after pat's birthday

[piranha]

pat tillman was killed by "friendly fire" in 2004 in afghanistan. (a criminal investigation is underway into the actual cause of his death; there was a cover-up.) his birthday was november 6.

his brother kevin, who joined the army together with pat, and who served in iraq and afghanistan with him, wrote this call to action in pat's memory.

excerpts:

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat's birthday.

*tears of frustration*. i'm doing my small part in helping to distribute this far and wide. i am not very hopeful that enough people feel as strongly as kevin about how very, very wrong this path is. reading farthing didn't exactly help either -- too damn much realism in my SF. i am seriously afraid, more so than i was under reagan, because now the subversion of terms like honour, courage, freedom, and democracy seems to run deep, doesn't just feel motivated by unreasoning fear, but by outright mean, conceited belligerence.

via memeorandum.

Comments

[daev.livejournal.com]

i am not very hopeful that enough people feel as strongly as kevin about how very, very wrong this path is. reading farthing didn't exactly help either -- too damn much realism in my SF.

This may be why I really hated the new Battlestar Galactica that everyone made me watch. Right now, I don't want SF that considers the pros-and-cons of the President putting the nation under martial law, and whether social democrats are terrorists aiding the enemy.

[djm4]

Yes, except that I love it for exactly the same reason. And because it doen't generally try to give easy answers.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

ah, i knew i forgot to reply to something.

i didn't hate farthing, not even close. it captures why i feel how i feel better than anything else i've read lately; i think it's precisely the right book for the times. that is, however, not a cheerful thing. but it shouldn't be cheerful; the situation is serious.

haven't seen BSG at all. so, it's worth watching?

[djm4]

haven't seen BSG at all. so, it's worth watching?

I'd say so, but it does divide people. It's bleak, and grim, and often lead characters do morally very dubious things like torturing and killing prisoners, and not only do they get away with it, but because they're desperate and barely surviving, you can see why they do it. There are consequences, though, just not tidy, easy, resloved-in-an-episode ones.

It helps that the enemy comes ready-dehumanised, in that the Cylons aren't human, and then as the series progresses, it humanises aspects of them without ever making them seem like less of a deadly threat. I don't always agree with how that happens - sometimes it almost seems like cheating or very convenient scripting - but I admire the ambition, and cut the series huge amounts of slack because of it.

If you are going to watch it, start with the 2-hour mini-series and watch it in order. If you hate the mini-series, you probably won't like the rest. Otherwise, give it until about the middle of season 1 to write it off or decide to keep going. Don't jump into the middle if you can possibly avoid it.

BSG

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

thanks! i'll go and see whether zip.ca has the miniseries, or whether i need to torrent it.

Possibly positive thought.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I was reading Shirer's The Fall of the Third Republic about why France collapsed in 1940, and one of the things is said was that in Britain and the US in the Depression, people complained about the government and when they got the chance, threw them out. In Germany and France and Italy, where the governments were weak and changing all the time anyway without it helping, they complained about the system of government, and threw it out.

In this context, "this country is still a democracy" is a really helpful and positive thing to hear.

As long as they're counting the votes, anyway.

I can feel news-avoidance mode coming over me too.

[huashan.livejournal.com]

I truly believe democracy in America has been subverted 7 years or so and that the person in the office of president has never been legally elected to that office. I expect will find out all about it sometime in the next decade. At which point I may actually drive to CU and punch Walt in the nose.