Sunday Sermon

A family member, smart enough to have employment as a research scientist, once cautioned against my poking around in my computers registry trying to fix things;” its like a great big ball of spaghetti, start cutting strands and it will never go back together right”.

The integrity of this serpentine starch could be held as metaphor of the complex components of our nation’s reputation among the nations of the world, the snippets seem unrelated at first, but none to long, the unraveling starts.

Listening to KXOT, they ran “as it happens” pretty much the Canadian equivalent of “All things considered”. Interview was with the Canadian photographer who shot the infamous photo of a dead US soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu Somalia. He spoke of the Personal responsibility he felt for the pictures effects on US policy; the flight from Somalia and the blind eye turned to Rwanda. He had nightmare filled, mental illness provoking RESPONSIBILITY for what he had done and its EFFECT ON OTHERS. Could we, perhaps inoculate some folks in Washington, with this absent strain of simple humanity.

The other snip is explanation of why we don’t have to give a shit and why God is kicking our ass for it.

Listening to KUHF Houston TexaCUTION, one of the sponcers of NPR programming was a local company specializing in offshore drilling and national defense.

Was there not an American president, viewed both as warrior and humanitarian, who warned of the dangerous power of the “military industrial complex”.

Allowing private industry to get powerful enough to hijack our foreign policy. Allowing an image, no matter how poignant to cause us to turn our backs on the humanitarian interventions necessary in Africa. Both, in my Sunday morning morallism, sins.

Photo/Africa is a sin of simple fear, well practiced as of late; the industrial complex is an outgrowth of greed and pride.

And in this light we have the balls to wonder, why anyone on this planet would be pissed at us.

May God help those who deserve it.

May we work toward being deserving.

Another accidental internet discovery

The Vanity Fair article concerning the BS which the republicans crafted against Al Gore, and how the "liberal media" reported these as "gospel truth" had my antenna up for this trick.

So when this Letter, Written by the then 23 year old Bill Clinton dropped in my lap (thank G-d Gore invented the internets) I just had to check it out.

Before being bespoiled by the truth, what is your (media shaped) memory of this?

I was still doing the talk show at Jeanette, reading the NY Times, wall street journal, Trib and Post every day, I would listen to NPR while delivering pizza and would sample as much Limbaugh as I could stand.

My memory is of a proud and elitist Clinton, proclaiming the military to be a task "beneath him" and stating that HE, PERSONNALLY "LOATHED THE MILITARY"

I never remember ANYONE, not NYT, not NPR, putting this statement in to the context of the letter.

The most charitable treatment I remember hearing, is of an "older wiser Clinton" disowning his "youthful indiscretion"

Here is the letter, read the letter!

The “loathing” “smoking gun” is in the final paragraph

The media treatment of this issue was, as usual; Bullshit!

http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/clinton.htm