Poetry in Notion

After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity.

Hedges is the respectable author who, along with other NYT team members (including ummm the truthsayer Judith Miller), shared a Pulitzer for their Explanatory Reporting on worldwide terrorism.

Such explanations as: " It was a real intelligence break, later recounted in detail by senior French intelligence officials, but it would prove too late to stop the World Trade Center plot. Enough time and work could have led investigators from Mr. Beghal to an address in Hamburg where Mohamed Atta and his cohorts had developed and planned the Sept. 11 attacks. But the hijackers had already slipped into the United States and were within days of carrying out their mission."

You see, there's my problem with exspurts such as Hedges. I, as a believer in an "inside job" dismiss anyone who pushes the official tale of Mohamed Atta & Cohorts plotted and perpetrated, developed and planned 9/11 from Hamburg, and that Western intel just needed more time to sort it all out.

A Harvard Divinity graduate, Hedges' latest book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, outlines in frightening detail how America's powerful whitewing Christian fascists seek apocalyptic totalitarianism.

I fail to see the power Hedges attributes to the Christian right in American society; it's a cult and as cults go – the rightwing theocracy movement will never control a population which praises the Lord with a Hustler mag in one hand and BudLite in the other, whose fundamentalist leadership holds a collection plate in one hand and a hooker's phone number in the other.

But Hedges serves to reinforce the divide, i.e. open society good versus Christian coalition bad. No middle ground folks, you're either for or against one or the other; either tolerate everything or tolerate nothing. No truth allowed – this ideology or the other – please check only one.

In view of the perverse, gluttonous, self-absorbed average American the rightwing Christian threat was beaten back a long time ago by the liberal cult of if-it-feels-good tolerance.

In the article Accustomed to Their Own Atrocities in Iraq, U.S. Soldiers Have Become Murderers Hedges is eloquent as always. Quoting Biblical passages, relating war to man's primal fear, pain, ecstasy. "War is also the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque."

All those grotesque poetic monsters make chills run up and down the spine of the "left." And all that talk of pain, dark beauty and porno gives the "right" a hard-on.

HEDGES: After four years of war, American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.

However, when these monster troops return and beat their infant child to death, "progressives" will claim it's depression, PTSD - not murder. One specious excuse fits all.

Perhaps US society has finally created the perfect soldier – a unique blend of the liberal anything goes and onward Christian soldier - troops without conscience who get off on "murder" because it feels good and is blessed by the State.

The military is a reflection of society. Whatever the numbers of US troops reveling in an orgy of violence is representative of civilian society. For every arrogant racist criminal in uniform in Iraq there are tens of thousands of him at home. Let us hope there are not 350,000 murdering troops/contractors coming home.

Hedges editorializes action that occurs in every war. What stands out is the statement : "Military machines and state bureaucracies, who seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war to speak the truth … "

Your fear fix for the week. Fear of the machine because it's gonna come back and getcha if ya "speak truth to power"? Nice mantra that truth speak to power thingy. Chris Hedges is to the "left" what Chuck Krauthammer is to the "right." Pompous cheerleaders with agendas.

Did you read Hedges article and say yes, right on!, quote a line or two on the forum? Are you afraid of the government and it's military machine? Are you silent in the face of power (chat rooms do not count)? Do you pay your taxes, obey the State?

You're a good little armchair, a properly socialized civilian soldier. Please mark the appropriate box and submit. Your opinion is important. Bwaaahaahaahaa.