ARTIFICIAL SPECTACLE…

…CAN NEVER STAND IN FOR REAL LIFE.

L. F. Eason III, american hero

It’s easy to forget what principle and conviction and honor look like, but this man reminds me. Mr. Eason, an employee of North Carolina’s Agriculture Department, refused to fly the flag at half mast after the death of avowed racist and bigot Jesse Helms. In return, he was forced to take early retirement from a job he loved.

My hero of the day, L. F. Eason III. If only we had public financing for elections, this man could take his courage to Washington and take on the lowlife scum oozing all over that city.

Update: NPR interviewed Mr. Eason; you can listen here. Predictably, he’s had a death threat ~ “thinly veiled” ~ via newspaper comments responding to one of the articles. Otherwise, he reported that people have been very supportive. Could there be hope for us?

Crossposted at Big Ass Belle’s blog

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right wing bootlickers

The right wing hue and cry over the Supreme Court’s shocking decision that habeas corpus should apply to all human beings makes me despair. What the hell has happened to this country that we no longer believe in basic human rights for all people? Licking the boots of authority is not an American trait, it is a trait of a subjugated people. The United States was founded on dissent, and there is no more basic right of dissent than to be able to dispute one’s incarceration at the hands of authority. That those who are locked up in Guantanamo have had no such right is a stain on the Constitution of this country. The Supreme Court got it right on this one; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. This decision will not endanger this nation. The grievous danger we are facing comes from those who decry this decision. John McCain is one such person.

Crossposted at Big Ass Belle’s Place

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I Love My Country-The Government is Another Issue

The recent controversy over the Reverend Wright has produced another round of the old, right wing cliche about loving this country or leaving it. You would think think that after all these years of using the same hackneyed catch phrase that these people would find something a little more creative than “my country right or wrong,” but then again who said that pseudo patriots (I just can’t bring myself to think of these goons as patriots) were especially creative? That would require a certain degree of intelligence and as we all know the current wave of reactionary conservatism is hardly known for its brain power.

So what’s wrong with the love it or leave it mind set? Well, friends, I would suggest just about everything. In the first place it’s even more anti-American than most of the ideas that it seeks to demonize. The last I knew the Constitution does not require us to love our government. Indeed, it doesn’t even require us to love our country. I love my country, the country being the ideals that are set down in our Constitution, as oppose to the governments of fallible men and women who we elect on a regular basis. And in the case of George W. Bush we didn’t even elect him; he was selected by the selected members of the Supreme Court. Not exactly a shining moment in the history of representative democracy, is it? Sadly there is often a huge gap between the policies that are created by our governments and the ideals of the country. And it seems to me that the gulf between country and government has been widening at an exponential rate. We have reached the point where governments wage war without legal declarations from Congress. We sell out privacy rights and legal protections because our government wants more power over our personal lives. In short, we have raped the Constitution,the country, because our government has told us time and time again that we are no longer safe, that we need to give up rights to maintain our rights–an Orwellian mindset if ever there was one.

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