Sunday, May 1, 2011

A Steep Plunge into Stygian Slime

The "slippery slope" is one of our more tired and threadbare metaphors but it remains apt when applied to the Obama-Bush war machinery.

Take our fourth-front, third war in Libya: it was sold to us (all of our wars are cleverly marketed, like Super Bowl commercials) as a safe-distance, no-boots-on-the-ground humanitarian intervention.

But now, oops!, we have killed Col. Gaddaffi's youngest son and three grandchildren, innocent kids no matter their bloodlines, in an attack on one of the dictator's homes.

Despite the clever commercials, our image in the world has plunged down a slippery slope from humanitarians to child-killers.

The most recent victims are simply more prominent than countless others in our wars.  The sad fact is that we can only estimate the number of innocent kids we have slain in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and, now, Libya.

What kind of people are we to look the other way while trillions of our tax dollars are spent in the willy-nilly slaughter of innocent children?

What kind of hypocrites are we who elect sociopathically dereistic politicians to our legislatures, intent upon paying the costs of these wars by condemning American citizens to suffer without health care, food, jobs or basic necessities of life?

What kind of heritage of barbarism, savagery, ignorance and self-deceit do we fashion for our own children, who will inherit our debt and the hatred and contempt with which we are viewed elsewhere  in the world?

How many wars will they  have to fight because of that hatred and contempt? How many of them will bleed and die for an ignoble cause?

What further debasement will we reap for having sown our seeds of destruction by remote control, death by robot, massacre by drones?

Is there no end to this madness?

Have we plunged so far down that cliche'd slope that not just present, but also future generations of Americans are condemned to wallow forever in the Stygian slime of militarism, war and the stench of the death of innocents?

When, oh when, did we give away the nation forged in revolution and defined by the likes of Madison, Jefferson, Washington and Adams?

Perhaps only another revolution can reclaim it.  Or, worse, perhaps it is lost beyond reclamation.