Not old enough to remember Carter then? He was in my lifetime at least, and while he made some mistakes, they were mistakes in the cause of trying to help others and rarely because he was trying to help himself or his party. He tried to turn the White House green with solar panels, he got Israel and Egypt to agree to a peace deal, and he’s genuinely a very decent and honorable human being. The reason why he’s looked down on as President is only because we seem to want dickweeds and assholes in the job, not decent people.
Oh, and he deregulated the beer industry. Home brewing and all those awesome craft beers, you can thank Carter for that.
This is A. F. Branco, a living breathing Republican talking point. His only purpose in life is to slander Democrats, Liberals, or whatever the current enemy of the GOP is today. He’s as an extreme of a right wing cartoonist as you can get without posting the actual Neo-Nazis.
He will slander innocent children locked up in cages if it furthers the party cause.
I think the departure here is that some people are holding the value of the lives of thousands of people that were taken by his actions as the more important item to note and show reverence to than the office he held.
And then there’s you, holding the office to be the more sacred thing, or perhaps holding more sacred the manners issue of not slamming anyone during their funeral, officeholder or not. It’s not that everyone disagrees with holding a certain regard for either of those… it’s just they hold an even higher regard for his victims, and protesting all of this praise for him, and shining a light on their graves while everyone’s offering their attention to Bush is one way to do that.
But when someone is praised and praised and praised in the press at such time, it’s hard to resist taking the opposite tack when they truly deserve it.
Sure. Politicians always get painted in a better light when they’re dead, even if they were massive assholes throughout their career. Personally, I find it irksome too. Still, the funeral is over now, go for it. I just suggested a little pause for a fellow human being for a few hours, I’m not in any way defending his career or actions or trying to sway anyone’s opinions, after all I’d probably get flagged for bad language if I described how I actually felt about him as a President. Doesn’t stop me thinking there’s a time and a place for speaking your mind.
We can’t have nice things because people keep electing leaders who are warmongers that focus on whatever they need to to obtain & hold power instead of trying to find ways to solve the differences of the planet and move us towards nice things.
These realities don’t go away just because one dies. Worse, you get a ton of whitewashed, nice things said about those leaders out of an IMHO misplaced notion of decorum, and now many folks who know little else about these leaders, or have forgotten, or whatever, remember this whitewashed version of that person because it was the last, most recent thing they read about them.
People were murdered and lives irrevocably altered at the hands of world leaders. In many cases, attitudes and opinions about entire groups of people may well have been altered for generations by policies enacted by the soldiers or people of countries affected by world leaders. If for no other reason, it is precisely at those moments when these leaders are being most remembered that it is important to get the full and complete history out there for everyone to see, so that those that suffered are not forgotten.
The media has done a wonderful job of portraying the “fucking class” version of events. I applaud Cory for making sure the full story is heard, and that the harm caused to those affected isn’t forgotten as a result.
I read a good essay by Alexandra Rowland today that discussed “nice.” Here’s the excerpt:
I believe the purpose of this article’s commission was to have me write something uplifting.
I don’t know if I can. I think it would be (I’m afraid it would be) nice.
Awful word, nice. A word to silence anything that discomfits you: You won’t make any progress toward those basic civil liberties you want if you can’t be nice about it.
Nice is nonthreatening. Nice is comfortable. Nice is a quiet neighborhood with white picket fences and white minivans and an overwhelmingly white demographic, where we don’t talk about things if they aren’t nice.
The world has never been nice. The world has always and only been a never-ending, Darwinian struggle for survival, an “empire of unsheathed knives and hungers,” clawing at each other and climbing over each other in a mad riot, pushing our boots down into someone else’s face to heave ourselves up a little higher or risk being trampled ourselves
But once in a while, the people toward the middle of the heap manage to look down and see the mass of wretched bodies below, the base of the pyramid that’s supporting them, and for a moment, they see the instability of their own position, that their pyramid isn’t built on solid ground but on human flesh and human pain. For a moment, they see, and the illusion of niceness is wrenched away from them, and they weep, but still, still not for the people below them whose suffering has gone on so long. They weep like children over the teddy bear that’s been snatched out of their hands. They weep only because the world suddenly isn’t as nice as they thought, and it’s hard to deal with that.
Like I said above. Name one president you’d approve of just not not saying anything about at all on the day they were buried.
I will reiterate what seems to be ignored or not given a fuck about. My point was not whether or not Bush Sr was a good president or not. It was that on the day he is being buried is bad form to speak ill and post this on BB. Simply not saying a word for 24 hrs and allowing the day is simply too much self control for some people. Too much to ask.
Clearly I’m on the minority on feeling it’s a dick fucking move. So by all means. Burn him in effigy today to all your hearts delight. But don’t say one fucking word about civility or being a bigger/better person. Don’t ever quip how “those people are the assholes”. Because you’re in the same shitty boat.
There is a reason I often proclaim that I am not a “nice” person, aside from the fact that it obviously happens to be true; ‘nice’ is passive, ‘nice’ is toothless, ‘nice’ is the stuff of willing doormats.
if we can’t have respect for reality, especially on a day like this, we don’t deserve to have freedom of conscience.
i, for one, feel like thanking mr. doctorow for saying what i’ve been thinking all day as i’ve heard people pouring treacle over the corpse. i don’t mind the people at the funeral doing that, but the rest of us should absolutely not have to.
