One Door Closes One Door Opens
Janus, our two-faced Host -- greeting us in the foyer of 2007 -- bids us look back and forward.
I saw the "tall boats" footage of the Bicentennial, and recalled the late reporter Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On [- Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic; Penguin, 640 pp., Trade Paperback], and his deduction that AIDS had reached New York City on those tall boats, during the Bicentennial festivities. The plague ships in our harbor. The Masque of the Red Death.
America has changed a lot since I headed for Los Angeles in the spring of 1976. But there is a resonance that begins 2007 for me.
And for the USA, there is that resonance of Watergate and Pardons and Plumbers, oh my. And Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who were Ford's Chiefs of Staff. This whole Bush mess really is Nixon's revenge.
A lot of people think that it's over. Think that the election decided something. No. These Bushies have never obeyed the law, and have dared anyone to stop them. We have given our assent to putting the brakes on.
If you study your history, this is a very dangerous time. No American president has failed to gracefully step down when the time came, but then again, no American president has ever been a convicted felon before, either.
Those three funerals seem to have emphatically punctuated the end of an era. What end that may be, we will know in the fullness of time, but we're too close to it right now. Still, with the funerals of James Brown, Gerald R. Ford and Saddam Hussein, a period has ended. Another begins.
What that will be, I cannot say. But we can't go back and we can't stay where we are. So we might as well go forward.
Courage.
.
I saw the "tall boats" footage of the Bicentennial, and recalled the late reporter Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On [- Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic; Penguin, 640 pp., Trade Paperback], and his deduction that AIDS had reached New York City on those tall boats, during the Bicentennial festivities. The plague ships in our harbor. The Masque of the Red Death.
America has changed a lot since I headed for Los Angeles in the spring of 1976. But there is a resonance that begins 2007 for me.
And for the USA, there is that resonance of Watergate and Pardons and Plumbers, oh my. And Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who were Ford's Chiefs of Staff. This whole Bush mess really is Nixon's revenge.
A lot of people think that it's over. Think that the election decided something. No. These Bushies have never obeyed the law, and have dared anyone to stop them. We have given our assent to putting the brakes on.
If you study your history, this is a very dangerous time. No American president has failed to gracefully step down when the time came, but then again, no American president has ever been a convicted felon before, either.
Those three funerals seem to have emphatically punctuated the end of an era. What end that may be, we will know in the fullness of time, but we're too close to it right now. Still, with the funerals of James Brown, Gerald R. Ford and Saddam Hussein, a period has ended. Another begins.
What that will be, I cannot say. But we can't go back and we can't stay where we are. So we might as well go forward.
Courage.
.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home