I just watched the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which was moving, to say the least. Throughout my 37 years or so of political awareness, I NEVER thought I would be nostalgic for Richard Nixon. Nixon may have had his criminal side, but nothing as insidious and manipulative as CEO Bush. The Nixon White House perceived a real threat in John Lennon. In Lennon's FBI files is a letter from then Senator Strom Thurmond to the White House recommending deportation as a "strategic measure", and you know the rest of the story. (If not, you can read the actual FBI files here.)What the Bush White House has done is far more insidious. They have established the Executive Office as sacrosanct, immune from the fundamental principles of Checks and Balances. Because of the privilege of having a Republican rubber-stamp Congress, they have been able to sustain the illusion. Bush and his co-CEO Cheney have run the office like a corporation--expecting the nation to run on their directives, unquestioned and unchallenged. They have curbed our Bill of Rights, and called it the "Patriot" Act. Wherever Bush appears, protesters are cordoned off a safe distance from his (and the news cameras') presence. In the wake of the current U.S. Attorney scandal, they have agreed to unrecorded questioning of certain White House officials, and they not be under oath. Dissent, one of our fundamental rights--and the reason, I might add, that we are no longer English--is repressed, discouraged and equated with disloyalty and lack of patriotism.
In short, CEO Bush has hijacked the office of President. He promised when he first became President that he would restore dignity to the office (an obvious dig at President Clinton). He has, in fact, degraded it. His anti-intellectual, Crusade-centric, shoot-from-the-hip attitude has hurt our image around the world in such a way that it may take 50 years to restore it. One wishes now that his transgressions could have been as simple as getting a blow job from an intern!
Yes, I would prefer Nixon. Next to Bush, he was a lightweight. And this brings one bit of sadness to the fore---I miss John Lennon. What has allowed the current state of affairs is indifference. I would go so far as to say that the Holocaust did not happen primarily because of Jew-hating Nazis; it happened because of the indifference of the German people, the American people as well as the rest of the world. Indifference is more powerful than hatred. Lennon cared deeply about war, and put himself on the line to help end it. You may not know that he did not perform for money one time after the Beatles broke up. He only performed for political causes, and for free.
Imagine.
3 comments:
I was moved by Lennon's approach
to protest, there is that Ghandi dude again. It
seemed also to be a sort of mixture of Yoko's performance art and
Lennon's wish to use his fame to help the peace process . A guy like that
doesn't come along often, and it is a huge loss to the
cause. If he were alive now, he would be making
himself heard. MLou
And to think that under the "Patriot" Act, our own government might tap our phones if we act for peace. As Frank Zappa once sang, "It can't happen here."
I couldn't agree with you more. The blatant hypocrisy of this administration and its supporters has surprisingly made me feel more "Christian" and more truly "American" than ever before---in contrast to the lip service Bush and his cronies pay to these concepts.
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