Yesterday there was an infuriating episode of
me vs. Public Transportation in which the defeated, infuriated party was me. By the time I was through with the subway and arriving at my car, had you come up to my head and peeked in through my eyeball, you'd have seen a tiny image of me rampaging across several countries, one of which was

the country of Lies and Broken Promises
Last month we went to Mothers' Day brunch with my grandparents and my dad joked about the plan for a secular Islamic government for Iraq. What's that?!, he scoffed, and my grandfather chuckled his accord. Then I said something about America recently resembling a secular Christian state, what with all the invocations and God-talkin' from GWB and his cronies. My comment was not taken well. I tried futilely to explain: if a corporate executive submitted to his board a business plan that included as justification for certain actions an endorsement from Jesus, wouldn't that be inappropriate? To non-Christians, what could be more irrelevant? Anyway, every fifth car in the T parking lot yesterday had a God Bless America sticker on it and that sort of thing has been driving me nuts. It's not the sentiment that bothers me, or an idea that America ought not to be blessed; it's the deep sense that Americans have been manipulated. -- To which, outrage -- utter outrage -- would be expressed by my father:
����How can you presume to know better than
����they? George Bush talks about God because
����that's how he talks; it's what he believes.
����People put the stickers on their cars because
����of what they feel for America. He -- they --
����they're expressing themselves!
����Well, surely I'd like not to take that away from them, but without doing so a person who'd like to make a point about deception finds his hands tied. So I'm going to say it, and honestly, when does anyone deny it?: people can get caught up in things. Flags everywhere, okay? -- bandwagons. There's no diminished respect for people who ride these waves, and their feelings are always valid. A lot of people are feeling patriotic and spiritual lately, in response to certain events and ideas. Fine. Others, like me, are feeling suspicious. I watch news, press conferences, speeches, and it's all suspect. I can deal with political differences -- it's not that. The "oh, no! not in my name!" protest is, in all cases but one, misconceived, since public servants don't act on behalf of individuals, but on behalf of a majority. If I happen to disagree with that majority, it's my problem, and that's democracy. The exception is the case of God, who has been hijacked and through whose mouth has spoken George Bush at whim. This example is for me one of the clearest indications that sources of critical information are untrustworthy. --Not because they're religious, but because it's inauthentic. People in the White House -- who I just know are intelligent -- apparently have dismally lax standards when it comes to deciding what qualifies as an ethical, logical communication. How could anybody -- much less those atop the U.S. government -- fail to seriously consider whether God would distribute blessings along national lines? They obviously haven't considered it, because He wouldn't! Sure -- technically it's an unanswerable question, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed; I think it's essential that justification be given if the President of the United States is going to be jabbering on like a preacher. I could see it if the world were not in conflict and one day America was just sitting there on its porch, being all land-of-the-free, and God looked down and was like, "you know, I LIKE America. America is a good thing. Bless you, America." But that's not what's going on. What's going on is: 1. Purportedly, God is enthusiastically blessing America as it deals out judgment and decides the fates of other countries. God is a sports fan and America is His team. 2. Meanwhile, every chance they get, government speechers are sitting down with America, and with a big black marker they're retracing country names and borders -- making them ever thicker, ever darker. Nations ever more discrete. Which says something -- especially as it coincides with God's supposed cheering. And then Americans yell amen and put flags up and vilify dissenters. The excitement makes them less likely to notice that the administration's implication that respect and propriety are irrelevant, is a dramatic rejection of Christian principles. Besides being an incredible hypocrisy, if the appropriation of God by GWB, religious president of a (theoretically) enlightened nation, isn't one of the hugest, most corrupt things ever, I don't know what is. It's not that the Bush administration is religious and consequently obtuse. It's that it's made up of liars. Fully disingenuous sharks who have neither respect for the American people, nor for the idea of God.

���� And I barely believe in God, if I do at all. But it makes me so mad. I'm not even complaining about their choices. I feel let down by the way our government talks to us. I suspect that we are not being served.

���� Is it any surprise that we're not finding any weapons?

���� I had been thinking about it a few hours before, after I'd heard some Bush clip on the radio -- his awful kind of plodding speech delivery, speaking as no human speaks. Every sentence tailored to present a voluminous profile, while saying nothing.

���� Maybe tomorrow I'll profile another country.


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