Go Get 'em Al!
Al Gore made an important speech last night at the New School University in New York. You wouldn't know it by the kind of coverage it's getting; I still haven't found a complete transcript of the text. I found some scraps of it in a most certainly anti-Democratic article on Wolf Blitzer's CNN page - kind of reminded me of looking for quotations from lost Gnostic Christian texts in the works of heresiologists:
"In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me more of Nixon than of any other president. Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principle to his hunger for re-election."
"He abused the trust of the American people by exploiting the fears of the American people ... "
"The Republican party became for the core group controlling it, merely the nameplate for the radical right in this country. The radical right is in fact a coalition of those who fear other Americans as agents of treason."
Along with the piece was a lot of blowhard puffery and speculation about whether Al Gore is getting to be a little too left of center these days. Actually, I think believing in the Constitution and the principles it promotes is anything but "left". If it is, than I'm a g*ddamn commie.
Imagine There's No Ketchup....
As I was picking up bits and pieces of this report on CNN reading the text off a television in a restaurant, the piped in radio was playing "Imagine" by John Lennon. I have long been rather suprised that this song is repeatedly used as muzak - after all, it is the very anthem of utopian secular humanism. And what Lennon got for it, in the end, was death. Death at the hands of a gentleman who was realizing his own dream, a monster who was bent on committing the ultimate kind of identity theft.
When I hear it am still saddened and struck dumb at the idealism and naivete of Lennon's lyrics: "Imagine there's no countries/It isn't hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too/Imagine all the people/Living life in peace..."
Death. That was his reward. Lennon's vision of a borderless, Marxist paradise played as background music to the consumption of a thing Mark's Coney Island calls an "Italian Burger." With French fries.
One could say that at least something of the meaning drifts into the subconciousness of people as they hear this song over and over again. But honestly, to most folks it is just a dreamy, relaxing song from a long time ago when musicians used to record dreamy, relaxing songs a great deal more often than they do now. To me it's like EZ Rock's equivalent to the "Internationale" - an outdated, pleasant relic of a way of life that has, in all practical purposes, disappeared from the earth.
America's dream was built through the Constitution and the liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. If we do nothing in the face of the gradual abrogation of these principles, then our reward too will be death. Our dreams, our liberties, everything this country was founded to represent will become nothing more than a distant, pleasant memory of freedom, a familiar oldie that falls into the background of our lives; cozy and obsolete. And good with ketchup.
Uncle Dave Lewis