by Don Hynes
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| Vantage Point | Culture and Politics by Don Hynes |
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"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.
He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so,
the prejudice will be gone." - Tom Paine
February 22, 2005 In the days of old prophets would keep kings in line, leveling their hubris, shrinking their grandiosity, soaking their arrogance with the righteousness of compassion. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X brought this spirit in recent years with a fire few have yet to match. However, John Dear, a Jesuit priest and the author/editor of 20 books including most recently "The Questions of Jesus" and "Living Peace" brings a rare fire to his contemporary perspective "Pharisee Nation." He lives in New Mexico where he is working on a campaign to disarm Los Alamos. Tell It Like It Is was a Big Easy classic from Aaron Neville, but aside from the overwrought cliché there was a limited use policy on the real thing with the notable exception of Hunter S. Thompson. He chased the hypocrisy and crazy making duplicity of our culture for forty plus years with undying quotes like this one concerning bush junior: "To say that this goofy child president is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon." Here's Hunter at his best in an excerpt from the Kingdom of Fear. RIP brother. Ibraheim Al-Jaffari, the head of the pro-Iran Da’awa party is the new Prime Minister of Iraq. I wonder if he'll be sitting next to Laura at next years SOTU? Perhaps if he leaves the turban home and promises to renounce his old friend and compatriot, Iranian president Khatami. The Da'awa carried out terrorist bombings and assassinations inside Iraq during the Sadaam era and as a party has called for an Islamic Republic for Iraq. How that looks and feels to women inside Iraq is best captured by Riverbend in her current posting on the growing fear of a punishing type Shari'a with the Shia ascendancy in Iraq. Rove probably has a spin ready that confirms the real purpose of the invasion of Iraq (not WMDs, not threats to the US, not links to Al Queda, and certainly not control of Iraq's oil reserves) was to expand Shia religious fundamentalism in the name of democracy. We'll know it's coming if Darth Cheney appears in the senate sporting a turban or macdonald's starts offering Da'awa action figures with their happy meal. *** |
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