Ben Metcalf, the Literary Editor for
Harper’s Magazine, wrote a wonderful, brave article for their June issue. Do yourself a favor and read it. It's on page 9. But in case you don't get around to it, I have included a couple of paragraphs from it below. Metcalf asks a question that I'm sure has crossed the minds of more than a few decent, rational, upstanding citizens in the last few years, at least it has crossed mine.
Excerpt from "On Simple Human Decency"
- by Ben Metcalf - Harper's Magazine, June 2006
"I am therefore led to wonder what the common citizen is allowed to "say" anymore, in print or otherwise, and still feel reasonably sure that some indignant team of G-men, or else a pair of gung-ho local screws, will not drag him away to a detention center, there to act out, with the detainee as a prop, that familiar scene in which one hero cop or another is patriotically unable to resist certain outbursts against the detainee and what were once imagined to be the detainee's constitutional rights. Because I am loath to violate whatever fresh new mores the people have agreed upon, or have been told they agree upon, and because I do not care to have my ass kicked repeatedly in a holding cell while I beg to see a lawyer, I almost hesitate to ask the following question. I will ask it, though, out of what used to be called simple
human decency:
Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?"
Given the mess Bush has gotten us into, I'd say Metcalf's question is a reasonable one. Not only is Bush an idiot, he is a corporate shill who has pimped the White House out to his shady, corporate cronies. And besides being stupid and pathologically unethical, Bush is also dangerously insane. He consults religious fundamentalists to make sure his foreign policy suits their wet dream vision of the Apocalypse. He is also personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, children, animals and our own, beautiful, young American soldiers who he sent to death based on his lies that he covered up by an act of treason, a crime punishable by death in a time of war. Then there's the illegal spying on Americans, the systematic shredding of our Constitution, the corporate rape of environment, the dismantling of our already inadequate health care, what to speak of his current, mad plan to embroil us in yet another war, this time with Iran etc, etc...oh god, the list does go on.
I am grateful there are at least a few brave writers left in the mainstream media who are willing to challenge the suffocating silence that blankets us today but I'm not going to be a spoiler. You'll have to read the article to find out whether or not it's okay to write:
I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands.
harper's magazine ben metcalf constitution question president bush
"In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up."
