Sunday, February 12, 2006

I’m entitled to my own facts!

I read recently that I’m not entitled to my opinion, but that I do have the right to be wrong. Following that sterling logic, if I disagree with the prevailing paradigm, my only opportunity to be right is to keep my mouth shut and go along, or be frog-marched to the nearest American gulag to have my hippie head bashed in.

If in my opinion the president has the right to spy on American citizens, detain them without charges or access to courts, use national security and blind patriotism to pummel the population into submission, and use his newly-minted unfettered powers to declare war on anyone who may displease him at any given moment, I have my “facts” straight and can feel free to spout away.

If I want to believe that we are now safer and more prosperous, and that combat veterans such as Max Cleland—who left three perfectly useful limbs in Vietnam—and decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry are weaklings when compared to the architects of 21st century American foreign policy, such as Dick “five deferments/I had other priorities” Cheney, and George “Champagne Unit: TANG” Bush, then they I am completely within my rights as a Stepford citizen to believe that.

But as a semi-educated, thinking and voting American, it’s not in my makeup to shut up, particularly when my country has been turned upside-down by a cabal of Orwellian thugs who don’t give a whit about the constitution, social justice, or the American people as a whole.

If my opinions are right or wrong, black or white, then I’ll adopt my own truths. Subsequently, it’s my reality that Condoleezza Rice is a vampire who thrives on the blood of dead Muslim babies. Just look at the pictures in the run-up to the unjustified and illegal war in Iraq. Condi made Bela Lugosi look like Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. She is also the darling of bloodthirsty multinational oil corporations, who had her very own super-tanker named after her.

My facts tell me that there may just be a connection between the ties of the Bush administration to the oil oligarchy, and that our Middle East “adventures” have nothing whatsoever to do with “spreading Democracy.” If I mention that out loud though, I am derided as a “conspiracy theorist” by people with a different version of reality, who think I should keep my opinions to myself.

It’s the same with the attacks of 9/11. If I think that my government either willfully or through incompetence allowed those planes to fly into the towers, I am immediately labeled a nut job. But what could be more preposterous than a theory that includes a shadowy network of Muslim extremists that infiltrated civilian flight schools in Florida, then took down four airliners using box cutters. They were so sly that the Air Force never even scrambled fighters on call for the very purpose of taking out hijacked airliners, yet several months later a Cessna 182 came within three miles of the White House and was immediately swarmed by F-16s from nearby Andrews AFB.

What about Osama Bin Laden, and the infamous “number three man in Al Qaeda”? Spooky men who have evaded capture despite the multi-trillion dollar efforts of the most powerful and technically advance nation in history? That sounds like a pretty whacky theory to me.

I’m supposed to believe that there were no warning signs, such as a President’s Daily Briefing entitled, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. and that our intelligence community was caught completely off guard. In the words of Donald Rumsfeld, “Who knew?”

Yet for the most part, we’ve swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, as an entire population. Our national “opposition” leaders have been neutered for fear of upsetting the narrative.

My reality tells me that our electoral process is corrupted to the point that I worry we’ll never have a legitimate election again, and if we can’t maintain a true Democracy here, my facts tell me that the relatives of all the brown people that we’re bombing into a red paste in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other countries where we commit mass murder will see through our hypocrisy and react with violence which may not be equal in force, but will dwarf our “nation-building” efforts in intensity.

Our government has turned on us, and is using 9/11 and national security as a cudgel to keep us under control while political hacks and Bush cronies expand executive power at a frightening rate. It is becoming ever more important to speak out, before we are all herded into concentration camps that are overseen by David Horowitz’s brown-shirted legions.

Thank god—as we know him—we live in a country where we are all entitled to our opinions. But it appears that we now have the added bonus of creating our own reality. Democracy is even better when things like unintended consequences don’t get in the way of fuzzy thinking.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Abbott, I'm reading your web page from time to time. Just wanted you to know that I enjoyed this rant. Meg