The last couple of days have been some kind of interesting, being as they were an enlightening and disturbing window on the psyche of some folks.
It all started here when, being in a bit of a cranky mood, I opined that I was having a hard time dredging up the requisite sympathy for the victims of Hurricane Katrina for a variety of reasons. Sure, I could have been more diplomatic about the whole thing, or maybe waited until the caffeine kicked in a bit more, but I wrote what I was thinking at the time and there you go.
Predictably, the reactions weren't long in coming from folks like this. My word, but I was a monster, a fiend, a ghoul. Where did I get the nerve to call myself a progressive? And on and on and tediously on.
Ignore, of course, that I wasn't the only one who couldn't get into the spirit of things:
... In fact, to judge by the reaction of some Londoners yesterday to Katrina's rising death toll, Britons seem to feel the United States is overdrawn on sympathy.
Pay no attention to those snotty foreigners, though -- no point beating up on them when we have a local to jump all over.
The curious feature here, of course, is that your humble correspondent is in no way responsible for Katrina. I don't control the weather, I didn't create the storm, I didn't personally cause the levees to fail. I'm a man with a blog. I control words, and that's it, nothing more.
Consider, then, the treatment of the man who, inarguably, is at least partially responsible for this nightmare -- President George Bush. As I (and many others) have already documented in excruciating, nut-breaking detail, this is the man whose administration cut the budget for New Orleans levee restoration, slashed FEMA's budget, gave the crucial wetlands that helped protect New Orleans back to developers, started a totally unnecessary war that depleted several states of their vital National Guard and Reserves and, as a final insult, thoroughly dragged his ass getting back to D.C. where he gave, by all accounts from both the left and the right, a totally lame-ass speech that satisfied no one.
The general reaction from the right-wing wankersphere? (And even from parts of the left?) Man, that CC guy is an asshole, what an incredible jerk, how can he call himself a human being after what he wrote?
And if you presume to instead criticize Commander Chimpy and point out the ongoing horror going on down south? Well, that just won't do, as one commenter writes here:
Do you never stop? I mean here is an act of nature which is disrupting millions of peoples lives, killing scores if not hundreds and making a mess of a large part of the southern US and you want to score political points.
Yeah, criticizing the one man who's actually responsible for this fiasco. How arrogant. How presumptuous. How downright political. Easier to beat up on a snarky blogger than think bad thoughts about the Boy King.
But that's cool. All of these critics have the right to say what they want about what I wrote, just as I had the right to write it in the first place. But let's remember one thing -- when things go from bad to worse to even worse than that, keep in mind that I wasn't responsible for any of it.
But that doesn't really matter, does it?
2 comments:
The world would be a better place without so many 'Murcans, n'est-ce pas?
You're definitely not a person seeking consolation, but if it's worth anything, I've been reading you regularly and am in complete agreement with what you're saying. The problem is, to many people, attacking the current President of the United States and his policies is inseparable from attacking America. It's nonsense, of course, but this is a culture whose leaders chose to respond to France's decision not to send troops to Iraq by renaming French fries "freedom fries" in the White House cafeteria.
How do you begin to hold a fact-based argument with leaders and "newspeople" whose rules of debate begin and end in a daycare sandbox? (And my apologies to pre-schoolers everywhere.)
The consolation to me is that I have several American friends who are profoundly embarrassed by their government in general and its President in particular. So there's hope.
The sooner that Bush and his patently dangerous cohorts are relegated to the dustbin of history, the better off the world will be. Fortunately, there are fewer and fewer people holding him up as a beacon of hope and more and more people who consider his policies dangerous, stupid and appallingly short-sighted.
I'd rather be us than them, any millennium.
But as for your being assailed for being the messenger of reality -- you're just going to have to live with it. But please don't ever let that slow you down!
(By the way, our Chief of Staff has just offered whatever troops the US thinks will be useful to assist in the relief efforts. The US has said "Thanks; we'll let you know." What do you want to bet the time required for the Malkins, AGWNs and Small Dead Twits of the world to rail against the absence of Canadians among the relief workers and peacekeepers is measured in hours? The time required for them to acknowledge the generosity of the Canadian offer, given our own critical lack of military manpower, will be, of course, infinite.)
Please keep the flags of Canadian Cynicism flying!
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