I just finished breakfast, dishes and DemocracyNow. And I am feeling overcome with a particularly severe variety of nearly uncontrollable sadness and despair. The show which will be transcribed in its entirety at the Democracy Now website includes a piece on Rachel Corrie's play which has just finally opened off-Broadway in New York and features a discussion with her father and sister and the woman who co-edited Rachel Corries's journal writings into what is now the play on her life. In a follow-up to this story Amy spoke for a short time with the actor and political activist Vanessa Redgrave who was instrumental in bringing the play to New York.
Redgrave talked about her efforts to bring the Corrie story to the New York stage and the case of Mahar Arar and during all this matter of fact discussion of the death, destruction, rendition and torture of two talented and self-less human beings played out against the backdrop of a steady drip, drip, dripping away of not only our constitutional rights but of the Constitution itself under the most repressive regime in the history of this country, I began to feel a certain sense of hopelessness. Ironically this thread only reinforces my deep sense of loss and despair. If the city of Berkeley, undoubtedly one of the most liberal areas in the whole country can only boast 3,600 green party members, what hope is there for a third party that stands in stark opposition to the corporate slaves represented by Tweedledum and Tweedledee ever developing in this country.
I think back to the short-lived ideals and ideas generated by members of the Populist Party of the late 1800s and wonder if that wasn't the last best chance for a political reality different from the unstoppable power of the capitalist machine that now rules this country with what is becoming increasingly an iron fist similar in many ways to those of the totalitarian countries we fought against in WWII. I don't know how many know this but after WWII we charged people who water boarded prisoners with a war crime.
Yesterday, with a gleam in his eye, a flourish of his right hand and that smirk still on his face, Bush made waterboarding by American interrogators a legal act, took away habeus corpus, and gave himself the same powers that were invested in the dictators of Germany and Russia under Hitler and Stalin and every other third world tyrant from Idi Amin and Pol Pot to the American supported Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. This is a sad time indeed in American history. Today I feel that sadness more than ever before through every cell in my body. Progress in Iraq? I guess if ten dead in one day is progress? How about some progress in America...
