Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Why high school English is important

So I'm reading Bush's short Q & A session after meeting with the WHO Director-General and I'm thinking, "Didn't everyone else read all of those horrifying dystopic novels in public school?" I mean, how can a person have read Brave New World and 1984 and still believe the rhetoric that W regurgitates about Iraq? I really and truly don't get it. I read this for example
The only thing that the enemy has got going for them is the capacity to take innocent life and to get on our TV screens with this devastation that they cause. These people cannot stand free societies. They have no regard for the human condition. They'll kill women and children at the drop of a hat, all aimed at frightening the American people and trying to get us to withdraw.
And to me it reads like a parody of jingoistic proto-fascistic nationalism. They hate freedom. Victory is inevitable. Go team. Why is this not obvious to everyone? It's like those bad horror movies where only a few people in the know understand that everyone is gradually being turned into pod people/ zombies/ aliens. What was that one where putting on the special pair of sunglasses revealed who was an alien? It's like that. Brave New World and books like that are like the sunglasses. As much as I was an unenthusiastic student in my adolescence, I'm glad I always liked to read.

The whole thing, brief though it is, just pissed me off so much. This was the worst passage:
I -- our troops need to know that the American people stand with them, and we have a strategy for victory. And of course there will be debate, and of course there will be some pessimists and some people playing politics with the issue. But by far, the vast majority of people in this country stand squarely with the men and women who wear the nation's uniform.
Of course there will be people who disagree with me, but they will be wrong. At best they're just haters and sad asses; at worst they are putting their own political ambitions in front of what's best for this nation and, driven by spurious motives, are willing to spit in the eye of private Ryan.

The whole thing ends with the bald-faced lie, "We do not render to countries that torture. That has been our policy, and that policy will remain the same." Yeah, and you did not have sex with that woman, and you are not a crook.

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