So, who can I blame for having so many exes? I guess I should have learned more from watching the farm animals, as well as listening to Edward Snowden.
Hmm….
Anyway, blame is for G-d and small children. After all, children never blame themselves for getting lost.
Look, to err is human. To blame someone else is politics. And to blame it on computer technology is like blaming Walt Disney for giving dangerous beasts human qualities that make you want to pet them, domesticate them and teach them how to sit on the john. Not to mention how to use a knife and fork.
Hmm… if you teach cannibals proper etiquette is that considered progress?
So who is to blame when they eat the entire hand that fed them?
But of course!
When it comes to pinning blame, perhaps we should pin the tail on the donkeys… as well as the elephants. And any other ass that looks like you and me in the looking-glass.
We don’t seem to learn from yesterday’s history or tomorrow’s mystery. Today we still think that fixing blame is the same thing as solving problems.
So let me fill you in on a family secret: You ain’t thinking outside the confines of your football helmet, son. It’s too small. Too tight. And you’re looking through the ear holes!
Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we’ve solved the problem.
For instance, the headline in the New York Times the other days blared that: ‘U.S. may never know extent of Snowden’s leaks…’
As if Snowden is still to blame – even after all that he has revealed has turned out to be absolutely true. And we’re impugning the messenger pigeon?
The man did us a bigger favor than George Orwell – yet he is still being punished for telling the truth, duh whole truth and nothing that WikiLeaks, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Confessions of a Geisha and even the Bible hasn’t told us before: There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
And no one lies so boldly as the ‘men’ who are indignant…
Hmm…Make that government men.
Yet we continue to blame Snowden for reminding us that we are allegedly a righteous country; that we are supposed to do as we say – and not as we do. That what a ‘secret government’ is doing – as a federal judge ruled the other day on the N.S.A.’s controversial surveillance program collecting millions of Americans’ telephone records — is probably even more unconstitutional than…say…the Patriot Act.
Ain’t that a kick up to the Supreme Court.
Does anybody still believe that Snowden is the problem? Or is still causing problems?
How?
He’s in Russia hiding out on a temporary one-year political asylum. He is looking for sanctuary — anywhere in duh world that isn’t afraid of U.S. consequences for harboring him.
Simply put, he is a single man of conscience forced to fight against the unconscionable forces of the entire U.S. Government.
Yet the real problem hasn’t been resolved in the USA. Oh, the President, in the midst of the brouhaha and following Judge Leon’s ruling the other day, announced a task force report suggesting 46 NSA surveillance changes, including how long the NSA information can be kept.
Oh, really…I am so depressed. Like I wrote in last week’s essay, try getting government ‘mistakes’ in your own personal ‘criminal’ record expunged. Nothing involving the government ever disappears. Anything that is part government is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.
All we’re doing is desperately fixing and updating our surveillance security procedures. And continuing to heap blame on Snowden while trying to get him into one of our sniper’s cross-hairs. The White House has declared that Snowden ain’t getting amnesty and wants him returned to the U.S. ‘where he will be accorded full due process and protection.’
Yeah, due process – just like those guys in Guantanamo.
Look, I am no red neck, no commie and no limp-wristed Volvo driver. I know you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet. I recognize that there are a terrible lot of lies going about the world — and the worst of it is that half of them are true. History is nothing but a set of lies agreed upon.
And sometimes the truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
But there are lies. And then there are the lyin’ liars who tell them.
There are silly lies, such as: I did not have sex with Monica. Misinformed lies, such as: You can keep your own doctor. There are destructive lies of massive carnage, such as: There are Weapons of Mass Destruction…
And then there are those nefarious lies that are so invasive they cut to our very constitutional foundations. They are worse than our worst nightmares.
Hmm…I had a nightmare last night. I dreamed that Dolly Parton was my mother and I was a bottle-baby.
Strike that! I think I must be talking about my ‘personal’ constitution.
What I meant is that our government has become the government that Orwell warned us against.
When our own democratically elected federal leadership has got us completely under surveillance through a secret program authorized by a secret court in a supposedly transparent republic of the people by the people and for the people… something evil is seriously afoot – like communism.
Snowden himself once stipulated: “Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”
Hmm…
If nothing else Judge Richard Leon’s decision was a powerful critique of the secret court that supervises the NSA program. He noted that 15 judges of the court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, have issued 35 orders authorizing surveillance, even as the government “repeatedly made misrepresentations and inaccurate statements about the program.”
Lies… lies… and more lies…
In our age all issues are political and politics itself, as Orwell poignantly noted, is a mass of lies, evasion, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
The trouble with lying is that it is like alcoholism; you are always recovering. And hopefully we will dutifully recover from another American descent into hell. Maybe we should begin with barking less blame and wagging more forgiveness.
How about welcoming Edward Snowden back home and granting him the awards and rewards his bravery of conscience deserves. After all, if President Obama can receive the Nobel Prize, why shouldn’t Edward Snowden receive a Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor. He earned them.
But, I guess he’d have a better chance of winning the Mega Lottery.Then again, even though the odds are a seemingly insurmountable one in 257 million, someone does win – eventually.
Hmm… Anything is possible once we get beyond the lies and the blame. As Orwell wrote: The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
And tomorrow’s always going to be another day… somewhere… someplace… somehow…And that’s no lie. But you can blame me if it is.
And dats yDrewIS on dis penal colony…
ydrewis.wordpress.com 