A political thought

I realized something this morning as I dealt with a typical "ditto head" who started an arguement with me using his latest talking points:

-Jimmy Carter caused the fight going on now between Israel and the Hezbollah.
-Right-wing dictators keep the people of the Middle East and Latin America in line, so they are a necessary evil. And while they may use death squads that we train, they have no reason to hate the US when they do overthrow their dictators.
-Liberal are pessimists who don't believe in Evil, since conservatives DO believe in evil, they are optimists.
-Iraq is going swimmingly, and the media is lying about all of the people dying there because we don't see any of the fighting on our TVs, now do we?

As I went home, I thought about the things under these core talking points that quickly become people's beliefs. They all come from a hard, deep rasism that is ground so deep into a person's brain that they don't even know it is there. It comes from a belief that people who aren't US can't handle freedom and need brutal dictators with death squads to help keep them in line. It's the old British belief from the 19th century that "We white people know what is best for the savages. Without us to keep them in line, they'd just be a bunch of murdering animals."

Sadly, the other part of it is something that I have been thinking about for a while, and I'm trying to find a way to express it in art. Here in the US, the marketing of products has conditioned us to think that what is new is great, what is old is bad and what happened more than 20 years ago doesn't matter. The rest of the world has a much longer memory, and many of the wars going on now are the eruptions of anger and hatred that is hundreds of years and endless generations old.

It blew me away when he said that Iran was better under the Shah, and the people who are in charge of Iran now should not hold us responcible for the torture, repression and death squads because the Presidents that pproved those things "have been out of power for a long time."

It's this kind of thinking that brought us to 9/11 - our attackers TOLD us what they wanted and why they wanted it. They let us know they were going to attack years before they did. Now, we are creating whole new genera