AND THEY CALL IT DEMOCRACY ... OR, GEORGIE, YOU'RE DOIN' A HECKUVA JOB

... Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom ...
Bruce Cockburn, Call It Democracy

If you want to imagine the tone for this, think of Dave Chappelle's parody of Samuel L. Jackson. No, I can't stop yelling! This is how I talk!

It's hard to figure out the best way to approach the situation in the Mideast, especially if you are, in the eyes of most of your associates and colleagues, a stupid hick from RR1 Napanee who's in over his head when the discussion involves anything that doesn't involve a ball or puck.

My two cents: Israel, and all the chicken-hearted countries who refuse to condemn what's going on in Lebanon, are pure 100% dead wrong. George W. Bush, if he wasn't already a disgrace -- and that's just me being diplomatic -- surely is now since his administration refuses to acknowledge how much of an enabler the United States of American has been in Israel's aggression toward Lebanon.

Believe you me, there are much more sophisticated ways Israel could protect its security than by carpet-bombing the Bejesus out of people in Lebanon. But what it should do and what it can get away with are two entirely different things, now aren't they?

The U.S., and all the world leaders -- this country's prime minister, Stephen Harper, only gets a the tiniest of free passes since he's still new on the job and he's only a caretaker PM to begin with, but if it wasn't for that he'd be lumped right in there too -- who have refused to hold Israel to account should be ashamed. Yes, Israel's leaders are constitutionally compromised and the mood of the people there really leaves no alternative other than unchecked aggression, but at some point, enough is enough.

It doesn't take any fancy Ivy League education or an advanced degree from LSE or the Kennedy School of Government or a decade of experience in sensitive international geopolitics to see what an outrage is being perpetrated on the world. Come to think of it, the people with fancy educations and decades of experience in international diplomacy can't see it -- or at least won't admit to it. And ay -- or should that be oi? -- there's the rub.

It's not as if all of us shouldn't have seen this coming, but we've managed to find a comfortable level between the varying layers of bullshit as it relates to the Mideast. Yours truly is as bad as anyone -- I play dumb since it's a powder-keg of highly combustible geopolity that is totally above and beyond my realm of consciousness. In other words, I pretend I don't get what all the fuss is about.

However, it's plain to see situations like what the world is in today are the culmination of years of policy failures, by leaders and diplomats from across the the political spectrum. (Well, all the way from centre-right to far-right, at least.)

How is it that the people who are supposed to know best get it wrong, time and again? To use a classic Simpsons line, "Democracy doesn't work." Actually, the problem is that democracy does work, but that almost every society that has installed it has stopped halfway. But that's another rant.

Idolatry of ideology ... -- Ibid.

Civilians are being bombed in Lebanon, because the Boy King in the White House doesn't want his Christian Republicans to lose too much of the "Jewish vote" in the November mid-term elections, or do anything that flies in the face of all those neo-con principles that work so well in theory but are invariably a disaster when put into practice. Whatever Israel wants, Israel is going to get. For any politician in that country, being seen as "soft" toward Israel's neighbours is political suicide, and there's probably nothing the West can do to change that thinking.

Not that there's great sympathy for Hamas or Hezbollah, who both seem pretty deadset on favouring arms over politics. Still, can you blame either group for seeing it that way? How else would you expect them to react when the diplomatic deck is so stacked against them?

Another question: How bad is it when Russian president Vladimir Putin suddenly starts sounding something like a voice of reason?

Some people might say, "Sager, you stupid idiot, you can't blame Bush." Like every other unprecendented crisis that has just happened to have occurred on his watch -- Sept. 11, 2001, Katrina, the growing civil war in Iraq -- it's not completely the fault of Bush's administration.

However, it does go to show what happens when you take the absolute worst people who don't pack the necessary intellectual gear for the job -- remember the Arabian horse-show assclown who was put in charge of FEMA and how well that went? -- and put them in charge of a delicate situation. They can take a crisis not completely of their own making and exacerbate it by a factor of 10.

The anger here is all at the situation, how the people who are supposed to know best are making us all murderers to a certain extent. There's not a person in the Western world who isn't waking up this morning without blood on her or his hands. Maybe that can be said for every single day. Perhaps it's only hitting home since this is the most the Mideast has blown up in a generation, since 1982.

North south east west
Kill the best and buy the rest
It's just spend a buck to make a buck
You don't really give a flying fuck about the people in misery -- Ibid.

The savage burn we have to live with here is the realization there seems to be nothing we can do about it, or that a plausible solution to all this just seems to float out there in the ether, forever vague, forever out of reach. That's the burn -- not having an answer to the question, "What would you do?"

That's how it looks from here, to this white-bread Canadian hick.

Nothing else our right-wing politicians have tried has worked, and enough of the population is still going to vote for the Harper and Bush types -- or Liberals, "New Labour" and Democrats who are scrambling these days to portray themselves as a kind of Top-40, Diet Coke, low-fat mayonnaise of neo-conservatism -- that we're going to be stuck with this crap for the next 15 to 20 years.

(Where that chunk of the voters is concerned, that's because some people believe preventing two gay dudes from getting married trumps the lives of innocent children on the other side of the world and some Boomer greedheads beliving having screw-the-young tax policies that ensure my generation will be drowning in debt until we're middle-aged ourselves trumps the lives of innocent children on the other side of the world. But that's another rant.)

It's a sad, sickening day for all of us. Yes, we can still exist in a world of compromised values, go on living, lose ourselves in childish things -- this is still a blog about sports, damn it -- but there's no getting past the feeling that every person in this country, and in America, is waking up today with blood on his hands. And I didn't vote for any of these leaders or their parties.

Not to put myself in the story, but to sit here at 3 a.m. on this early Sunday morning, July 16, 2006, and there's nothing but inchoate rage, at feeling ompletely helpless, not wanting to give in to the hegemony of the right, put off by the splinter politics of the left ... that's what this was borne out of, and that's how it shall end.

Just leave off with that Eugene V. Debs quotation that Kurt Vonnegut referenced in his novel Hocus Pocus:

While there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Be back with some sports later today, when the mood is more suited to it. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.