Monday, August 28, 2006

the problems ov nationalism.


i don't like posting about politics too much, i prefer to make my dissatisfaction with the current system known in more clandestine incindiary ways. the other reason i don't post too much about politics is that it's hard for me to not make revealing statements like the one i just made. but i'm posting this for a friend with whom i had this discussion because, as he put it, there are just too many 'ov's in this thread to share with just one man. this whole train of thought was spurred by this article, so perhaps you would like to read its excellently written arguement, which has very little to do with my post, before reading my mostly formed ramblings on the subject matter below.


for me the main failing ov the current administration became easier to sum up for me after reading that. if i were to present an arguement to a conservative that i would think was convincing, it would be this: bush didn't really care about 9/11. i explain:

it's like bush got everyone all riled up, put on his hunting gear, went up to the podium, loaded and cocked his shotgun, looked out at the audience and said "i'm gonna go and find the bastards who did this and make them pay. i will bring you back their severed heads in a duffel bag, and toss them to your children so that they may kick them down the street chortling gleefully and praising our godfearing way of life. wait here, it won't take long." then the bastard went out duck hunting with american lives as bullets and came back with a bunchh of ducks. ducks he didn't even share with the kids. he ate the duck with his buddies. so where is all this revenge shit he was speaking before? why do people think that he still cares about them after such a huge impersonal national slap to the face? when's he gonna bring the heads back in a bag?

ain't gonna happen. we all know that. but the suck thing is, that other 'conservatives', the other people who were all fired up about the atttack, they don't care about the world trade center either. and i can prove it to you.

when i found out abouut the world trade center attack, i did not care about the lives that were lost. i was reprimanded at work and almost fired because i jumped up and down for joy when i heard. i then spent the rest of the day trying to tell people who didn't want to really hear why it happened why it happened, because they kept fucking asking. this almost got me fired, and i was told not to discuss politics or 9/11 with anyone, and they were told to do the same. i tell you that so you know where i'm coming from. even though i'm talking about this, i truly care not one whit for the lives that were lost. i do care about the incident itself, but not the people who died. i'm just being real with you.

why do i not care? people die in great numbers all the time. floods. earthquakes, mudslides, Union Carbide, all those things have killed people in far greater numbers and people don't go to pieces about it unless it strikes them personally. i knew from day one that this incident did not touch me personally, but i think a whole lot ov other people pretended it did. a whole hell ov a lot. most ov america. all those disaters all had bigger death tolls and people in america didn't/don't care that much about those situations. why? cuz there's no outrage or outpouring ov fevered emotion that can get your blood pumping. there's just no thrill ov bloodlust to accompany a natural disaster, it just don't seem right. but an attack on god and country, hell yes. add that into the mix and it's easier to pretend those deaths matter.

so, what you get now is a lot ov people being released from the burden ov pretending to care about something they never truly personally did: all the lives lost in the world trade center attacks. if you were to try and argue the point that i just made earlier to a conservative, many ov them would no doubt try and explain off the presidents actions as part ov a greater plan rather than question why he is not doing what he said he was doing; exacting revenge. the underlying reason for this in my mind is that those people did not care then and they do not care now about actual revenge, they just want to justify domination and mayhem for their side's aggrandizement.
the same type ov nationalism that made it easy to rally around a more personal and visible attack makes it easy to do whatever you want to do in the name of promoting your agenda if you give out rewards ov violence and tragedy to what is seen as 'the other team'. actual followup on what you said you were going to do no longer becomes relevant because it's easier to just quit caring about what started it and keep on focusing on the little shit that keeps popping up in your face. it's actually quite sad that we have this type ov nationalism. if we had the kind that actually had brought whoever bomed/flew into the towers(both are possibilities to me) to justice without blowing up a bunch ov irrelevant persons i would personally respect that, even if i did not quite approve. the type ov nationalism that we have though, so poorly rooted in realy person to person unity, is just a very poor excuse for nationalism for anyone but dickheads in power.

don't get me wrong, or at least not too terribly so. i'm not really into nationalism. i think it's stupid to section off humanity like that. but if we're gonna have it, can we at least get some respectable nationalism to fight against? this shit is totally lame.
okay, i done.







1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I miss your blog. Come back, Senor Jones!