The Plague

Originally written Thursday, January 27, 2005

It makes me sick, it really does. I watched the coronation of Bush a few days ago. I saw parts of his appalling speech, the speech so focused on “freedom” and “liberty” it never mentioned “war” or “Iraq”. I got to see the nauseating Laura Bush, all dressed up right down to the white gloves, making the University of Texas hand sign (the same sign you would make if you were in the habit of yelling “Rock on, dude!” – you know the one I mean) as though the ceremony was just another giant frat party and Laura was looking forward to pleasuring the rest of the football team. I heard about the millions of dollars spent on inaugural balls and celebrations, while Iraqis and Americans kept dying in Iraq and hundreds of thousands died in South-East Asia.

I could have puked.

I got to see the media fall over themselves in a self-congratulatory slop of grinning, joyous cheerleading as they “covered” the coronation. I had the displeasure of noticing the utter lack of coverage of the numerous protests taking place in DC that day. Democracy Now reported the next day on the usual disgusting habits of those whose profession we dishonour by calling them “journalists” – Fox News who reported that only a few dozen people showed up at a protest organized by ANSWER, with the New York Times reporting the next day that thousands had shown up; CNN’s relentlessly superficial Wolf Blitzer who described the protestors as “angry, angry people” and deliberately tried to downplay their significance, saying “We don’t want to make too much of the protesters, because we don’t know how many there were. Certainly, the nature of this business, the nature of television, we could over-exaggerate based on the images, and they might just be a tiny, tiny overall number.”

Hand me my friggin Gravol.

The Plague is back everybody, but this time it isn’t Black, it’s White, Corporate and Military. It’s a spreading sickness of violence, greed, a total disregard for truth and justice and an endless stream of propaganda. It’s a sickness spread as effectively as if America were stuffing the germ-ridden corpses of the Bush family into catapults and launching them across the globe like filthy squishy ICBMs. Put your SARS masks back on people, because America the Model Society of Freedom and Liberty is spreading like an avian flu that jumped from chickenhawk to Condoleeza Rice. Get the shovels out too, because we’re going to need to bury all the voters who will soon enjoy Bush’s promised era of freedom and liberty.

It makes me sick, it really does.