2. Because it’s how you can find out things that would otherwise remain hidden for all eternity, or at least until after they’ve happened, in which case you’d have missed them anyway. Thank you, Google, for giving me Neil Gaiman, in person, and in just a few weeks.
I spent a lot of time yesterday biting holes in my bottom lip (to stop from either crying or shouting something obscene and very un-clever) after watching Donald Rumsfeld's incredible recent speech to the American Legion, and then, thankfully (but still lip-bitingly, albeit out of welcome relief) reading what Keith Olbermann had to say in response.
There’s little I could say that’s not been said more articulately somewhere else. Except, if you haven’t read or watched already, please do.
I’d forgotten that the USA can set an example we’d be well-placed to follow. I’m a Generation X-er: by the time I came to any sort of political consciousness, the presidents were Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and then Bush the Younger. Besides some of Clinton’s more humanitarian work, these weren’t men who were working to make the world better, as far as I could tell. They variously trafficked in lies, militarization, and separatism – and turned admirable values of liberty and democracy into kitschy souvenirs you couldn’t sell three-for-a-dollar.
The commitment to freedom espoused in the US constitution had already been reduced to a catch-cry. It’s a cult of patriotism and fervour that’s every bit as extreme as what they claim to be waging war on, where disagreement is equivalent to treason and suspicion alone is grounds enough for revocation of your most basic human rights.
The irony that most shames all of us living in the ‘free world’ at the moment is that we’ve been scared into standing by while our leaders annihilate the only thing that could ever be worth warring over.
And I’m just so fucking grateful to have been shocked out of docility. Again. Thank the deity of your choice, if only because you can.
1. Because Fabulist is, quite simply, fabulous.
