5/4/4

Willy said it best...

Not Nelson...

 Shakespeare.

From King Henry V:

"But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection."

It's getting so you need to fortify yourself just to turn on the TV (i.e., a 5 mile run, a prayer, a beer, 25 minutes of  meditation, all four?) .

The good news that I'll pass on for your consideration is this--- with everything that's hitting the fan in Iraq in the last 72 hours or so, it's the freedom and open nature of our society that may end up saving the day. It is this freedom and transparency - the very aspects that the goose stepping patriot actors would eradicate or brand as unpatriotic (see Bill O'Rielly's vehement denunciation of those who released and published the photographs of the abused Iraqi prisoners...) - that will whisper this unrelenting question beneath the rightly enraged screams of the Arab world: Do they ever have see what goes on in their own prisons and torture chambers? Would these pictures ever have surfaced without a free press?

Seriously, and I offer this in NO way as a defense of PNAC's  delusional and dangerous pipe dreams, if we end up doing any good, sowing any lasting seeds for a better deal for the folks over there, it will be unwittingly and by  the very contagion, the almost virus-like germ spread by the very  genius of our society that the corporate over lords and neo-right have tried, not without some staggering success,  to beat, bully and brain wash into submission; our freedom of expression. Maybe I just need to see a little sunlight today but it seems to me that when you shake hands with the devil, sooner or later your finger's bound to go into or up something it shouldn't and before long you're feeling a little run down. Soon you sense a slight tickle at the back of your throat. From there it's just a matter of time until the sniffles come along. Then before you know it...

Ha- chooo!...

God Bless America.

With peace,