Springfield in the news

I think The Office is a rerun tonight, but I’m going to watch it anyway, but before I do here’s a link to an article in the New York Times about my hometown, Springfield, and my dad’s hometown, Clifton Heights. Most Springfield readers probably already know this, but I should also mention that the Rocco Polidoro quoted in the first paragraph is a family friend. I haven’t read the article yet myself, in toto, so I don’t really have any further comment on it, but it’s certainly an interesting piece of Springfield trivia. Don’t ya think?

President Bush’s Speech

I still plan on getting to the year in review stuff eventually.  In fact, putting the idea out there has given me a chance to organize some of my thoughts privately before I air them here for all to see.  So consider yourself lucky. Or warned.

Instead of posting the year in review stuff tonight, I’m going to comment a bit on the speech that President Bush delivered this evening.  I knew that it would be painful to watch, but I also felt like I was somehow obligated to watch it, so I grinned and bore it.  On an aesthetic, emotional level, as a gut check, it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  In fact, ever since the last election, I haven’t found the Bush ‘persona,’, or what we might better call his presentation all that galling.  Certainly, this is a matter of fatigue on my part, but like anyone in his position, I think that he has at least toned down his hubris somewhat, however infinitesimally, and that has made at least some difference to me.

The speech was somewhat honest.  I found the following section the most affecting:

“[Our troops in Iraq] have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.”

When I first heard this, my response was quite visceral.  Immediately, it felt like a pose that I’ve never seen or heard Bush strike before–repentance, remorse, responsibility, guilt–the simple admission that one has made a mistake.  But of course, reviewing the text now, I realize that it wasn’t quite that.  As Mark Shields pointed out in his immediate response to the speech on PBS, “mistakes have been made” is Washington double-talk designed to displace blame.

Still, Bush’s tone was sober, and the strategy he presented for escalating the invasion of Iraq was, at least, not as vague as feared (though this is not really a good thing either).  Nevertheless, it was obfuscating–a mask–though this mask is thin and attenuated.  The president’s big lie is damaged and fraying.  Fatigue has set in–fatigue towards the war, towards the presidential persona, towards the politics of fear.  Does anyone buy the War on Terror rhetoric anymore? These days it almost seems as though it would be in Al Qaeda’s best interests not to attack the United States so that the War on Terror rhetoric will seem like more and more of a fraud to the American people and perhaps convince them to take their own action against their falsifying government.

It is difficult to see, but it is obvious that what Bush is talking about here is expanding the war effort, escalating the war effort.  This is really what he’s asking for–a tenuous mandate of silence.  He’s playing politics, so I will too.  I hate to sound like a Democrat here, because I know that this is the counter-spin that they’re posting up against Bush and his cronies’ preferred “troop surge,” but “expanding the war” is, in my opinion, a phrase to get behind.  It is the truth. (Note: The president doesn’t actually mention troop surge in the speech so I wonder if that’s already been taken out of circulation.)

From my perspective, with today’s speech, the United States government’s invasion of Iraq has come to resemble their invasion of Vietnam more than ever before. Of course, this development is a totally horrible thing for the people living in Iraq and for the soldiers attacking them.  But if the resemblance has a good side effect it might be, finally, to bring the utter brutality of war, all war, home to American citizens and perhaps inspire them to attempt, more forcefully, to put a stop to this invasion and all future invasions.  I visited Vietnam and Cambodia two years ago (and the former Yugoslavia the year before that), and to see the scars of war in these countries is to forever know that the mediated presentation of a sanitized war, a rational war, a just war, is an out and out lie and distortion.  I will be thinking of this fact as I watch and read of American soldiers going from door to door in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, not creating a peace, or securing a peace (there is none to be had!) but fighting a war, a war, I will have you note, that never came up in President Bush’s speech.  As he would have us believe, no war is being fought in Iraq (besides the war on terror, mentioned once, early on, in passing).  But of course it is.  And a wider war is being sought, and this, for the moment, we can only mourn.

(P.S. Some of my thoughts on this post were inspired by Phil Ochs’s song “We Seek No Wider War,” which was scrolling through my head throughout the entire speech.  I would quote it, but it’s difficult to pick up on its irony without reading through the entire thing, so here’s a link to the lyrics: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/we-seek-no-wider-war.html  Or better yet, download it somewhere.)