May 9, 2006

Another step closer: Freedom.

That finish line metaphor from last night is becoming ever more relevant. I am anxious. And I am tired. But I’m almost there.

Anyway, I heard Dubya on the radio today in a rebroadcast of some public thing he was doing with seniors in Florida. It’s just so funny to hear him get really huffy, but the best is when he goes off script. Someone questioned him about the ramped up rhetoric against Iran, and he began with his furrowed brow (or at least so I imagine) and talked deeply about freedom and that the Iranians (pronounced like “uraniums”) want to be free. He wanted to tell the people of Iran one day, “you’re free!” How touching.

But then he went on in some bizarro tangent about how he spoke with the Prime Minister of Japan, and how, believe it or not, they’re friends. He simplified the incredibly complicated relationship between Japan and the United States both immediately after WWII and in the decades that followed, didn’t seem to recognize that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed, and tried to make it seem that War was a good way to make friends, and spread “a Japanese kind of freedom” to Japan. Truly bizarre.

Whatever. HIs soliloquies about freedom are incredibly frustrating, too. I’ll have to find the piece I read somewhere that spoke of the difference between “freedom” in the American/Dubya formation, and “liberty.” The freedom that everyone supposedly hates us for, and that we want to spread like some kind of Johnny Appleseed of good fortune and feelings around the globe, is not necessarily the liberation of spirits, peoples, and cultures that some of us are working towards.

Anymatter, flygirl turned me onto this remarkable pho-log about Kashmir with a floating entry of her own. Check out both sites when you get a chance.

2 comments:

flygirl said...

Rage..Thank You. You're too kind by far.

That image of a Johnny Appleseed like George Bush had me in stitches!

Hope the exam stress is over.

Rage said...

No worries. Looks like I have to update my look... after exams, though. Mebbe I'll learn me some real html skillz...