©2007 UrbisMedia
I used to spend a lot of July 4ths abroad, several of them in Britain when I was leading travel-study groups of students. I enjoyed bringing over with me a bag of those little American flags on toothpicks that they stick in canapés and sandwiches, so that we could good-naturedly tweak the Brits by sticking them in our food at breakfast. Most of them didn’t know or care that it was a celebration of the day we won our independence from them. That was a different time, when America had some goodwill to spend abroad. I wouldn’t even think of that today, not even in England, which Bush lapdog Tony Blair (who will forever be so known) dragged into Bush’s Iraq War (as it will ever be known) and caused his people to call for his resignation. Most everywhere else in the world our flag is an invitation for everything from being ignored to sneers and snide remarks, to possible harm.
I won’t even be flying or displaying a flag again today, at home. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love my country, but it just doesn’t feel like my country anymore. Not the one I remember at least, even in what used to be its worst of days under the likes of Nixon and Reagan. I just can’t do anything that will seem—if only to me—to be playing along with the charade of patriotism that will be managed for political effect by the Bush administration. Not after, literally like a thief in the night, he once again waited until Congress was recessed and Americans were busily engaged in a long holiday weekend, to announce very un-publicly, his commutation of Traitor Scooter Libby’s sentence of 30 months—30 months for treason! Although the sentence was passed down by a judge appointed by his administration, after a prosecution by a prosecutors appointed by his administration, after his (obviously disingenuous) statements that he wanted the perpetrators of the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame found and punished, that the sentence (well within the Federal sentencing guidelines) was, he said, “too harsh” was for little Scooter, and so he would let him walk. Once again the law means nothing to Bush, as it is similarly regarded by his VP and Attorney General.
In fact, the flaunting of the law this time probably owes to his need to protect himself and those guys from indictment. Libby’s commutation puts him in a legal position where he can invoke the 5 th amendment if necessary. So it was a likely strategic payoff for Scooter to keep his mouth shut—it was his obstruction of justice that got him in court in the first place—in return for a commutation and, probably eventually, a pardon. A more corrupt bunch of liars, thieves and traitors would never make it as fiction. As reality it is more than this country should bear. But alas, we do not have Britain’s parliamentary system, where a bad vote of confidence can be a course correction. We can’t even get enough congressional votes to assess confidence in Attorney General Gonzales, who sat and lied and dissembled day after day before them. Talk of impeachment fares no better, since there apparently has been no adulterous act between consenting adults. [1] Bush’s approval ratings are the lowest in history, but he is virtually untouchable, and he and is strategists know it. Cheney can give Congress the finger (he has) and even say that he is not “part of the Executive Branch”) to avoid surrendering information they have a right to request. [2] He is one of the architects of preemptive war, torture of POWs, rendition, and spying on the American people, and he is all but inviolate.
For a long time we have regarded our political system as “self-correcting,” like a pendulum that would swing from right to left and back again, gyroscopically keeping us on course to our self-annointed destination as “the greatest country the world has ever known” and other bullshit. Well these guys have proven different. First they proved they could steal a national election, and they proved that the politics of fear is the greatest politics. Hitler and Stalin proved it; we just had to find an American version of it. Well, Al Qaeda pointed the way. Maybe those guys weren’t as smart as we think, but they sure found the chinks in more than our civil air defense. They lit the candle and Bush intends to burn it all the way to the bottom. He is still sending them American troops to blow apart (averaging about 5/day), Afghanistan is slowly being re-taken by the Taliban, thanks to American troops knocking off large numbers of civilians. Even growing numbers of dumb Republicans recognize that this war is lost as more and more generals admit it. [3] AQ found the perfect political storm of cowards who would never put themselves in the way of the harm they so easily send others into and the Evangelical Christian zealots who would put them in office. They found the greedy bastards whose first allegiance is to the corporation, not the Constitution. They gave them the power to destroy a great country.
Maybe America will correct itself. It will likely let George Bush go back to Crawford unscathed, and Cheney to wherever the hell he goes to enjoy his Halliburton dividends, and the rest will hope the country is still to busy trying to extract itself from Iraq, and too weary of the polarization, to bother much going after all the sleazy minions of this most corrupt, sleazy and un-American administrations, to do much about what justice demands.
So I’m not playing along. I’m ashamed to be an American these days and I’ll be damned if I’ll join in the Bush PR campaign and show the flag. I will quietly thank those who have served this country— rather than their own lust for power and their economic greed —for their service and their true patriotism. Until this nightmare is over I’m a crypto-American.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.4.2007)
[1] Ironically, the Libby commutation has shaken the hive of the Clinton haters—which is the now classic smokescreen response to Bush’s crimes. They have been out in force in the media talking about how Clinton “was convicted”(?) –they conflate impeachment, which is merely an indictment, with conviction. Mind you, these people are addled and most of them have intelligence quotients like hat sizes. But they love to hate Bill.
[2] Earlier in this administration he refused them by invoking “Executive Privilege”.
[3] Although Colin Powell hasn’t said much. He still trying to figure out how those aluminum tubes can be used to make weapons of mass destruction.