Category: Commentary

"Not only is it a flagrant violation of international law, it's a slap in the face of the UN," I vented to a friend about the US's recent imperious shenanigans abroad.

His response was chilling.

"Like most of the wars that have occurred since more than five people on a side could heft a club," he posited quite matter-of-factly, "People aren't likely to ask permission to have them."

With presidential elections still more than a year away, we're already being inundated with presidential electoral politics. If that sounds like a redundancy, it is, and it's only the first of many yet to come. The Democratic hopefuls are all lining-up on the center/left, singing differing versions of the same song, at this point a pop-country ditty about cheating and lying. Bush, still basically unchallenged by any overreaching Republicans, is busy raising a campaign fund huge enough to pay off the national deficit if put to good use.

Old people have become a burden and we don't know what to do with them. They need so much tending, which interferes with our own sacred lifestyles, so we shunt our grandparents and great-grandparents away to retirement homes where they can become someone else's problem. We assuage our guilt by dutifully visiting with them for an hour or so every Sunday after church, while turning a blind ear to their complaints of being ignored or mistreated by the home's overworked and underpaid staff. "That's just grandma," we say, knowingly, to ourselves. "She always did expect too much."

The other night as I watched Anna and the King on TV, I remembered that the movie had received horrible reviews in 1999, the year of its release. I wondered about that, because I was enjoying the film. Certainly, it was no masterpiece, but it wasn't worthy of the scathing reviews I remembered. After the film ended, I went online and looked-up Roger Ebert's original review, since I usually agree with him.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in "ESP Magazine," an entertainment weekly published in Greensboro, N.C. on April 2, 2003, just as the war in Iraq was beginning.

"Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia."

Eerie, isn't it, how George Orwell's novel seems much more relevant now, 19 years after it's self-proclaimed due date of 1984, than ever. Last year we were at war against Osama bin Laden, with our government's propaganda machine working overtime to convince us that the Al-Qada leader had been public enemy number one practically forever. Now we fight Saddam Hussein, and are reminded that this tyrant has been our chief nemesis, also practically forever. In case we notice this obvious inconsistency, the officials at MiniTrue, the Ministry of Truth, imply that Hussein and bin Laden are actually the same person.

America is now fighting two separate wars, yet our leaders are trying their best to convince us that these two actions are actually one. Because the war on terrorism is obviously necessary, the Bush administration is trying it's best to convince us, and the rest of the world, that the war against Iraq is part and parcel with our efforts against Al Qaeda and Hamas, by playing on our fears of "dirty" bombs going off on crowded streets, of anthrax again infecting us through the mail, or of nerve agents being released in our subways.

As Kurt Vonnegut pointed-out in Slaughterhouse Five, wars are fought by children, generally male, who are usually too young to understand the discrepancy of politics. Adolescent boys are seldom motivated by any clear cut ideology other than patriotism. For example, our fathers and grandfathers didn’t go off to invade Normandy or the Philippines because of any particular support of FDR’s New Deal, but to protect their country by fighting evil. They wanted to be like the heroes that our country had before produced. They wanted to make their fathers proud and to protect their mothers and siblings.

On the day that NATO began making air strikes on Kosovo I was at work, unable to follow the news on the radio or television. I was, however, able to keep up with the story’s developments by going to various news sites on the internet. On “abcnews.com” I found a link to the Yugoslavian home page.

Now that we’ve entered the new millennium, we’ve become inundated with predictions of what the future holds in store for us. This is nothing new, of course. Some will remember that back in the 60s, a regular feature in the Sunday comics section of many daily newspapers was a strip called Our New Age, which gave us visions of a future spent commuting to work in private helicopters and dining on cheap and plentiful food harvested from the ocean floor. There were other predictions that seem more reasonable in retrospect, such as the notion that Americans would quit relying on trains and buses for long distance transportation since airline travel would become both convenient and affordable.

Most people don’t know that there are two cards in the Tarot that deal with karma. The card “Justice” (or “Adjustment”) deals with personal karma, the law of cause and effect that speaks to the consequences of our choices and actions. This is fairly easy for most people to understand: if you stick your finger into a flame you’re going to get burned. But there’s another kind of karma that’s collective and often identified with the concept of luck. In the Tarot, this collective karma is identified by the card “The Wheel of Fortune.”