Sunday, October 20, 2002

American Nightmares
As Americans, we talk a lot about freeing ourselves from dread diseases, lesser diseases, want, taxes, terrorism, gun violence in our cities, etc. We never seem to accept that many of these are the inevitable consequences of living a finite human life. We don’t seem to want to acknowledge the inevitability of death and disaster. Bad stuff always happens somewhere else when you live in the isolated “sanitized” suburbs and the gated communities that the well-off have built themselves. Such people seem to think they should be insured against all accidents, those that are true disasters like fire, flood, and earthquake as well as those that are accidents of living with bad choices like auto accidents, falls, drownings, suffocations, and all the rest of that endless list. This, at least, seems to be what the various media would have us believe, and what the Bush Administration appears to have swallowed whole.

Monday, October 14, 2002

Fear 2
Fear of Terrorists; fear of losing an election; fear of those who disagree; fear of loss of control, chaos, disorder. You name it, they’re afraid of it, this Bush Administration. How many are listening?

Saturday, October 12, 2002

Fear
Fear Rules the Bush Administration. I’m trying to figure out if this is on purpose or politically useful. What crises will they manufacture next year for the presidential election? What will be the result of that election?

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A comment added on March 16, 2004.

The fears that rule the administration seem to be the result of a leadership stuck in a Cold War mentality that saw some kind of evil in anyone who did not agree with its point of view. At least that’s what some are saying. But you don’t need a Cold War mentality to see a threat in those who are perceived as different. All that’s needed is ignorance. It’s the same impulse that drives our periodic fulminations against immigrants and foreigners, those with different skin colors or ideas about religion, marriage and family. It’s the instinct to see those outside our own tribe as alien, other, and worthy of the utmost suspicion. And Americans are not the only people to suffer from this disease. It seems to be universal and part of the human condition.