On Reality

Why do I think the coming roast of Pamela Anderson may signal the end of civilization? Oh, never mind.

All day I have been pondering the question of reality. I think I may have lost it. Bush/Cheney and the neocons have lied so consistently and outrageously that it has become virtually impossible to locate reality. It is like one of their people once said, "we now create our own reality." But if you can create your own reality on a day to day basis is there, then, any real reality? I know I sound like Rumsfeld who has been so dissociated from reality he wouldn't know it if he saw it. But really, reality-wise, I have reached the point where I simply do not believe anything Republicans say. The concept of reality has been abandoned. We are now living in a complete fantasyland where what people say has no connection with anything previously considered to be reality. Things are going well in Iraq. Progress is being made. The insurgents are in the "last throes." We are going to reduce troop levels. We are not going to reduce troop levels. We want Osama bin Laden dead or alive. Osama bin Laden is not important to us. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. No, they don't have WMD's. They were trying to buy uraniam in South Africa. No, they were not trying to buy it. Rove had nothing to do with outing Plame, the idea is absurd. Bush will fire anyone who leaked. No, only if a crime was committed. Social Security is going to collapse unless we do something immediately. Well, maybe not immediately. I could go on and on. But what's the point? None of these claims or statements has anything whatsoever to do with reality. Hardly anyone seems to care. That's exactly how far we have come from reality.

Although I can't go into the subject here at the moment it is past time that we rethink carefully the question of an all volunteer army (no, I am absolutely not in favor of a draft). It seems clear to me that most of those individuals who now are in our military are there because of some financial motive (bonuses, college tuition, professional training, etc.). Some of them may also have patriotic motives but I suspect they are now a minority. Apparently we also have now large numbers of mercenaries, hired hands from wherever. In this situation it seems to me their loyalties are not to the United States per se, but rather to whoever it is that pays them. When you couple this with recent legislation that for the first time will allow the army to operate within the continental U.S. I believe we are treading on extremely dangerous ground. With large numbers of military personnel refusing to return to duty in Iraq, and the military unable to fulfill their enlistment goals, it would seem that patriotism is not much involved. They either don't want to get killed or they think the "war" is not worth it and they want nothing to do with it. Somehow, if we are to maintain an all volunteer military, we are going to have to make it clear that their loyalty is to the United States of America, not to the corporate masters that now control them. I do not believe this is a trivial issue, or paranoid, or un-American. Think about it.

"For he who sins a second time, wakes a dead soul to pain..."

Oscar Wilde
The Ballad of...