Re: IRAQ: Predictable catastrophes of human stupidity

From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Sat Apr 12 2003 - 13:50:38 MDT

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    From: "Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@tsoft.com>
    >
    > I'm continually appalled at the negative "cult of personality"
    > on this list. Evidently most people think that Bush runs the
    > government entirely on his own ... No matter
    > how many times the entrenched bureaucrats in the various
    > departments are referred to, nor no matter how many times the
    > president's advisors (Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, etc.) and their
    > staffs are referred to, it just doesn't matter: the refrain
    > is always the same: George Bush doesn't have the I.Q. to do
    > the job (whether it's "managing" the economy, or "conducting"
    > foreign affairs).

    All right, Lee, who in the Bush administration do you consider to be (even a
    little bit) extropian? Rumsfeld? Rice? Powell? Cheney? Ashcroft? DeLay?

    Neither Bush's I.Q. nor the respective I.Q.s of members of his
    administration worry me as much as the fact that *all* those combined I.Q.s
    cannot seem to leap over the wall of faith. And that faith - and not
    secular geopolitics or reason - is really in the driver's seat "managing"
    the economy and "conducting" foreign affairs.

    Here are some excerpts from Lewis Lapham's Notebook in the current (May
    2003) issue of Harper's:

    "... even the British choose not to notice that Jehovah is alive and well
    and often angry not only in Texas and Tennessee but also in the halls of
    Congress. Our national opinion polls report 46 percent of the respondents
    registering themselves - together with President George W. Bush - as
    evangelical Christians, twice born and therefore safe within the garden of
    redemption; 48 percent denying as heresy the theory of evolution; another 68
    percent knowing that it has met or seen the Devil."

    "Attorney General John Ashcroft asserts that in the United States 'we have
    no king but Jesus,' and Tom DeLay, the Republican majority leader in the
    House of Representatives, says that he has been assigned by God to promote
    'a biblical worldview' in American politics, that 'only Christianity offers
    a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world - only
    Christianity.'"

    "When President Bush appeared in the White House on the evening of March 6
    to announce the imminent scouring of Iraq, it was a wonder he didn't speak
    in tongues. His topic was geopolitical, but his message was religious, the
    blank expression engraved on his face disquietingly similar to the
    thousand-yard stare of the true believer gazing into the mirror of
    eternity."

    And Lapham quotes George Bush (there are many more such gems in the
    article):

    "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift
    to humanity."

    "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in
    defense of our great nation."

    Towards the end of the article Lapham writes (Extropians read this and
    weep):

    "President Bush speaks for an earlier period in American history, from a
    pulpit in the Puritan forest before it received the gift of books. If his
    biographers can be trusted, we now have in the White House a president so
    secure in his belief that the course of human events rests in 'the hand of a
    just and faithful God' that he counts his ignorance as a virtue and regards
    his lack of curiosity as a sign of moral strength. A similarly primitive
    way of thinking (fearful, intolerant, fond of magic) darkens the mind of the
    shamans drawing up the Pentagon's plans for the conquest of evil and
    accounts for the punitive reign of virtue currently being imposed upon the
    American body politic by the Justice Department, the Congress, and the
    Supreme Court."

    "Our Washington geopoliticians like to imagine their war on terrorism as 'a
    clash of civilizations.' They flatter themselves with the high-toned noun;
    what they have incompetently in hand is a clash of superstitions ..."

    Scary stuff, IMO ...

    Olga



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