Being Otherwise, II

When I read or hear news stories these days, I often feel as if the remaining ability to think at all, now possessed only by those few of us who are still recognizably sane, is under direct assault. For example:

The White House on Wednesday cast Great Britain’s decision to withdraw 1,600 troops from Iraq as evidence of "significant progress" towards peace in the country, triggering a renewed political battle with U.S. Democrats who said the British move signaled the unraveling of President George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing.’

"I think (the British) believe that in southern Iraq, that Basra region where they’ve been most active, we have made significant progress," said Vice-President Dick Cheney. "What I see is an affirmation of the fact that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well."

Those who rule us and are so ruthlessly determined to eradicate the rare citizen's even rarer analytic capabilities must rely on us not to read beyond the first few paragraphs. For a bit farther on, we find:

While Britain has steadily shifted control of major combat operations to Iraqis in Basra and surrounding areas near the Iranian border, the region has increasingly become a haven for illegal militias and political corruption, White said.

"The White House is trying to build it up as a good news story but, in fact, the south is in very bad shape, with governance extremely tenuous and much of the south controlled by militias or police affiliated with them," he said.

Basra is "still a difficult and sometimes dangerous place," Blair acknowledged, citing regular attacks on coalition forces.

And Madame Rice informs us that "[t]he coalition is still intact."

I know. You can feel your brain melting. Look, at this point, I don't give a damn what these contemptibly miserable Ministers of Empire say. This has been and remains the immoral, illegal, monstrous and ungraspably destructive annihilation of an entire country. Just get out, and make all those reparations that are possible. So let them say whatever they want. Just Get Out.

They can say this:

Be what you would seem to be -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

AND THEN LEAVE.

Give Up the Fantasies

Get Out Now

Christ, I need a drink.