xtcian

3/10/03 Brooklyn, NY Driving up

3/10/03 Brooklyn, NY

Driving up the Eastern Seaboard with the satellite radio tuned to the BBC will give you eight hours' earful of how much the rest of the world despises the United States right now; it seems like the only country with no beef is Bulgaria. I don't blame any of them. If I were more involved with the folks over at moveon.org, I'd suggest helping the French, who are busy convincing the rest of the world that our government is a drunk 15-year-old at the wheel of a loaded school bus.

One liberal mantra is "this would be the first unprovoked attack on another nation in the history of this country" but they'd be wrong. America did the exact same goddamn thing with the Spanish-American war. Remember it from 9th grade? One of our battleships called the U.S.S. Maine, docked in Spanish-owned Cuba in 1898, suffered a mysterious explosion (probably engine-related). The U.S. government, however, in cahoots with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, drummed up a war against the Spanish to sell papers and solidify American power. Sound like any Republican-controlled government and news outlet you happen to know?

Back then, the cry was "Remember the Maine!" which is exactly like Bush Jr. invoking "Remember September 11!" for Iraq, in that both statements attempt to blame the wrong people through a hideous slight-of-hand that Gary Kamiya calls brutal sentimentality, and I call the New Mercilessness.

At the farm I have a giant picture of the 1899 U.S. Congress well, actually a "composite photograph" of every member's head stuck on random bodies, making the whole thing look like an animation still from Monty Python. At the bottom, it says, "They Remembered The Maine." And you can see it, too, the scowling faces of hundreds of old, corpulent white guys obviously suffering from the gout, aching to kick some brown people ass.

I bought the picture last year because I thought it was hilarious; I didn't know I'd be staring at such a deliciously apt doppelganger for our times. Frankly, I'm surprised that the Spanish-American war isn't being brought up more often these days; I find it rather comforting that the U.S. has acted like a tyrannical, imperialist dipshit before and managed to survive.

a police action on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge held traffic there for an hour here's Manhattan from that vantage point. recognize anything?