A few days ago, I was doing the ego-surfing thing and looking for references to Follow Me Here I hadn’t seen before. I came across an entry by a weblogger who, linking to a FmH post she found praiseworthy, commented that I had redeemed myself as she had just been on the verge of dropping FmH from her blogroll because I was getting “too political.” Well, I plead guilty as charged, your honor. I suppose that, if you are still reading, it is because you do not mind. It was not my intention in starting Follow Me Here to be a political commentator. Cynical me! I fancied myself somehow above national politics and dubious about the relevance to any truly important aspects of life of the actions of the buffoons who choose to dedicate their lives to transparent and ingratiating vote-grubbing and giveaways to their rich friends. Local politics, I have always thought, is a different matter. ‘Think globally, act locally’ makes eminent sense. Nation states the size of the US are just to large and diverse to govern effectively and, seeing that truth, we should divorce ourselves from politics on the irrelevant and absurd national scale, I thought. Perhaps because of that disdain, I have never had the patience to follow the minutia of political machinations, and others on both the left and the right are far more erudite analysts than I aspire to be. Yet, since Bush’s election, the distinction between the merely banal, superficial and pompous and the malignant in politics has come to be clear. While I am not sure that national leadership can make much of a positive difference, it is clear how much evil it can do in the wrong hands. The most important fact in my experience of American public life has come to be not merely, as it is characterized, a ‘culture war’ around which sitcoms we choose to watch, which books move us, or which beverages we drink, but a life-and-death struggle for our souls between the life-affirming and just and the apocalyptic world-destroying (and, believe me, I am the first to get sick to my stomach of hyperbolic prose).
Not to suggest that those of you who do not have children should not be similarly moved, but watching my children grow up in the world George Bush has engendered is to a large extent what has transformed my sense of urgency around political issues. In my professional life as a physician, I fight to make small contributions to maintaining the life-affirming and dignifying effects of healthcare treatment in the face of its debasement. My weblog is becoming my little contribution to a similar but broader, multi-faceted struggle, over the outcome of which I am desperate and far far from confident, to pass on a world that is perhaps just abit more than debased, degraded and totally degenerate to our descendants. I do preach to the choir, but I hope there is something that deepens and widens your perspective and moves you toward further or more nuanced engagement in that struggle. I am logging essentially what widens and deepens my thinking and engagement. I was far more honored by a journalist reader’s recent comment to me that I am doing a good job on the war than I am troubled by those who might want to keep the blinders over their eyes. I hope that, if FmH is “too political” for you, it is because you have already gotten it, that you find all the thoughts upon which I harp already obvious and tedious. In any case, departing reader, fare ye well, and keep up the good fight.
Related: “Despite the worst foreign policy blunder in American history, George W. Bush and his millionaire supporters don’t know the meaning of the word shame”. Hal Crowther writes a devastating impeachment on indyweek.com:
“I never imagined 2004. It would be sophomoric to say that there was never a worse year to be an American. My own memory preserves the dread summer of 1968. My parents suffered the consequences of 1941 and 1929, and my grandfather Jack Allen, who lived through all those dark years, might have added 1918, with the flu epidemic and the Great War in France that each failed, very narrowly, to kill him. Drop back another generation or two and we encounter 1861…
The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don’t believe it yet, just keep watching. Apologists strain to dismiss parallels with Vietnam, but the similarities are stunning. In every action our soldiers kill innocent civilians, and in every other action apparent innocents kill our soldiers–and there’s never any way to sort them out. And now these acts of subhuman sadism, these little My Lais.
Since the defining moment of the Bush presidency, the preposterous flight-suit, Fox News-produced photo-op on the Abraham Lincoln in front of the banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” the shaming truth is that everything has gone wrong. Just as it was bound to go wrong, as many of us predicted it would go wrong–if anything more hopelessly wrong than any of us would have dared to prophesy. Iraq is an epic train wreck, and there’s not a single American citizen who’s going to walk away unscathed.”
