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…before my battery runs out, or I pass out from drinking too much underpriced Argentinean beer, or both: I hope everybody is going to be watching Sarah Palin get schooled in tonight’s debate, as I will not be able to do so (at least, until it becomes available on YouTube).
I’ve been blissfully out of the political loop for most of this trip, but I am quite sad about missing these debates – please relish them for me, and cross your fingers that the voting public pulls their collective heads out of their collective asses, and decides not to vote for the candidate they want to “have a beer with.” That is all. Good night.
Argentineans are obviously no strangers to organized political protest, and even relative political stability doesn’t seem to have quenched their flames. While strolling around the government buildings in the Centro district – the Casa Rosada, the Cabildo, etc. – we noticed vanloads of police setting up crowd control barricades, news trucks, and all the other signs of a Big To-Do… but all we saw in the park was a makeshift stage, and a set of posters (that were actually quite informative, even in Spanish) about the Falkland War and about Pinochet’s collusion with the British during said war.
“Huh,” we thought, then sat down for some mate. After our break, we decided to check out the sitch, and things had changed considerably. A phalanx of police was arranged down Rivadavia, facing the Cabildo.
But what were they waiting for? Immediately next to us, a group of young men and women were aggressively tagging the white walls of the Cabildo with political slogans.
The walls were already be-sloganed, but the cops didn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other. Then we figured out why:
While putting up that last post, it occurred to me that as a New Yorker of more than a decade now, and even though this blog is still in its infancy – and therefore still very much at risk for Sudden Blog Death Syndrome – it would be remiss for me to not at least acknowledge that today is, in fact, 9/11.
Especially since, while walking to the cafe in which I’m now firmly ensconced, I trailed behind a slowly disintegrating procession of firemen who had just left the big church on 6th Avenue. Clearly a memorial service had just ended, and most of them were more or less at ease, except for a small detachment that were actually proceeding with banners, in formation, toward Flatbush Ave.
I don’t know if I should be embarrassed to admit this, but I feel absolutely nothing today. I was here when it happened, living in the city. I lost contact with the outside world for the better part of two days. I housed a friend who walked from his office in Tribeca after watching the second plane hit, and who suddenly found himself stranded on the island. We ate dinner together in a packed diner that had almost run out of food, while watching ash-and-dust-caked trucks rumble past, leaving behind long airborne streaks of grey that slowly settled on 1st Avenue. I found out that you can’t give blood if you’ve had hepatitis A. I smelled the burning for weeks afterward, which smelled unsettlingly of barbecue laced with unknown chemicals. I went to peace rallies and memorials, signed petitions, took photographs, and watched the cordon of machine gun-toting National Guardsmen slowly recede down down down until all that was left were tiny armed brigades in our leading transit hubs.
And now, seven years later, nothing. It’s been bludgeoned out of me. I’ll Never Forget, but in the same way as one might Remember The Alamo – it’s history, but the personal has been crushed out of it to make way for the symbolic. It’s been drenched in the most distasteful politics and used to decorate pathetic posturing and some of the most execrable laws that I never dreamed I’d live to see enacted. So fuck you very much, George W. Bush. Fuck you, Rudy Giuliani. Two times, in fact. Fuck you Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, and Tom Ridge, and John Ashcroft, and Alberto Gonzales, and Karl Rove, and John McCain and all the rest of you who decided that today was more important and useful as a GOP talking point than as a human tragedy.
I know you’ll probably never get yours in the poetic sense that you deserve, but I do hope you and your lackeys do get it at the voting booth in two months.
Wow, from Yahoo! News… Palin: Iraq war ‘a task that is from God’:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a “task that is from God.”
Aha! So all this time, Bush and Cheney haven’t just been fucking about with our military readiness, our economy, and our national integrity… they’ve been on a Mission From God, just like the Blues Brothers!
But that’s not all the estimable Miss Palin had to say about her orders from the Man Upstairs:
In an address last June, the Republican vice presidential candidate also urged ministry students to pray for a plan to build a $30 billion natural gas pipeline in the state, calling it “God’s will.”
It’s funny – I never had God pegged as such a keen advocate for natural gas energy… I just assumed he was more of a wind-power kinda guy. Well, I guess that’s why I’m not getting the GOP Veep nod.
Thank you, Josh Marshall, for getting me to watch a speech I would have otherwise completely ignored.
What is it about the Democratic presidential candidates, that they only seem to find their soul and grow a pair after running Epic Fail presidential campaigns? First Al Gore, now John Kerry… shit, Gore did so little for me in 2000, I voted for Nader (yes, I know – but before you send letterbombs, please keep in mind that I lived in NYC, where it would have taken mass extinctions for Bush to win). Then, as penance, I actually phonebanked for Kerry in ‘04 – even as I continued to slap my head over the way he somnambulated through his campaign.
So yeah, this is heady and inspiring stuff – I especially like his Senator McCain vs. Candidate McCain riff – but please, no more Inspiring Former Presidential Candidates… please just fucking get it right when it matters, OK, Barack?
