TW: In many ways this piece sums up why I am so fired up about this election, I like living in our "home", I really do not care for the "homeland" that has been created.
From Roger Cohen at Int'l Herald Tribune/NYT:
"Oh, it's good to be home...[but I will not] mention the other America before "threat levels" and two wars and renditions and bumper stickers saying "Freedom is not free" - the land where jokes were not yet grounds for arrest and nobody got wrestled to the floor for "looking" suspicious and fear was not yet a coin of the realm...Oh, but it's good to be home, even if it's a "homeland" now.
Oh, yes, it's good to be home. Even if it's a homeland, at least it's not a fatherland. And how, I wonder, does our home look to others? As Bill Clinton noted at the Democratic national convention in Denver, the United States does better when it leads with "the power of our example" than with "the example of our power."
To think this airport is named after JFK - all that promise, and my Dad weeping at his loss in faraway London. Kennedy who asked us to ask ourselves what we could do for our country. Whatever happened to Lincoln's "last, best hope?"
It got frayed. Let's stop talking about an infrastructure bottleneck, sounds too like something in a Soviet 10-year plan, and start talking about collapsing bridges, crawling trains, dilapidated airports, potholed roads - the great national failure to build a network of public transport worthy of a modern state in the age of $120 oil.
We've been spending too much on fear while others have spent on the future. And now JFK looks like LOTH - Lagos-on-the-Hudson - while Hong Kong airport shimmers the way American promise once did.
Unless you make the wrong joke, or knock yourself out on the scaffolding, or have a weird beard.
Speaking of the Democratic national convention, the security there involved police in shades with sub-machine guns riding around on platforms on the backs of vehicles and the image they summoned with their truculent menace was Pinochet's Chile circa 1986, the main difference being the Colorado vehicles still had license plates...Police dogs combed through the gym and pool area of the Denver Grand Hyatt sniffing goggles and towels as wide-eyed kids gaped.
Barack Obama put the situation this way: "America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this."
I reckon everyone - Democrat, Republican or independent - can agree on that. Certainly the rest of the world can. Its thirst to close the Bush chapter is bordering on the feverish.
Winston Churchill said of the United States: "It can be counted on to do the right thing, but only after it has tried every other alternative."
As Roger Smith, an acute political observer and blogger, put it in an e-mail: "Well, George W. is every other alternative...Unless you count Sarah Palin...She's certainly alternative.
Yes, it's good to be home. But it sure could be better"
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/opinion/edcohen.php
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