Happy Mother's Day

Well the biggest news in the news last week was again the least covered by the media: the non-fall-out from the cop riot in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park on May 1, in which crowds of innocent people were fired on with rubber bullets and other nasty so-called “nonlethal” weapons; in which a 12-year-old boy (from the looks of him) was brutally beaten with a nightstick. The New York Times was unable to summon as much outrage as they did for the inability of Alberto Gonzales to answer a question with anything but gee, I don’t recall.

I remember when politicians started saying, “I don’t recall”—Iran-Contra. How symbolic that it was during the Reagan administration, helmed by a man with incipient Alzheimer’s, that American politicians discovered “the dog ate my homework,” ceasing to even pretend that they were required to take responsibility for their actions. And they got away with it.

As they are now. Gee, I don’t recall if I was warned about 9/11, I don’t recall if I made plans to start a war even before then... The death mask is coming off, slowly; we really have no say, we Americans, in this current dirty war; do we? If not, we will be in Iraq for many, many years to come. The grim reapers, the contractors of The Pentagon, Inc., the oil men who call the elections, are calling the shots on this one again and, apparently, there is really very little we can do about it. (Or the now $4-a-gallon gas price.) If we let them. The cops at home have nonlethal weapons and know how to use them, if we get out of line, so…

What shall we do now? Pray?

Oh, but religion “poisons everything,” as one best-seller is now telling us—yes, especially for the rich, who don’t like to be reminded, as religions seem to want to persist in reminding them, that the poor are people too. That the meek shall inherit the earth. That riches, in fact, don’t matter at all; that what matters is kindness, fairness, justice….

“Point!... Fire!” the Ohio National Guard can be heard shouting on a tape from the Kent State shootings, 37 years ago. Another bit of outrageous news that was buried in the apparently much more pressing news about Paris Hilton’s jail sentence and the “mommy wars”—there are mommy wars only for mommies who can afford the ammunition, by the way. Most mommies have to work. They have no time to argue about it. But they aren’t the ones who tend to write books and newspaper articles, so their voice is rarely discernible…. What if all this time and attention about mommy wars could be turned into a debate about the lack of government support for mothers with children (we fall behind Sri Lanka on this one), the absence of child care options?

Again, shall we pray?

“Get set… Fire!” The murders that inflamed a youth movement (September, 1970) turned out to have been on purpose, by government design. It’s not surprising. (See Garden Plot.) What is surprising is that, just 37 years later, no one seems to care.

I guess by now we’ve just gotten used to seeing cops attacking Americans citizens.

Well, they're not attacking *me*, you say...

Yeah, God spoils everything, doesn't he?


p.s., Still haven't seen any video yet from the LAPD of those 50 "troublemakers" who allegedly started the MacArthur Park riot. Gee, you'd think in the hundreds of hours of footage from media outlets and the cops themselves *somebody* would have caught those anarchist trouble-makers on tape. Or maybe the cops just can't recall where they put the evidence, they have a history of amnesia. I think. Gee, I can't really remember...