News From A Parallel World

I knew a woman who underwent plastic surgery in middle age. She’d been married to a local attorney until she’d surprised him with his secretary in flagrante delicto, as it were, in his office.

It was the eyes, mostly. For a couple of months afterward, she looked like a raccoon, which was mildly disconcerting, but she was a raccoon with class. I liked her before and I liked her after, although I haven’t seen her in close to twenty years.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why she did it. Still, if I’d had a vote, I’d’ve voted no.

I’ve written before about beauty and women’s faces. I think I posted it. I understand that my culture has conferred the beauty award on several specific archetypes. That’s cool; cultures always do that sort of thing. There are or have been cultures which prize enormous lips or asses, or even earlobes. Go figure.

But beauty, really, doesn’t have much to do with these archetypes. If you’re in love with a woman, she is flat-out beautiful, especially when she smiles. The beauty in her which shines through is powerful enough to transform what she shows you.

There are plenty of women, too, with culturally ‘perfect’ features who are not beautiful. They are not happy. Without radiance, it doesn’t mean anything.

Nine days ago, a San Francisco woman named Kerry Campbell told a national television audience on “Good Morning America” that she had injected her 8-year-old daughter, Britney, with Botox, to make her more competitive in beauty pageants.

Campbell and Britney appeared on the show. The photograph in the Chronicle has mom smiling and gazing in admiration at the puffy-cheeked but unlined Britney.

Turns out that Campbell, a recent resident of Birmingham, England, had told the British press about it in March, and stories had included photographs of the mother injecting the drug into her daughter’s forehead. Other photos showed Britney with ice packs on her face after getting the shots.

In keeping with the high standards of American television journalism, “Good Morning America” had her repeat the injection demonstration in its program.

Campbell says that she is a trained esthetician and that the use of Botox is becoming common in children’s beauty pageants –– which pageant officials deny.

I am saying that there is a direct connection between the cosmetic surgery my friend chose and the injection of botulinum toxin into the forehead of an eight year-old child, and you’re saying that I’m exaggerating wildly to make a point. Let’s see how wild.

First, please don’t misunderstand. I have nothing against plastic surgery. It’s a fantastic thing to be able to ‘correct’ deformities. But in this culture, to an alarming degree, not being ‘beautiful’ is to be deformed. You know what I’m talking about.

The objectification of women is old news, of course, but in recent years the sexual component has crept below adolescence. Nine year old girls are being taught that their human value depends on how flirty they can act and how soon their breasts develop. If that isn’t sick, what is?

More and more, we are seeing a confluence of accessories and pharmaceuticals; each is assigned a critical role in creating attraction and desirability. There are rules for looks and behavior, most especially for females, and we’ve got the products to help you. Pills and cuttings, the tools which rescue the ordinary.

If that is not so, then why are adolescent girls –– far more so than boys of the same age –– cutting and otherwise disfiguring themselves?

I’m old enough to remember a time when some of the more obvious sex role idiocies were on the run. Turned out that the culture was not going to back down. Instead of change, we got pervasive (and entirely fictitious) tales of ‘bra burning’; we got dyke jokes and a few more women elevated in politics and business, now lie down and shut up. We could not even get the Equal Rights Amendment, whose failure of passage is impossible to rationally justify.

Okay, I get it that sex roles have always existed, and that oppression arises from them, and that it ain’t just America. But until quite recently, the kids’ version has focused on a “little girls’ curls” sort of deal, maybe not terrific but at least not vicious. Today, kids have been sexualized to the extent that an 8-year-old girl gets forehead injections and has to be packed in ice to kill the pain, while her mother brags about it and demonstrates it to a national TV audience.

Look at me torture my daughter!

I’ve always hated beauty pageants because they celebrate and promote a commercial substitute for beauty. In the early ‘seventies, more than one Miss America contest was disrupted by feminists. I remember especially a woman clothing herself solely in cuts of beef, a vivid and on-the-money satire which scandalized the media.

Today, although many among the young resist it, there remains a stubbornly-held list of physical requirements if you want to be popular in America, and a fake ‘beauty’ is one of these. And so we get cosmetic surgery of all kinds, faces and necks, breasts and asses and bellies, anything which might lead to the right husband, or to corporate success, even to stardom, another witless ‘dream’ pimped by ‘American Idol’ and other circuses.

Beauty pageants for children border on child abuse, and they are on the increase. With them, the logic that if adults can have their features ‘improved’ so can children. The reasons are, after all, the same.

Recently I offered some thoughts on the use of words in social and political contexts. It was a fairly ordinary series of observations, the kind of junk which had been on my mind and needed unloading.

Two items in today’s news, one from the Associated Press and another from Agence France Presse via Alternet, on developments in the middle east. Interesting. As we all know by now, with every major world event, from a meltdown in Japan to a military coup in Honduras, the American public is being spun to a fare-thee-well.

Had the American education system not been systematically destroyed by the corporate bosses over the past forty years, the public would not buy a nickel’s worth of it. We would know how to think instead of what we’re supposed to think. Oh, that would be such trouble. A good wash-and-rinse is cheaper and more reliable.

The AP dispatch reports a recording made quite recently by Osama bin Laden in which he “praised the protests that have toppled and shaken longtime rulers across the Arab world...”

Bin Laden, in a 12-minute video, said this:

“The winds of change will spread through the entire Islamic world, God willing. The youth need to make necessary preparations and not act without consulting the experience of the honest ones and those who are far from half solutions and compromises with the oppressors.” These would be “those who advised early on the necessity of uprooting these oppressive regimes...”

Words. Bin Laden, like everybody else, was against “oppressive regimes.” Everyone’s against them but they keep cropping up. Weird, isn’t it?

The AP story doesn’t mention whether the dead guy was more specific, but probably he was talking especially, and pointedly, about Egypt.

You may recall Hillary Clinton’s rhetorical gymnastics on Mubarak. He was America’s great ally and a “personal friend” until he suddenly wasn’t. The popular uprising, fueled by the young, led to perilous, mass demonstrations in which the Egyptian army played a pivotal role. At first used to suppress the crowds, the military switched sides and forced Mubarak out.

It’s yet another case of everybody wants ‘democracy’ and nobody is getting it. The Egyptian insurgency has been stalemated by a new ruling elite, comprised almost entirely by the military, which promises free elections after a period of ‘normalization’. The original leaders of the revolt have been frozen out. The ‘new’ Egypt is being created by those in power, those with the guns, and the guns came from the United States.

The Associated Press, originally a fairly straight source, is now about as reliable as F*X News, and this one is a beauty. According to the AP, bin Laden made the video as “an attempt by the terror leader to remain relevant following sweeping changes in which al Qaeda...(has) played almost no role.”

Well, who knows? I’m certainly no expert on bin Laden, and have no wish to be, but it appears likely that his principal role in world affairs was as a funding agent for various groups of people who wanted to blow things up. It’s doubtful that he was any sort of evil mastermind; he was an old guy who could swing the money end.

The AP dispatch, while noting that, “both bin Laden and the West have generally supported protest movements in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere,” then says: “their goals differ” because “(t)he West hopes the protests will bring democratic reform.”

Being fairly sober in this world invites madness. Perhaps that’s why Americans drink so much.

America is not interested in ‘democratic reform’. It is interested in extending its military and corporate control into every nation it can reach. As long-demonstrated, the United States supports governments of any kind so long as they are amenable to their resources being stolen. Any country which tries to protect its own resources from foreign, e.g. U.S., control becomes an enemy to the U.S.

I hasten to add that bin Laden’s boys are not very loyal to democracy, either. For starters, they harbor bizarre ideas about women which pretty much disqualify them from the discussion. Like any other lunatic group, from communist bureaucrats to Republican Senators, these people will do whatever it takes to run your life for your own good.

One of these, John McCain, thinks that the way to ‘democratize’ the middle east is by securing “free trade agreements” with Egypt and Tunisia, and wherever else we can get a deal. Free trade agreements. Like NAFTA.

What McCain wants is to broker these deals –– which establish strong positions for American corporations in target states –– before anybody gets too carried away with the ‘democracy’ stuff. Before, say, elections are held in Egypt.

According to the Agence France release, McCain also said:

"If we are to going to help countries like Tunisia and Egypt to grow their economies, we will need to be much more innovative," and that support should come from the ‘private sector’ and from “wealthy partners like Qatar.”

Well, hold on a minute. I don’t want to be a cynic here, but I suspect that our “help” will be a lot like the missionaries ‘helping’ the natives in matters of religion, or the Marines ‘helping’ people discover freedom, and what the fug is Qatar?

By the way, doesn’t Qatar sound like one of those big players which suddenly surface, having never really existed before? Like the Valero gas stations popping up a few years back. One day, no Valero; the next, thousands of them.

In order to get the point across, McCain announced that he would be traveling to Egypt and Tunisia next month with the CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, and a delegation of U.S. business leaders, “to reinforce the message that greater democratic reform can lead to greater foreign investment."

I see McCain as a sort of friendly rapist who explains that it can be easier or harder, your choice, but it’s gonna happen so you may as well take some lubricant with it. His remarks leave little doubt what he and his owners have in mind. Our first objective, he said should be the "peaceful change of regimes that are irreconcilably tyrannical, anti-American and hostile to the democratic regional order that we seek to build.”

That we seek to build. America equals democracy. Whatever America wants is democratic. To be against America is to be tyrannical and anti-democratic.

The bottom line in all of this is that bin Laden had already become irrelevant. Killing him didn’t change a thing. There are popular, indigenous movements all over the middle east and there are signs that this instinct is spreading. Bin Laden hoped to bend events toward his vision; the U.S. expects to cut them off before they get out of hand.

Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats in the Congress are rushing through a four-year extension of the subversive ‘Patriot Act’, key elements of which are due to expire. Both parties are having trouble with their rank-and-file, with true conservatives in the G.O.P. aligning with the remains of a progressive left in the Democratic Party, but Harry Reid has cut a deal. There he is, standing next to Boehner, a couple of phonies without loyalty to the nation or its principles.

We will spend billions of dollars, sacrifice American lives by the thousands, destroy communities and civilian populations in countries thousands of miles from home, but we can’t be bothered with protecting liberty in the U.S. They tell us that the death of bin Laden makes extending the ‘Patriot Act’ imperative.

Spinning. As Bill Hicks said, go back to bed, America. Your government is in control.

At 9:30 in the morning on May 5th, Jose Guerena was sleeping, just back from the graveyard shift, when his wife awakened him. She had been alarmed, hearing noises outside their Tucson, Arizona, home, she said, and she’d seen a man look in a window.

Moments later, armed men broke through the front door and began firing. Guerena was hit at least 60 times. As he lay mortally wounded, his wife, Vanessa, called 911, pleading for help from emergency responders who kept her on the phone for more than five minutes, questioning her, before sending help. Audio records show that Drexel Heights Fire Department dispatched a medical unit at 9:43 a.m., but the Sheriff Department told them to hold off because they might be dealing with a “barricaded subject.”

It was too late. Before medics arrived, Guerena died from his wounds.

The 26-year-old Guerena, an ex-Marine, owned an AR-15 rifle but did not fire it. All of the bullets came from the guns of a Pima County SWAT team. The Sheriff’s Department initially claimed that Guerena had fired at officers but later retracted it, presumably because that was discredited by forensic evidence and the autopsy on the dead man.

Now, two weeks after the murder, Pima County officials are not talking. It has not been explained why an armed SWAT team had gone to the Guerena home. Local ‘authorities’ claim that the cops had been sent to serve a warrant. Other teams served warrants at three other area homes that morning, although neither the identities of the lucky recipients, nor the reasons for the warrants, have been revealed.

The other evening, I saw a great documentary on PBS, the civil rights movement in the American South in the early days of the Kennedy administration. That was a time when black and white volunteers rode together on ‘freedom rides’ into Alabama and Mississippi where they were set upon by mobs wielding iron pipes, baseball bats, and knives. Many were hospitalized. The political leaders in those states made it plain that they would do nothing to stop the attacks. One, Governor Patterson in Alabama, explained that the ‘freedom riders’ had invited violence by their presence.

The freedom riders aimed to desegregate interstate public transportation. In the early ‘sixties, it was physically dangerous for blacks and whites who failed to conform to the local rules, dangerous all over the country but especially in the deep South. I am struck by the bravery of these riders, starkly evident in the news footage, the contemporaneous news stories, and by the historic record and the reflections of those still living who risked everything, even their lives, to change their country for the better.

Still ahead of them were the escalating terrors, the bombing of the church in Birmingham which killed four little girls, the shootings and lynchings, the beatings of Selma, Medgar Evers shot in the back as he walked for the right to vote, the murders of Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman, and eventually the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

But in the early ‘sixties, this was a movement that would change history simply because it grew from the true best instincts of a people.

The political story of the time is instructive, too. It was, God help us, a different time. Those among my vast readership on the slow side of 50, or even 60, will not remember a time when we had a President with both the heart and the intelligence to actually do the job, but we had one then.

JFK and his brother Robert were pragmatic politicians. When the freedom rides began, the Justice Department privately urged the riders to wait. The riders said they would not wait.

The President at the time was attending to critical matters internationally. By this time, although it would remain unknown to the world for another forty years, Kennedy had established a ‘back channel’ to the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, and the two of them were seriously working to figure out how to get away with a disarmament. It was one of the greatest conspiracies of all time and they nearly pulled it off. So Kennedy’s focus was not on domestic matters.

But the riders were determined to go south. They went into training, first, in nonviolence. They would be beaten, perhaps, and they would not strike back. They might be beaten to death... and they would not strike back. That’s some serious shit.

As the first bus riders were beaten, and many hospitalized, and it was plain that local cops and state authorities were going to use the burning of the Trailways bus in Mississippi to toast marshmallows. The FBI, then run by J. Edgar Hoover, watched the violence and took notes but would not intervene.

Robert Kennedy, unable to reach the governors who were “fishing” and couldn’t be found, and exasperated by the FBI, sent his own people. John Siegenthaler, a deputy attorney general who would later become a great newspaper editor, tried to assist a woman being kicked by a gang of young whites and was knocked unconscious.

The Kennedys were frightened for the safety of the riders but could not convince them to stop. For every bus interdicted by the cops or the local mobs, another bus headed South. At one point, after several riders were nearly killed, and still they would not stop, Robert Kennedy is said to have yelled at Siegenthaler over the phone, “Who is Diane Lane?!”

Diane Lane was a college student, from Fisk University. She was a kid, a black kid, and she was leading these people who would not turn back.

It’s not exactly the same thing, but there are commonalities between then and now. Jose Guerena, shot sixty times by heavily armed goons wearing badges, the weaponry’s more advanced and the rhetoric more muted. In Arizona, the Governor and much of the state’s political machinery have sought political capital in targeting nonwhites.

Behind the pompous calls for obeying the law when it comes to immigration –– by people who routinely pocket corporate ‘contributions’ in writing public policy –– is a manifestly racist agenda which appeals to the worst in us.

Political leaders occupy a critical place in America, not because they can enact laws or spend tax money but because they describe the public debate. A nation can go in any direction if it is led there. Today, the public dialogue is the nearly exclusive province of demagogues, in Washington, D.C., in states like Arizona, and in the mass media.

Jose Guerena was only one man, but he was a husband to his wife and a father to his two young boys. He had served the U.S. in the Marine Corps. He was shot to death for no reason and without rational excuse. He was shot to death because politics in America is infected with a sickness.

As Robert Kennedy said, we are a better people than that. Bobby’s dead, of course. 43 years ago this June. But the rest of us are still around.

For a long time, certain words had particular meanings. We relied on them.

Words are sounds we human use to enable communication. That’s the theory, anyhow. But what happens when words are used to confuse, to blur distinction, to cut rather than enhance understanding? We’re finding out now.

I’m not referring to the weird inversion of some words in popular usage, such as the bizarre use of the term ‘sick’ to describe what we used to call ‘great.’ These small insults to the intellect are merely passing fads. I’m much more interested in, and alarmed by, the intentionality behind definitional lies.

Ordinarily, words are all symbols, many with particular application and subject to near-universal agreement, at least in proper translation. An hour is an hour and there are sixty minutes in each one. We don’t have to call them ‘hours’ or ‘minutes.’ We can instead call them ‘fins’ and ‘wallawogs’. It wouldn’t alter the phenomenon itself, the time thing, only the terms of convenience we’ve agreed on.

But what happens when there’s a persistent subversion of that agreement? What happens when ‘up’ becomes ‘down’?

Politics, along with commercial advertising, has always modified the meaning of language. If you’re going to talk people into or out of things, it’s common enough, often essential, to lie. And lying in the use of words really works. Ask the CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations. No, don’t; they’ll lie about it.

I’m not writing here about the kind of a lie where they tell us war is peace. The Presidents, all of them since John F. Kennedy, have done that, although Carter, as was his habit, waffled. I’m writing about something weirder and much worse.

Richard Nixon used the term ‘protective reaction’ to cover unprovoked air strikes in Cambodia. Bush the younger liked more pseudo patriotic expressions, where an invasion might be “Operation Enduring Freedom”.

But now we’ve got it so bad that ludicrous, even nonsensical, terminology is accepted as given. Obama launched a series of air attacks against a country with which we are not at war and said they were “kinetic” military actions. I guess he meant that the soldiers were moving their limbs.

Kidnapping and dispatching to overseas dungeons is “extraordinary rendition”. Torture is “enhanced interrogation technique”. My favorite, though, is something everyone is now unthinkingly referring to as “regime change”.

A regime is, of course, a kind of illegitimate government. Changing it sounds pretty good. How else can you get a democracy for those poor, oppressed people? The expression “regime change” is now in the public conversation, used by politicians of both parties and by the President, who was once an educated sort of a bloke and should know better.

It’s easier, after all, to talk about ‘regime change’ than about overthrowing somebody else’s government by force. We aren’t really inviting assassination, just promoting ‘regime change’. Maybe even kinetic regime change.

The reason all of this is so dangerous is that it undermines the actual foundation of a putative democracy. We are brought to accept the perversion of principles through the use of propaganda, and in the propaganda the terms we once could count on have become meaningless.

Yes, I know it’s traditional. The mafia might say someone pushed a button on a guy, or there was a contract. The CIA would terminate with extreme prejudice. But even those expressions carried a charge. They were in the active voice. Now, the voice is passive. Regime change is something which just happens; nobody is really doing anything to promote it.

Have you noticed how often political leaders say “mistakes were made”? It’s as though nobody could help it, nobody could prevent it, nobody did it, we all just watched in horror and surprise as New Orleans drowned or a wedding party was hit with missiles.

None of this baloney would be possible in a critically aware population. Nobody could abrogate the powers of Congress unless the nation slept. Nobody could legislate-away the Bill of Rights if Americans knew what they were.

I’ve got this novel, through about a hundred revisions and rewrites and in my opinion good enough to blow the chrome off a ‘57 Chevy, and for reasons too boring to mention it has thus far failed to get itself published.

I had a couple of near-misses, but these are not so near anymore, and several friends and readers have suggested that I self-publish, and that I release it as an e-book. They may be right. After all, it’s hard to disagree with the imperative of getting my work into the world while my readership is still alive.

I’ve resisted, though. I do not want my masterpiece to disappear into the enormous cyberspace black hole which is already sucking up plenty of deserving, credible work. My novel deserves a better fate. It deserves, as I’ve told people, to be stacked on one of the tables at Borders.

One of the really interesting things about getting older in a new world is that all of your frames of reference get fractured in the wild rush to the unknown. Quite obviously, I need to turn my manuscript over to someone younger than, say, thirty, who has a clue how to do this.

I stopped by my local Borders today. The place occupies a vast space in one of those hybrid shopping experiences alongside the frontage road, where it has been considered the ‘anchor’ tenant, along with a mammoth Toys R Us emporium. The parking lot is of a size commensurate with really nice corporate expectations.

The lot was near empty. Inside Borders it looked like a bomb had hit.

I wasn’t sure it was even open. Borders has been closing half of its stores nationwide and this was one of the casualties. Consumers of the printed word frequent libraries, local shops, and Amazon.com. I sat in my car for a minute, unsure. The place looked boarded-up, the inside lights on shorter bulbs.

The closing sale had been going on for a week or two, but I thought, what the hey, whatever’s left they must be giving away by now and my taste is eccentric enough that maybe something interesting remained.

The shelves had been rearranged, collections winnowed, and they were selling the shelves, too, if you wanted any. The inside cafe, where people used to drink coffee and look at magazines, was closed.

You know what’s on the Borders tables now? The books nobody wants: fifty copies of something by Sarah Palin. Seriously.

If I’d had a hundred copies of my own book I could’ve brought them in and piled them up, and nobody would’ve cared one way or the other. I’m beginning to re-examine the available options.

I’m so tired of writing about this and you’re tired of reading about it, but what else is there to talk about?

I spent my afternoon on the company of a friend I hadn’t seen in a very long time. We looked at the hills west of Fairfax and spoke of history, of life, and told stories. Sanity island.

Later on, caught the tail end of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” on cable, waking from a nap. On the web, discussion about the Bin Laden killing, people talking about DNA matching and protocol, and about the obvious: there was never any interest in capturing the man alive because Barack Obama would have a problem with what to do with him. Some writers called-up the Bin Laden videos and pointed out that the ones in which the dead guy claimed ‘responsibility’ for the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington were proved to be fakes. Others said so what. Still others mentioned the peculiarity of the FBI refusing to cite him for 9-11, and the Bureau in its public statement pointedly saying it did not have sufficient evidence linking him to that crime.

Adding to the craziness is the fact that the initial story about what supposedly happened has already disintegrated, and some folks have not forgotten the complete fabrication of the ‘Jessica Lynch’ story and the lies around the death of Pat Tillman.

Events have a way of ruining cover stories.

It appears likely that Bin Laden was essentially a funding source for violent groups but had no ability to direct or control their actions. In any case, he had become irrelevant, an old man in his pajamas shot in the eye, more valuable to the radicals as a dead martyr than as a live ghost. Obama got a nice public relations boost, but otherwise nothing is changed.

Nothing is changed. Barack Obama, a campaign of drama in the context of national emergency, promising, again and again, “fundamental change.” But in the words of an old Dylan song, nothing was delivered.

Good lord, it’s easy to get discouraged. The America I see these days rewards greed and punishes the weak. Millions of children go to bed hungry every night while politicians argue about trivia and negotiate the destruction of the nation’s safety nets. I’m not quitting. At the end of the “Capitalism” film, Moore says:

“I don’t want to live in a country like that. And I’m not leaving.” That about covers it.

I switched on the television, CBS. Carroll had just phoned saying I’d want to see this, cryptically, I thought. I don’t watch that junk. Mostly, it’s a mental health decision. I was a news junkie once, ‘sixties and ‘seventies, and concluded that with Cronkite gone and the major networks in the hands of corporate goons nothing useful or even true could be learned thereby. But, what the hell, Carroll wouldn’t oversell it.

So Bin Laden is dead, shot in the head, his body in “U.S. hands.” And the commentators, those wax figures in tailored clothing, had plenty to say about it. Everyone was expecting a statement from the President. In the meantime, there were the experts.

The main point seemed to be that in reaching Osama’s inner circle, the United States had shown the world that anyone who harms the U.S., or whom the U.S. claims has harmed it, can be found and killed. “We will get them all,” gushed one CBS reporter. She thought she sounded sane. But change one word, without changing the meaning, and she turns into Charles Manson.

Reporters said that the body of the Al Qaeda leader would be “disposed of” and not retained for burial. That is because “we don’t want a burial place to turn into some kind of shrine.”

Yes, that would be problematic. Constant bad publicity, for one thing. What if great streams of mourners were to gather? On the other hand, although I know nothing of the traditional burial practices among Muslims, I’d bet that desecration of his remains would be regarded as extremely offensive by a few people.

One of the news anchors reminded viewers that, although some thought we ought to “just give up on” the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the ‘war on terror’ wasn’t anything like Viet Nam. Sort of a ‘fight them there or fight them here’ philosophy, which I suppose is popular these days, although I used to hear it proclaimed by the craziest of the right wing nuts back in the ‘sixties.

It is considered reasonable to speak in terms of killing everyone in any group which wishes to harm the United States.

They tell us that the world has changed, though they do not say for the better. It’s a ‘post-9-11 world’ which requires a different way of running things. Evidently, it also requires the relinquishment of our highest ideals.

In the spring of 1968, just about forty-three years ago exactly, an American political leader said this:

“We had great prestige a number of years ago, around the globe, but it wasn’t because of our military power and it wasn’t because of our economic power, but simply because people believed in us and believed that we would do what was right, and believed that the principles that we tried to follow in our own country, we stood for around the rest of the globe, and they don’t have that same confidence now.”

The message we’re sending the rest of the world today, according to the plastic journalists on CBS, and no doubt elsewhere, is that no matter how well you hide we will find you and we will kill you.

One of the CBS reporters was a fellow who had helped run the search for Bin Laden in the Bush years. He said that everyone in America should be rejoicing.

As the Second World War was ending, Adolf Hitler finished himself off in a bunker but many of his top guys were captured and put on trial at Nuremberg. The world then witnessed an exposition of the crimes one nation carried out against others and against its own people. Nobody worried that a public trial would “give the Nazis a forum”. That was because what the Nazis had done was indefensible.

But for some odd reason, the U.S. does not want to put anyone on trial anymore. We want them dead.

I don’t know why Americans should be rejoicing over the news. It hasn’t made us any safer or more secure. The wars will continue, with innocent people under the bombs, and the casualties will continue, and the horror and the tragedy and the stupid, bloody waste of human life. Does anyone really believe that killing Osama Bin Laden will change anything?

It was Robert F. Kennedy who talked about American principles in the spring of 1968. He also said this:

“We cannot and must not take on as our mission the suppression of disorder and internal violence anywhere it appears anywhere in the world...”

But that, of course, is exactly contrary to the policy of the U.S. government, regardless of who lives in the White House.

Three days ago, it was announced that Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, would become the new Secretary of Defense. His replacement at CIA: General David Petraeus. A new U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan: former Bush insider, Ryan Crocker.

The war goes on, a perpetual one, and that has always been the wet dream of the arms industry. The Pentagon budget is now greater than the budgets of all other domestic agencies combined. Rejoice? Because after chasing some guy down for ten years we’ve finally killed him? How many lives will that save, do you think?