detritus

I dreamed that I was wandering around with grauwulf and my brother (of all people...) and we went to see my grandparents in Arlington Cemetery. And we had to check in at the gate, where they gave us a little slip of paper with block and row number so we could find where we were going, which was much closer than I remembered. And instead of the rows of back-to-back tombstones with grass growing all over them, there was effectively a giant stone set of archival shelving units sitting out where there used to be lawn, and a couple of little urns and a pair of rubber death masks-- roman tradition, hallowe'en store materials, badly done-- just sitting on a shelf. And hordes of about third-grade age tourists milling around, unable to keep their hands to themselves and picking up people's ancestors.

after further sleep and thought:

I hate politics. I have been attempting to avoid it for nearly the past twenty years. (Before that, nobody expected me to pay attention.) I don't like the way people react in large groups, the mindsets of most of my fellow americans, or the way that discussions labeled "political" turn heated and ranting even when all the participants are on the same side. The polite guest does not discuss abortion or equal rights at the dinner table.

Unfortunately, my upbringing as a conscientious citizen seems to have finally caught up with me. It offends me, deeply and urgently, that those of you (not from my readership in particular, but from the american public at large) who care about what is happening in the world have allowed something this big to slide by. I hear things about Bush's crimes against the state the way I hear about episodes of the X-files, and most people seem about as willing to act on them. Possibly I'm just not looking in the right place, and certainly it's harder to make a difference to people who are not currently feeling the need to get re-elected. I don't know. But this is what I'm upset about:

*It took until Bush was nearly out of office anyway for anyone to attempt to bring charges against him. We as a nation, and our media specifically, have spent the last year cross-analyzing his possible successors and their minor and not-so-minor faults (a process which I also consider a travesty, but this is unrelated) but cannot be bothered to take notice of whatever evidence we have that our current president is making the job they are trying to inherit more and more difficult by his continued willful ineptitude.

*Someone finally has made an effort (for whatever reason) to make the government recognize that this is a serious problem. It is somewhat sensationalist, and most likely meant to be, but we the public are discouraged from attempting to judge this for ourselves, as the itemized points are not made available by our media. (If this is not the case, please let me know where in-country I can find them)

*True or not, any five of the thirty-five points would be far more severe than any of the stupidity that Clinton was dragged through in his day (through his own fault and errors, but ultimately unrelated to running the nation). And they are in the process of being deliberately brushed aside on the grounds that it would be too divisive, and probably wouldn't work anyway.

If a private citizen were accused of making war illegally and concealing evidence which might have prevented thousands of deaths, I sincerely hope that the case would not be thrown out of court before examining the evidence. The point is not even whether any of the articles are true. I personally believe that most of them are, but I know that other people disagree. The point is that we don't know, and we're not likely to know until it matters about as much as the details of Teapot Dome or Watergate do today. And a congressional hearing will certainly not bring us absolute truth either, but it will give us a larger range of facts to form our opinions from.

Whatever Bush has or has not done, of the crimes listed, I believe that he has by his insistence on war created more and better supported terrorists than there were when he began. He is busy doing his utmost to prove right those people who hate America and Americans for meddling. And he has in the mean time supported a noticeable loss in our civil liberties in the name of security. The soldier on the street in Iraq, being ambushed and suicide bombed, (and-maybe-once-or-twice-I-hope having the training or culture or language skills he needs to make peace instead at a crucial moment because of my father's work) should not be fighting the wrong war so that we can have our supposed freedom taken away from us by our own government.

(...and this is what I mean about politics bringing out the inner rant in all of us...)

I am seriously considering writing concise and better-than-this worded letters to my congressman, to the newspaper, and anywhere else I can think of that might be helpful. As a citizen, I think it a travesty that charges of this gravity could be raised by members of one of our supreme governing bodies, and essentially swept under the carpet because the rest of the nation is not interested in dealing with them. What happened to idealizing "Truth, Justice and the American Way" or whatever it was, anyway?

And of course the beauty of the idea of free speech, and the ungovernable freedom of thought, is that none of you have to agree with me. But if you do, I really think you should also make some attempt to be heard.

followup 1

Where does one find the text of a House resolution? On the Library of Congress site for the House Bills and Resolutions, of course. I feel slightly silly. But the fact that no one else seemed to know this either... is also distressing, and the amount of effort one needs to put into deciphering it is somewhat prohibitive.

Here is the official text and my congressman, Jim Moran, of the VA 8th district, voted with the majority to send it into Justice Committee limbo. So did Kucinich, incidentally.

(edited to update link... now sends to first page of the resolution, rather than the search for all the pages)