Language itself is a barrier.
I've tarried writing about this for the last few days but here it is in part, the real news, the end of the story of the life and times of three giant, hissing Madagascan cockroaches living in an oasis in the Nevada desert."Ever wonder if you're allowed to write, 'I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands'?"
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.
"Obviously, it's ol' Tom who's rutrutrutrutruting.The machine, called a StairMaster, allowed you to run — if you could really call it running — without taking your feet off a pair of huge pedals. It was a bit like standing up and "pumping" on a bicycle. There were many girls...Some wore plain, sexless gym clothes, T-shirts, sweatshirts, running shorts, and sneakers. More, however, came dressed as...girls. Super-low-cut sweatpants they had! And short T-shirts! And lots of nubile young flesh and belly buttons in between! From the back...was he seeing a little buttocks décolletage, a little cleavage...Right in front of Adam, a girl with long blond hair pumped away on the StairMaster in low-waisted lavender nylon running shorts and an abbreviated, royal blue basketball jersey. She didn't have large breasts, but with each rotation her nipples pressed out against the thin nylon of the halter, and her belly button winked this way and that in the long expanse of bare flesh. Four machines down the row, a girl wore black tights, which gripped every curve and crevice of her loins like a second skin, and a flesh-colored athletic bra. The tops of her breasts bobbed up and down like flan. You have to look twice to make sure she had on any bra at all. The sight aroused Adam. His own loins were on the qui vive, as if something were about to...happen in this so-called fitness center...The push of a button, the flick of a switch...and they would stop pretending anymore and plunge into a full-blown rout, an out-and-out orgy, and rutrutrutrutrut..."
