The Madness of King George - Again
King George III was the last king to rule over the thirteen colonies before the Revolution that made the United States a democratic republic. George was a despotic and unbalanced sovereign, who ended up speaking to angels and shaking hands with trees.
The George more recently appointed sovereign by the US Supreme Court, said that God told him to attack Iraq. And the same stubbornness that cost mad King George 13 colonies, just cost this one the midterm elections. But in neither case did it stay the progression of 'King George’s dementia.'
Case in point: Last week mad George went to Vietnam and proclaimed the lesson of the Vietnam War was: "We'll succeed unless we quit." Come again? Is George really saying we could have won that War if only we had prolonged it, and wasted more lives? Wasn’t 10 years and 50,000 lives enough for that particular mistake? Or was he suggesting that since he and Cheney personally never gave up dodging the Vietnam draft, that at least they'd succeeded in staying alive (while others had to die in their place)? Either way, it’s more evidence of a deteriorating mental faculty. How could anybody – but especially someone who made sure he never risked his own life in the war – say that the lesson of Vietnam was not enough lives were risked and lost?
It’s evidence of the complete breakdown and disconnect between reality and politics in Bush’s mind, with an even wider gap growing between ethics and empty platitudes. Our mad King George seems possessed with a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ – as if by simply willing something long and hard enough (and with other people’s lives) he might yet make it true. But the Nazis already tried out that theory and failed miserably, and Nietzsche died in the madhouse. You cannot tell a lie to power – you can only get a lot of people killed for it.
Like Vietnam, the war in Iraq was lost at its inception, because it was based upon lies, greed and crackpot theories. You cannot pretend a lie is the truth, and expect the world to roll over and follow, just because you’re a superpower. The lives being lost in Iraq are not the cost of victory, but the price of arrogance and deception. The question isn’t whether we can still win - we’ve already lost that war; America is no more in control of events in Iraq than Saddam Hussein. The only question is how much and how many are we going to lose before mad King George is compelled to admit it. No sane person can reasonably argue that people are dying in Iraq for anything more than a colossal blunder, and that includes dottering old war whores like McCain.
Emerson once wrote that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And wars that go on because small-minded leaders are too grandiose in their imagination to admit their mistakes are like wounds that never heal. If wars are the result of political failures and moral defeats (as I believe) what about wars that continue only because our leaders are too corrupt and full of themselves to cut our losses?
It sickens be to death whenever I hear pompous, degenerate pricks like Bush and Cheney proclaiming how we must hang tough and stick it out in Iraq. As if the fact that they don’t give a damn about other people’s lives was courage rather than absolute moral cowardice. As if it wasn’t the inevitable extension of the way they ran from the fight when it was their turn to serve, and are still running away from the truth. Other people will always do all the dying and sacrificing in their place because they’ve never had the guts to sacrifice anything for their country, least of all their pride. They only know how to take, and take, and keep taking more; they are like virulent parasites in human skin. Continuing the wrong war is not only cowardice – it’s the ultimate act of desperation on the part of slimy leaders who can’t admit the truth about themselves.
Lincoln once said, “I feel sorry for the man that can’t feel the lash on another man’s back.” We should all feel sorry for politicians whose greed and arrogance has made them incapable of feeling the suffering of those they’ve sent into war. We should be wary of mad kings who call the casualties of war, “just a comma”, and feel disgust when they insist that others die for their mistakes. We should abhor leaders who interpret their lack of humanity a political strength, and one we should all try to imitate. The real calamity came when they dodged the realities of this war so completley, that their madness means continuing in a perverse and wrong-headed strategy where the cost in terms of human suffering is irrelevant. A healthy revulsion for war’s true consequences is the only hope humanity has of overcoming the insanity of war.
A Republican president named Dwight D Eisenhower once said: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.” Only the stupidest, most brutal and cowardly political leaders could ever think war is the solution to political problems. Whenever leaders start preemptive wars it is always the sign of political madness wrapped in greed and lust for power wrapped in some hair-brained political theory.
Eisenhower also said that, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
We see some of the more direct consequences of this war in the daily casualty figures, and in bloody scenes from Iraq. But the killing fields of war has two sides, and what we don’t see are all the people who’ve died or been wounded from hunger, lack of decent housing or medical care because our nation’s resources were funneled into killing and corruption rather than healing and helping people. We don’t see all the people who were never educated, the medical and scientific research that was never funded, and all the lives and hopes that never stood a chance. Nor do we yet see the final result of all the hatred this war has inspired and nourished, either in the continuing ethnic conflicts, or in future religious wars and conflicts, or in the training and inspiration for countless future acts of terrorism. The destruction of war is incalculable, and the horror we are wittnessing today is only part of the tragedy.
What sort of insanity could inpire all this? What sort of fatally flawed logic would ever comit our nation to a war of choice against an enemy that was no threat to us? Only another completley mad King George could have put this curse upon us. Only an inbred advocate of the money aristrocracy could have deviated so far from the common good as to comit our nation’s resources to this abomination of blood, corruption, oil and torture.
The reason our founding fathers established a democratic republic was precicely to liberate us from this sort of hereditary madness, and avoid mad kings and their small-minded corrupt wars and personal grudges, along with the servile stupidity inherent in fighting for their reasons and their honor rather than our own. We can only hope that a newly and Democratically-elected Congress has the presence of mind to investigate, depose, and lock mad King George away again, so that the only wars he can conduct are the ones in his booze-crippled brain.
The George more recently appointed sovereign by the US Supreme Court, said that God told him to attack Iraq. And the same stubbornness that cost mad King George 13 colonies, just cost this one the midterm elections. But in neither case did it stay the progression of 'King George’s dementia.'
Case in point: Last week mad George went to Vietnam and proclaimed the lesson of the Vietnam War was: "We'll succeed unless we quit." Come again? Is George really saying we could have won that War if only we had prolonged it, and wasted more lives? Wasn’t 10 years and 50,000 lives enough for that particular mistake? Or was he suggesting that since he and Cheney personally never gave up dodging the Vietnam draft, that at least they'd succeeded in staying alive (while others had to die in their place)? Either way, it’s more evidence of a deteriorating mental faculty. How could anybody – but especially someone who made sure he never risked his own life in the war – say that the lesson of Vietnam was not enough lives were risked and lost?
It’s evidence of the complete breakdown and disconnect between reality and politics in Bush’s mind, with an even wider gap growing between ethics and empty platitudes. Our mad King George seems possessed with a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ – as if by simply willing something long and hard enough (and with other people’s lives) he might yet make it true. But the Nazis already tried out that theory and failed miserably, and Nietzsche died in the madhouse. You cannot tell a lie to power – you can only get a lot of people killed for it.
Like Vietnam, the war in Iraq was lost at its inception, because it was based upon lies, greed and crackpot theories. You cannot pretend a lie is the truth, and expect the world to roll over and follow, just because you’re a superpower. The lives being lost in Iraq are not the cost of victory, but the price of arrogance and deception. The question isn’t whether we can still win - we’ve already lost that war; America is no more in control of events in Iraq than Saddam Hussein. The only question is how much and how many are we going to lose before mad King George is compelled to admit it. No sane person can reasonably argue that people are dying in Iraq for anything more than a colossal blunder, and that includes dottering old war whores like McCain.
Emerson once wrote that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And wars that go on because small-minded leaders are too grandiose in their imagination to admit their mistakes are like wounds that never heal. If wars are the result of political failures and moral defeats (as I believe) what about wars that continue only because our leaders are too corrupt and full of themselves to cut our losses?
It sickens be to death whenever I hear pompous, degenerate pricks like Bush and Cheney proclaiming how we must hang tough and stick it out in Iraq. As if the fact that they don’t give a damn about other people’s lives was courage rather than absolute moral cowardice. As if it wasn’t the inevitable extension of the way they ran from the fight when it was their turn to serve, and are still running away from the truth. Other people will always do all the dying and sacrificing in their place because they’ve never had the guts to sacrifice anything for their country, least of all their pride. They only know how to take, and take, and keep taking more; they are like virulent parasites in human skin. Continuing the wrong war is not only cowardice – it’s the ultimate act of desperation on the part of slimy leaders who can’t admit the truth about themselves.
Lincoln once said, “I feel sorry for the man that can’t feel the lash on another man’s back.” We should all feel sorry for politicians whose greed and arrogance has made them incapable of feeling the suffering of those they’ve sent into war. We should be wary of mad kings who call the casualties of war, “just a comma”, and feel disgust when they insist that others die for their mistakes. We should abhor leaders who interpret their lack of humanity a political strength, and one we should all try to imitate. The real calamity came when they dodged the realities of this war so completley, that their madness means continuing in a perverse and wrong-headed strategy where the cost in terms of human suffering is irrelevant. A healthy revulsion for war’s true consequences is the only hope humanity has of overcoming the insanity of war.
A Republican president named Dwight D Eisenhower once said: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.” Only the stupidest, most brutal and cowardly political leaders could ever think war is the solution to political problems. Whenever leaders start preemptive wars it is always the sign of political madness wrapped in greed and lust for power wrapped in some hair-brained political theory.
Eisenhower also said that, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
We see some of the more direct consequences of this war in the daily casualty figures, and in bloody scenes from Iraq. But the killing fields of war has two sides, and what we don’t see are all the people who’ve died or been wounded from hunger, lack of decent housing or medical care because our nation’s resources were funneled into killing and corruption rather than healing and helping people. We don’t see all the people who were never educated, the medical and scientific research that was never funded, and all the lives and hopes that never stood a chance. Nor do we yet see the final result of all the hatred this war has inspired and nourished, either in the continuing ethnic conflicts, or in future religious wars and conflicts, or in the training and inspiration for countless future acts of terrorism. The destruction of war is incalculable, and the horror we are wittnessing today is only part of the tragedy.
What sort of insanity could inpire all this? What sort of fatally flawed logic would ever comit our nation to a war of choice against an enemy that was no threat to us? Only another completley mad King George could have put this curse upon us. Only an inbred advocate of the money aristrocracy could have deviated so far from the common good as to comit our nation’s resources to this abomination of blood, corruption, oil and torture.
The reason our founding fathers established a democratic republic was precicely to liberate us from this sort of hereditary madness, and avoid mad kings and their small-minded corrupt wars and personal grudges, along with the servile stupidity inherent in fighting for their reasons and their honor rather than our own. We can only hope that a newly and Democratically-elected Congress has the presence of mind to investigate, depose, and lock mad King George away again, so that the only wars he can conduct are the ones in his booze-crippled brain.
posted by R. Stephen Hanchett at 12:36 PM
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