Fear and Loathing
The titillating
emails about France I receive each week cannot overwhelm the insistent
political emails that engulf them: something is happening and we all
know what it is... the Bush Administration.
Not the least of my frustrations during the years of the George W. Bush administration is the morass of material I have been enticed to read just to maintain my political sanity. At first it was a necessity, a kind of reactogenic response to a horribly disturbing political sea change in Washington. I haven't felt so perturbed, disturbed and anxious in years; nothing compared to my focused angst of the anti-Vietnam era. My Bush discontent is pervasive and global.
How to respond? The Internet has provided more than ample grist for my mill. Between activist-oriented sites, (e.g. Move On, Democracy Now, Impeach Bush, Truthout, to name only a very few) which facilitate automatic responses and petitions to our Congressional delegations there is the voluminous amount of email sent to me by well-meaning and similarly troubled political soul mates.
That the Internet sites have at least produced results is attested to by the number of official letters I receive weekly (an average of four) from Senators Bennett, Hatch and Representative Jim Matheson. Each is specifically issue-oriented and undoubtedly written by a staffer from some ideological boilerplate, but there is the notion that a connection of some sort is being made.
The glut of email is a whole other matter. I have always had difficulty reading newspapers and magazines on the computer screen; tracts sent by email are no different. So I print them out, carry them around with me for a few days in the ineffable hope that I will read them, and finally quarter them to be used as note sheets (despite the fact that my secretary swears she already has a drawer full). Despite the fact that I have always been a voracious reader I have recently adopted a more radical approach: I delete them unread from my Inbox. Sure there are a few friends' missives I peek at but the others are history.
But my guilt remains. Am I missing something important? What really is the effect on my psyche of not reading the latest diatribe from William Pitt Rivers or Arundati Roy, both of whom I admire deeply. I cannot do it all. It is enough to read Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman.
I have given up Thomas Friedman who, it seems to me, has vacillated once too often for my taste. Furthermore, his September 18th New York Times editorial was a virulent diatribe about French behavior before, during and after the war. Friedman begins with:
It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.
He argues, somewhat fatuously, that France wants America to fail there, in the crazy hope that a weakened United States will strengthen France in shaping world affairs, and goes on to conclude:
Having France working with us in Iraq, rather than against us in the world, would be so beneficial for both nations and for the Arabs' future. Too bad this French government has other priorities.
Like what? Political morality?
But I digress from my fury. There are times when I resent the amount of time, thought and emotional energy I have expended counteracting the nefarious and, yes, hateful policies of the current administration. They are so globally odious that it is difficult for me to figure out where to expend my political energies: the war, foreign policy in general, the economy, the environment, education, and on and on. Now we are dealing with a myriad of issues and their implications seem gargantuan both geographically (the world) and temporally (the end of the world). What legacy will we be leaving our children, much less our grandchildren?
Many of us cannot stand to either watch or listen to George W. Bush; we have an almost visceral antipathy. My tolerance would not improve if he stopped asking North Korea to divest themselves of their NUCULAR (phonetically, NEW-KEW-LAR)... they don‚t have any. I tried free-associating: what words come to mind when I think about the current dilemma? Anger. Urgency. Overwhelming. Incredulity. Freneticism. Fear. The latter is probably the most powerful element in my contemporary worldview. The President uses it as his trump card to mobilize support for his disastrous policies and I look on it from the perspective of gonzo journalist, Hunter Thompson. I see the future with both fear and loathing.
Not the least of my frustrations during the years of the George W. Bush administration is the morass of material I have been enticed to read just to maintain my political sanity. At first it was a necessity, a kind of reactogenic response to a horribly disturbing political sea change in Washington. I haven't felt so perturbed, disturbed and anxious in years; nothing compared to my focused angst of the anti-Vietnam era. My Bush discontent is pervasive and global.
How to respond? The Internet has provided more than ample grist for my mill. Between activist-oriented sites, (e.g. Move On, Democracy Now, Impeach Bush, Truthout, to name only a very few) which facilitate automatic responses and petitions to our Congressional delegations there is the voluminous amount of email sent to me by well-meaning and similarly troubled political soul mates.
That the Internet sites have at least produced results is attested to by the number of official letters I receive weekly (an average of four) from Senators Bennett, Hatch and Representative Jim Matheson. Each is specifically issue-oriented and undoubtedly written by a staffer from some ideological boilerplate, but there is the notion that a connection of some sort is being made.
The glut of email is a whole other matter. I have always had difficulty reading newspapers and magazines on the computer screen; tracts sent by email are no different. So I print them out, carry them around with me for a few days in the ineffable hope that I will read them, and finally quarter them to be used as note sheets (despite the fact that my secretary swears she already has a drawer full). Despite the fact that I have always been a voracious reader I have recently adopted a more radical approach: I delete them unread from my Inbox. Sure there are a few friends' missives I peek at but the others are history.
But my guilt remains. Am I missing something important? What really is the effect on my psyche of not reading the latest diatribe from William Pitt Rivers or Arundati Roy, both of whom I admire deeply. I cannot do it all. It is enough to read Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman.
I have given up Thomas Friedman who, it seems to me, has vacillated once too often for my taste. Furthermore, his September 18th New York Times editorial was a virulent diatribe about French behavior before, during and after the war. Friedman begins with:
It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy.
He argues, somewhat fatuously, that France wants America to fail there, in the crazy hope that a weakened United States will strengthen France in shaping world affairs, and goes on to conclude:
Having France working with us in Iraq, rather than against us in the world, would be so beneficial for both nations and for the Arabs' future. Too bad this French government has other priorities.
Like what? Political morality?
But I digress from my fury. There are times when I resent the amount of time, thought and emotional energy I have expended counteracting the nefarious and, yes, hateful policies of the current administration. They are so globally odious that it is difficult for me to figure out where to expend my political energies: the war, foreign policy in general, the economy, the environment, education, and on and on. Now we are dealing with a myriad of issues and their implications seem gargantuan both geographically (the world) and temporally (the end of the world). What legacy will we be leaving our children, much less our grandchildren?
Many of us cannot stand to either watch or listen to George W. Bush; we have an almost visceral antipathy. My tolerance would not improve if he stopped asking North Korea to divest themselves of their NUCULAR (phonetically, NEW-KEW-LAR)... they don‚t have any. I tried free-associating: what words come to mind when I think about the current dilemma? Anger. Urgency. Overwhelming. Incredulity. Freneticism. Fear. The latter is probably the most powerful element in my contemporary worldview. The President uses it as his trump card to mobilize support for his disastrous policies and I look on it from the perspective of gonzo journalist, Hunter Thompson. I see the future with both fear and loathing.
--
Louis Borgenicht is a pediatrician/writer living in SLC, Utah. He's the co-author, with his son Joe, of The Baby Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance.
Louis Borgenicht is a pediatrician/writer living in SLC, Utah. He's the co-author, with his son Joe, of The Baby Owner's Manual: Operating Instructions, Trouble-Shooting Tips, and Advice on First-Year Maintenance.
