We happened to catch the nightly news, the one that features Katie Couric.
Watching the desert-khaki clad, machine-gun toting “Police” on maneuvers for “Super Bowl security” in Miami, I commented to my wife, “hey, it looks sort of like Baghdad or Kandahar, but without all the bombs going off.”
There were the heavy, armored troop-transport vehicles. The circling helicopters. The usual manhandling suspected “domestic terrorists” and throwing them on the ground, intimidating people in vehicles, all the stuff you’d expect at a Baghdad checkpoint. Without, of course, the up-close explosions and depleted uranium rounds thudding in the distance.
Not that I’d ever want to attend a Super Bowl game anyway. Or any other corporate spectacle these days, for that matter… But what if I wanted to attend a, for example,protest march? Would that be my lot, slammed to the ground, perhaps deafened ppermanently with high-decibel hearing-damage equipment such as police forces are ready to deploy in Vancouver against the Olympics protests?
This week, of course, all the heads of US security forces were in front of Congress whipping up the fear and anxiety level about an “imminent attack” from the usual people who terrorize us, including of course Mr. Bin Laden, now long dead.
It’s just too bad that all hints of a US movement for peace and in opposition to militarising every aspect of our “civilian” lives have now evaporated. It’s easier to accomplish that goal under a “liberal” administration instead of a hated “neo-con” administration, ever notice that?
Alas, we’ll have to rely on the workers, peasants, and slum dwellers in distant parts of our globalized world to do the heavy lifting in opposition to US militarism and imperialism. Much as the Haitians used to attempt to do, before being completely crushed in 1994 and 2004.
Bobby G
Central Wisc.
http://twitter.com/BioDiverseCity