RE: I Love America
Dear Frank,
Thank you for sharing this article from TomDispatch. I'd like to add my 2 cents:
- Cent #1: even with this disgraceful attack by Trump on Iran, Kamala would have been way worse as far as warmongering & actual wars are concerned.
- Cent #2: this brave article dares to mention Christopher Lee Bollyn's statement on USA being an "Israeli-occupied state". Maybe it is worth going one more step forward, and stating that zionism is the greatest evil on Earth right now.
Norbert Hanny
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Regarding Nader Terani’s "I Love America."
You begin your piece with the words "We bombed Iran.” Yes, that’s right, you’re behind it, too. You’ve been wholly bought, thoroughly propagandized, and now hang there unprepared, yet still part of that “we.”
Frank Thomas Smith can probably very much identify with your position, as he too is adrift while maintaining the American goodie goodie view of its military in so many heartwarming and good-natured stories in this publication. It takes massive strength to drop that link since you cannot help but believe it defines you. It happens when you think that the maintenance of that “we” is imperative, you own it something, it has done things for you. Please point to it. Who, what?
Actually, you are not requird to maintain loyalty, you are not required to be patriotic, you can sever those emotional ties you mistakenly believe you can actually criticize while being part of the whole construct. You can critize them, but only in that tempting ineffective mode allowed under freedom of speech. See social media for that.
To be free, you need to go much further, take down the flag, mind your own business and drop the “we.” Meanwhile, though, you’ll have to go on and be “willing to pay the ultimate price for [your] freedom.” Where is this freedom? What is it? Ignoring sovereignty? Bombing seven nations in a row? Creating havoc? Killing regardlessly? Bad-mouthing Russia and Iran and anyone else sitting on the fence?
You don’t speak of genocide, of America doing Israel’s bidding, the Zionists, the propagandized Jew, what, more than half of the Jewish population out to kill Palestinians? Once in that state, you cannot reject anything, just as you yourself cannot reject what you have been led to believe. So just go on, bicker, and leave it at that.
Frankly, I would be the first to "cede ground, when it comes to patriotism." It’s a matter of knowing what ground to stand on.
Nicholas Maync-Matsumoto
RE: Breathe
This is such a beautiful poem… it really struck a chord depicting my life and the way I’ve felt for years.
Thank you for this. 😊🥰
Sincerely,
Carrie Autenrieth
Hermoso!!! Yo empecé en esa misma escuela en el 71 y tengo los mismos recuerdos
Escribí yo también Recuerdos de mi niñez en el Waldorf. Q x ahí andarán en algún baúl.… Hermosos recuerdos de infancia. Imborrables. Te felicito. Gracias.
Vivian Olive
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Gracias, lindos recuerdos de un colegio Waldorf. Un día la sra Lunde vino de visita a Santiago y se quedó a vivir en mi casa, de mis padres. Recuerdo lo alta que era y su ropa Noruega.
Mónica Waldman
RE: The Personification of Decline
Regarding the article by Tom Engelhardt:
You need not have written a stack of good books, be a historian, or possess any special forensic powers to see where America the Beautiful is headed. It is partcularly easy when looking on from the outside, as I do. It’s as if watching a dystopian movie, ironically, one not written in Hollywood, because if it were, it would flop disastruously. It’s more akin to watching the unfolding of a foreseeable tragedy—that of empires. But since we are watching it in real time, uncompressed to put into focus its predictable demise, all we see is its shockingly banal, everyday detail.
Of course, one cannot but wonder how Donald Trump ever got “elected" in the first place. I guess the peculiar mechanism of the election is not a new one, but its pointed subversion by a wealth-holding oligarchy of interests, flashing the empire card, is. It has little to do with "the people" and nothing with”democracy.” These new, president-affirming processes are now proudly and unashamedly posted as the way to go, though they will do nothing but hasten this American Empire's end.
There were decades when America was seen as a good force from some quarters of the world, but this impression began to fracture with the Vietnam War and was lost thereafter. What resulted is what we have now: a triumvirate of evil men and women designing the playbook and the methods of maintaining world-wide order in America’s image, by its rules and—trying to hide the fact in so many ways, to its own exclusive benefit. True snake oil. A thoroughly negative, corrupting and willfully destructive force, hell-bent on creating convenient vassal states around the globe, in the firm belief that this state of affairs could last.
America is located far from the rest of the world. This affects its mental image of that world. Just as, in Europe, Japan could only be imagined as something fallen off the distant horizon, a minor economic threat from nowhere, so does China exist in the common mind in America. There is nothing to acknowledge its existence and encourage respect. The same void applies to Eurasia, Africa and Australia, all places—not cultures and people—to be transformed to obey their master.
Observed from abroad, Americans appear awfully noisy and opinionated, massively self-indulgent, and material-dependent, as if salvation lay in your “worth." A place where you are in full charge of your own misfortune and where poverty is nothing but an eyesore, to be simply erased. There is something awfully empty about education in America: so many one-liners, cliches, so much indoctrination, red-neck groupism, rudeness and disrespect, all camouflaging a painful absence of thought, except where it is vilified.
Few of us refuse to give credence to the progress of global warming—it’s all around us. One might conclude: Okay, let’s not amplify it, because that’s all we can do. That would be reasonably intelligent. But, no, it’s "got to be” fake, so let’s ignore it. That’s the American way now.
These paragraphs were not written with ChatGPT, but you have only my word for it. Were they at least grammar-checked, or in some detail edited using AI? Let me count the em dashes, check the absence of “very,” the presence of “quiet,” the weirdly placed comma, an uncomfortable smoothness. What can we conclude? How will generative text affect your response to this? Does it bother you?
Nicholas Maync-Matsumot