Monday with McKenna: Looking Back in Time

Another Sunday walk through Prospect Park, Brooklyn. The music is Rachmaninoff's G Major Prelude, beautifully played by Vladimir Ashkenazy (Quicktime video, 2.5 MB, 3:23, click to view)


If you follow the lies broadcast on your television, you might believe that there were just a dozen or so of us nutcase lefties objecting to the Bush occupation-invasion-imperialist-quagmire, back when it was being planned and sold some five years ago.

But you would be wrong: there were protest marches all around the world, attended by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, depending on the location. Yet it is also true that the American mass media were generally on a forced march of slavish advertising of the war and its delusional justification. Few on television or in the American newspapers were daring to speak against the notion of war back then in 2002. I am honored to say here that my blogging partner, Terry McKenna, was one of those rare writers. If you click the graphic and zoom it in your image browser of choice, you should be able to read Terry's op-ed piece in the Morris County Daily Record, from a few days after the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And in case you can't read it in the graphic, here's an excerpt from Terry's piece of Sept. 15, 2002:

...the president is not telling us the truth. It is not that George W. Bush is lying, but he is a politician and his public utterances are spin, not truth. He speaks to advocate a position, not to explore meaning.

Bush's career is in domestic politics...He projects an all-American niceness that stirs little genuine animosity. With these qualifications, we suggest that the president knows almost as little as the rest of us regarding whether we should go to war.

[snip]

War is a struggle over time as much as place. For all the territory that we conquered in World War II, we were not able to control the subsequent history. Even over a shorter time period, control dissipates. In the 1980s, we aided the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and enjoyed their victory over the Soviet army. But in a few short years, those we favored came to threaten us. On the other hand, the Middle East nation whose people most admire the United States are the Iranians, who have tired of the Islamic revolution after two profitless decades.

Perhaps the President really knows what to do and must do it to preserve what is good. But my fear is that he does not know and that what he wishes to do will unleash events that will go as much awry as ever, yielding decades of more terror.

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Tomorrow, we'll be returning to our Pottermania feature as we gear up for 7th heaven. The Paper of Record is so excited that its movie critics are "dissecting" Harry.