I have a huge backlog of things I want to write about, but I've been struggling to find the words for many of them.
Sunday I was herding the kids in the car to go to the gym, and I tripped and fell on my knee and messed it up. For two days it felt like I'd pulled evey muscle in my knee. Every day it gets a bit looser and less painful, but it's a constnat reminder to me that I'm not in my 20's anymore -- I get hurt more often, and I heal more slowly. It's ironic because I'm in the best shape of my life right now.
A month ago when I was in Hawaii, I started reading the Ender series of books by Orson Scott Card. The arc of the main story extends across four books: Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind. Earlier this week I finished the fourth, and I was withholding judgment on each of the books, and the whole series, until I finihsed it. At some point this weekend, I'll write up a long review of them, but the executive summary is that Ender's Game was fantastic, Speaker for the Dead was a really good murder mystery, and the last two were contrived and asked the reader to suspend disbelief far too much.
The prison abuse scandal really has me down. I despise the Bush administration, and I think Janeane Garofalo said it really well on the Daily Show last week: at this point voting for Bush is more than anything else a character flaw. I can't believe that the White House and the Pentagon are both saying that this is just the work of a few bad apples, and that the brutality shown to the prisoners was actually justified in the interest of extracting useful intelligence. I have been simmering for days trying to figure out what to write on the subject... and then yesterday the whole beheading thing happened. I read comments online from people saying that seeing the terrorists (or insurgents, or al-Qaida operatives, or whoever they are) beheading an American hostage really puts the prisoner abuse in perspective.
No, it doesn't. What our military did inside the Iraqi prison is not justifiable from any perspective. Donald Rumsfeld, our Secretary on the Defensive, cannot credibly present any rationale for these actions. Yes, there are other loathsome people out there, possibly even more loathsome than the things that our government has done. but in no way does that lessen the heinous acts of prison abuse that our own military have committed. Oh, and by the way, why is it that over the last couple of days we've stopped using the word "torture" to describe it? Let's face it: the interrogators were torturing those prisoners. Doesn't that get classified under the heading of "war crimes"? Maybe that's why the Bush administration is resisting the World Court -- because they want the ability to torture prisoners with impunity. The Bush administration has brought our nation to new lows, damaged our credibility around the world, destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, and coddled their biggest financial supporters.
It's clearly time for regime change. They lie, steal, cheat, and bully. This is not the America that we all know and love. The Founding Fathers spoke thusly:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does it say that this truth applies only to American citizens; it applies to all people, everywhere. That is a fundamental principle upon which our country is created, and for us to believe that we are justified in denying that basic truth and the rights validated therein to any human being on the planet, whether captured by our occupying forces in Iraq or held in limbo in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, is unconscionable. Our persistence in following this course of action fundamentally undermines who we are and what we stand for. Of course, John Ashcroft has made it patently clear that American citizens' rights are equally at peril, and particularly so if they are at odds with his fundamental Christian beliefs. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that this administration has no respect for human rights, anywhere.
In November, we have the opportunity to vote the bastards out. If we fail to do so, then America will have sullied, perhaps permanently, its reputation as the beacon for freedom and basic human rights in the world, and we will get what we deserve.
OK, I'm done ranting now.
To top off my bad-karma week: I got a letter in the mail today from the IRS, saying that they found a mistake in my 2002 (yes, 2 years ago) tax return and that I owe them a bunch of money. And sure enough, I pulled out my tax return and I had made a dumb mistake and I do in fact owe them a bunch of money.
10:17:32 PM  ; ;
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