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.
