01-Apr-2006
Iron Filings - 8
Photo caption: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.” - Mark Twain
I don’t know what it is about the wives of Republican presidents, but something seems to happen to some of them at some point during the presidential tenure. I remember seeing Pat Nixon again and again and thinking her smile looks so forced and there’s such a sadness in her eyes – such emptiness. As became clear later, she might also have been drunk, as was true of Betty Ford. Nancy Reagan, too, growing more and more gaunt as her husband’s term moved on, always seemed so restrained, controlled; really, they just all have seemed so much like zombies that you have to wonder what went wrong.
Was the dream not enough? Did it come at too high a price? Were there too many sessions in a back room where they were told exactly what they would be and do and say and don’t even think about your individual personhood – not for a minute? Perhaps what brings these thoughts on are some tapes I saw on the news the other day of Laura Bush. Laura so friendly, so, so much the soccer mom: she has the look now, the thousand-yard stare and that tightening around the lips.
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It has been so interesting watching the big news media spin their way out of refusing to publish the anti-Islam cartoons. I won’t recount their arguments because they are all so facile, so absurd. The truth is, people are rioting and dying throughout the world because of those cartoons, but the vast majority of the American people have no idea what the fuss is all about because they have not seen them. They have not seen them because their media – be it big city paper, small city paper, television, newsmagazine – has let them down. In other words, this has been a major international news story but the U.S. media has chosen to report it in a heinously incomplete fashion.
The media deserve all the brickbats and shame that anyone might choose to hurl in their direction.
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That Dick Cheney would become the first Vice President since Aaron Burr to shoot a man comes amazingly as no surprise. After all, it’s only a matter of degree that the man who would shoot down the career of Valerie Plame would truly shoot someone who got in the way of his killing a bird. That there were only minimal feelings from Cheney all the way up to the White House that the event ought promptly to be reported to the public is also understandable. After all, sheer hubristic arrogance can’t be a virtue unless it’s practiced once in awhile.
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I was in the post office not long ago and noticed a poster put up by a service fraternity at our nearby university. They are holding a benefit for a small child stricken with Coats Disease (exudative retinitis), an eye disease that has resulted in the loss of one of her eyes. The benefit is to raise funds for the child because she’s had to have one eye removed and needs a prosthetic eye. Her insurance regards this eye as “cosmetic” and will not pay for it.
Got any idea where I’m going with this?
Just once I’d like to take one of these insurance executives, put him or her in a room, and just look at them, just stare and see if somewhere in that physical presence I can spot that core of corporate idiocy which would regard the prosthetic replacement of a child’s eye as cosmetic. How do these people get driver’s licenses?
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Recently, the South Dakota legislature passed the most restrictive abortion bill in the nation. It allows abortions only in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. No exceptions for rape or incest. As usual the collective mantra is ‘respect for life.’
Perhaps the SoDak’s quest under this mantra to be abortion-free would be more believable if they showed even the smallest amount of respect for the Native American lives wasting away at Pine Ridge.
What always seems to shine through so many anti-abortion arguments, however, is rarely the bright beacon of respect for life; rather, it’s much more a harsh spotlight on a woman as she’s told – You’ve been bad, whore, and now you must pay for it.
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Sometimes this need we have to demonize puzzles me. At the present time, and without giving it a lot of thought, I can think of several groups we’ve devilized (and, thus, made beyond the pale, beyond all rights): smokers, pedophiles, aborting women, perhaps immigrants.
G. K. Wuori © 2006
Photoillustration by the author
