smoke and mirror lock down
I thought I would try to break my record of 2 months between posts but I really don’t want to write the memo I’ve been working on for two days and I got a ton of stuff done yesterday so I thought this would be a good opportunity to goof off. Also I’ve been really happy with the voting public in general this week as they see right through the Repubs and their attempt to "frame" the debate on how ‘winning’ Iraq will crush the terrorists. what a load of krap. Looks like it only takes 6 years for people to stop wanting to be lied to.
Not sure why that suprises me as we all fall victim to that desire to believe those who impact our lives. All’s fair in love and war and apparently everyone’s gullible in it too. Se la vi.
In another semi-cynical rant, how many of you can name all of the tragedies our country has sworn to ‘never forget’? I know I can’t but the three I do remember are:
The Maine
The Day that Will Last in Infamy
9/11
There’s also one about the Barbary Pirates and the creation of the US Navy way back in 1790-something but I’m not a hundred percent sure of the soundbyte on that one so I’ll ignore it for now.
Back to the three unforgettable days. I always loved the story of the Spanish-American war. It so clearly laid out our hipocracy and the ability of Americans to see exactly what we want to see. Many people know that the ‘Remember the Maine’ rallying cry had something to do with the Spanish. Most don’t know what that was though. ( :
[disclaimer: this is a general overview of the S/A war and should be fact checked before being cited.]Basically, the Spanish had a little territory called the Phillipinnes (which I apparently can’t spell…) and the Phillipino people did not want to be a territory so they engaged in something called gurella warfare (first case I know of where this term was used and amazingly, 150+ years later we still can’t really beat it….) the Spanish retaliated by corraling the villagers in camps (sound familar) torturing people (hmmmm….) and burning down forests (agent orange anyone?). The American public was outraged at this injustice and imposed some weak sanctions and tried to impose some blockades in order to help the Phillipino people (yeah us!! we stood up for the little guy). One of the ships involved in the standoff was the Maine. Details are sketchy and some claim we blew the boat up ourselves with one of the first submarines (not a very technologically advanced version of course) but the Maine was blown up. This led to an official declaration of war against the Spanish.
Long story short, (too late - hehe who knows what movie that was in? do you need a CLUE?) we won the war and got the Philppines as a reward. Yea for the little guy right? Not quite. With the new territory came new responsibility and we took up right where the Spanish left off. Americans of the… roughest quality were recruited to go to the Philppines and subdue the people, extract the natural resources and expand our national reach. The general public was told that where the Spanish were being brutal, we were just being tough (that sounds familiar too for some reason……). The deception of the majority of the American people lasted well into the late 1980’s when the Philippines gained it’s independence after the Marcos’ were finally booted (hehe) out of power. (obstensible reference to shoeware is funny….) [for more info on how and why this really happened, look in an encyclopedia - or the internet]
The nice thing is that this time around, with the war on terror and it’s relationship to Iraq and the inability of this administration to find OSB, it only took the American people six years to break through the smoke and mirrors.
and that my friends, is progress.
