Harper's, June, pg. 9
ashaanderson
wonderful, brave article for their June issue. Do yourself a favor and
read it. It's on page 9. But in case you don't get around to it, I
have included a couple of paragraphs from it below. Metcalf asks a
question that I'm sure has crossed the minds of more than a few
decent, rational, upstanding citizens in the last few years, at least
it has crossed mine.
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Excerpt from "On Simple Human Decency"
- by Ben Metcalf - Harper's Magazine, pg. 9 - June 2006
"I am therefore led to wonder what the common citizen is allowed to
"say" anymore, in print or otherwise, and still feel reasonably sure
that some indignant team of G-men, or else a pair of gung-ho local
screws, will not drag him away to a detention center, there to act
out, with the detainee as a prop, that familiar scene in which one
hero cop or another is patriotically unable to resist certain
outbursts against the detainee and what were once imagined to be the
detainee's constitutional rights. Because I am loath to violate
whatever fresh new mores the people have agreed upon, or have been
told they agree upon, and because I do not care to have my ass kicked
repeatedly in a holding cell while I beg to see a lawyer, I almost
hesitate to ask the following question. I will ask it, though, out of
what used to be called simple human decency:
Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush,
the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?"
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Given the mess Bush has gotten us into, I'd say Metcalf's question is
a reasonable one. Not only is Bush an idiot, he is a corporate shill
who has pimped the White House out to his shady, corporate cronies.
And besides being stupid and pathologically unethical, Bush is also
dangerously insane. He consults religious fundamentalists to make sure
his foreign policy suits their wet dream vision of the Apocalypse. He
is also personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of innocent men, women, children, animals and our own, beautiful,
young American soldiers who he sent to death based on his lies that he
covered up by an act of treason, a crime punishable by death in a time
of war. Then there's the illegal spying on Americans, the systematic
shredding of our Constitution, the corporate rape of environment, the
dismantling of our already inadequate health care etc, etc...oh god,
the list does go on.
I am grateful there are at least a few brave writers left in the
mainstream media who are willing to challenge the suffocating silence
that blankets us today but I'm not going to be a spoiler. You'll have
to read the article to find out whether or not it's okay to write:
I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United
States, and kill him with my bare hands.
a.
http://www.ashabot.com
http://www.ashabot.blogspot.com
Keep out of damn ditch