanat­ics. the last time i checked, there was­n’t a law against this but now it appears that the Patri­ot Bill and office of Home­land Secu­ri­ty have changed our civ­il lib­er­ties in some very fun­da­men­tal ways. That is scary enough, but when our source of ‘free’ speech effec­tive­ly con­demns all naysay­ing I feel a lit­tle claus­tro­pho­bic. Why for instance do we need anoth­er gov­ern­ment over­sight admin­is­tra­tion for the cit­i­zens, if the FBI and CIA aren’t work­ing well, then make them bet­ter, don’t cre­ate a new sys­tem. its like tak­ing a car to the junk­yard because it has a flat tire and then ask­ing the GM to build you a new one from scratch. as far as i can tell, the US is los­ing the war on ter­ror­ism, because the US isn’t quite the land of the free that it used to be.

as for the whole pledge of alle­giance mum­bo­jum­bo, will the sep­a­ra­tion between church and state reach the point where ‘God Bless Amer­i­ca” is banned and reli­gious lob­by­ists are pre­vent­ed from express­ing their desires for new leg­is­la­tions? will reli­gion end up being banned alto­geth­er since the USA as an enti­ty allows church­es on her soil. i can see it com­ing. dubya’s gov­ern­ment is a scary scary thing.

i’d bet­ter hop on my plane to Pak­istan now since it is obvi­ous from the pre­vi­ous para­graphs that i am a cause of the prob­lem and not just an Amer­i­can exer­cis­ing my right to free speech. omy­god they are here already, bang­ing on the door! i haven’t even post­ed yet.! big broth­er is every­where!