New Morning
for release
04-12-06
Washington D.C.
I'm reflecting on the old Ronnie Reagan campaign slogan: "It's morning in America." I feel like that today, like morning is about to break and we are on the threshold of a new day. The birds are beginning to chirp (Scooter Libby) and you can hear the papers hitting the driveways. People are waking up. They are getting the news.
Bush's approval ratings are approximately half of what they were in the giddy days immediately after 9/11. Yes, after five years of incompetence and bad policy and thievery and unnecessary war and insider trading on our national stock and corruption and outright lies and blindness or indifference to the will of the people, America is waking up. More and more people every day are tumbling to the fact that George Bush is nothing more than a stand-up comic hired by the white collar mafia to entertain the rolling trade-show that we call a government. He doesn't even write his own gags.
Even those of us who bought into the whole stinking package of fear and lies and propaganda that was assembled by the Bush administration are beginning to peek through the veil and what we see is not pretty.
It's almost become boring really. We wake up to the morning news so that we can find out which lobbyist was in bed last night with which government official. The whiff of corruption is so prevalent in our nostrils that we can't smell it anymore. The president or Scott McClellan utters another lie, so what? They do it every day. We've become used to it.
But if you listen to the chatter in bars and diners, if you hear the plain talk from the boys down at the brake shop, you will notice that the tenor of the conversation has changed. You hear less blind patriotism and more attention to the facts. America is waking up. Even the rank and file sees that our government places more emphasis on public relations than it does on policy. It's starting to filter down. Even Joe at the gas station knows that the only energy policy we have is to let the big oil companies have their way with us on a daily basis at the gas pump racking up astronomical profits. He knows that the body count in the pointless war in Iraq is mounting. He knows that there is a guy from Mexico named Jose' waiting to take his job.
But I sense a new morning. America is smelling the coffee. This week three million protesters took to the streets from LA to Phoenix to Dallas to Chicago to Atlanta to New York and Washington to vote with their feet on the topic of immigration. This is Woodstock X10.
Since 9/11 this administration has assumed that it was wearing Kevlar body armor. But what they assumed was an impenetrable fabric woven of lies and fear, propaganda and payola is starting to unravel. I could catalogue the scandals and deceptions and diplomatic embarrassments that have characterized this government, but there is no need. The eight hundred pound gorilla came to watch the Simpsons in our living rooms this weekend in the form of mass Hispanic demonstrations in our major cities. This administration has hung it's political hat on the claim that they are making America more secure from foreign, brown-skinned invaders and now we see several million of them assembling in the streets. And they did it with great dignity and decorum. Martin Luther King would be proud.
The administration has been telling us that by granting near dictatorial powers to the executive branch, Americans are safer from the possibility of 20 terrorists entering our country to wreak havoc, when 12 to fifteen million illegals are ensconced here and feel sufficiently entitled to demonstrate for their rights on our streets. What is wrong with this picture? And it is starting to dawn on people in both Red and Blue States, this terrible awareness that we've been had.. It's like a bad TV mini-series. We see scandal stacked on top of incompetence mixed with greed.
It's much like when Bush went on TV and asserted that the mission in Iraq was accomplished or that the government had no inkling that the levees would be breeched in New Orleans by a category four hurricane. Oh sure. And how about , "We want to get to the bottom of this," in the Plame affair when they were at the bottom of it? These guys are brilliant. "We didn't leak classified material because we de-classified it first....haha."
But it's not working. Americans are compliant and we want to do the right thing, but we are not plain stupid. We eventually figure out the flim-flam. You can only lie to us while you are picking our pockets for so long.
The Poet's Eye sees that there is a glow of pink on the horizon. It's about to be morning in America. People are waking up.
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
--Steve Goodman as recorded by Arlo Guthrie
to subscribe to The Poet's Eye
click Here
