Okay, so I do more than just blog my ass off. But, within the following diatribe, I am scared, shitless and that's why I want to share this with you!
Detritus of the Social Contract
Most people who know me will corroborate this fact, I don’t scare easy. But, right now, I'm scared shitless! I never before understood the ramifications of having a great leader until the start of the reign of our present American president (small ‘p’ intended), the imperialist George Bush aka King George. I simply took for granted that everyone sought to do the right thing. I was naïve. I did not realize how a great leader inspires a country to their respective greatness and how that greatness produces a global effect. Now, with this president I understand!
The president and his cabinet are arrogant, elitist, and truly represent the strangle hold on our country of the dying ‘old-boy, old-money’ even robber baron type network. This president thumbs his nose at our elected representatives in Congress (a weak bunch at most) who dare take umbrage with his policies. But even more importantly, this paternalistic and patronizing president thumbs his nose at the American people!
This attitude from above has provided the trickle down effect if you will, contributing to our present socio-moral and ethical erosion with a resulting lawlessness across the land. It is a lawlessness birthed and nurtured on the president’s valuation of arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and devaluation of the average human life; for the present administration appears to only consider fetal life as valuable because after all we will need more soldiers!
As a Clevelander, (Cleveland,Ohio) this summer of 2007 has been the worst in my known history because of the incredible and heinous nature of the murders here and elsewhere. It appears that our city and the country are being overtaken by senseless (there are no murders that make sense…wait a minute… Iraq!) murders leaving a trail of victims and collateral damage. The term ‘collateral damage’ is normally used as a cloaking term for residual deaths in places other than America like,Iraq(women and children are dying everyday!). Now, collateral damage is evident everywhere in every city, little town, and in every ‘safe’ little cloistered suburb, people are stunned at the disregard for basic humanity in the perpetrators.
Being that King George essentially bends and/or ignores the rules of law to in effect reward the loyalty of his friends and staff (see Scooter Libby), his actions do have a trickle down affect. It appears that a lot of people are abandoning the social contract in lieu of their own law and errant code of behavior simply because of the example(s) set by the white house (small ‘w’ intended). Back to Scooter Libby, the guy always looked smug and never seemed worried when he appeared in the media before, during and after his indictment, trial and conviction. It appeared that he ‘knew’ that he had to go through the ‘exercise’ of a public flogging before receiving his expected and agreed upon exoneration. No doubt, he is still on the guest list of many political and powerful social functions and parties and of even those who denounced him so loudly…in front of the cameras.
Actually, it should not shock us that reprehensible moral, ethical and enigmatic murderous behavior is flourishing in this present political-social environment. Yet, I still ask what the hell is going on? What makes a man kill his pregnant former significant other in front of his son, mutilate and bury the body, and then pretend to search for her and look normal!? What makes a fireman come out of his house and shoot three people to death? With Frigyes Karinthy’s six degrees of separation notion I know two people who experienced the murderous deaths of loved ones this year from my place of employment. In the Karinthian sense I am connected to a young woman I met at a picnic who stated that five classmates from her high school have died in Iraq! Can you imagine that?! It is comparable to the chronic war in the urban core of many cities involving young Black males; that other war that no one seems to care about (perhaps it should be set in Darfur).
The knee-jerk response is that we need more police which I think misses the significance of this period of time yet is to be expected as a Pavlovian response. A police person could not have stopped the eighteen year-old young woman from killing her father and his girlfriend by beating them to death with her boyfriend in their home this summer in South Euclid,Ohio. More police could not have prevented the death of Jesse Davis. The call for more police does not actively seek to interpret (and remedy) more deeply the overall agency which is the devaluation of life and the valuation of maintaining and increasing material goods of oil and money and the social currency of status. In starting an unjustified war in Iraq, this president has deemed the deaths of a number of Americans as acceptable (there are calculations of acceptable projected deaths done in the war room!). Essentially, what we are experiencing in cities, towns, and suburbs throughout the country are fallouts of the devaluation that the president’s ideology and policies has placed on ‘regular’ people, not wealthy or rich people. If there were a draft, the war would be over; hell there may not have been a war!
Within this presidency there are breaches in our ethical-moral code, the rule of law and the social contract. A good President having oral sex would be a relief right now, and surely would not cause the deaths of our nations young! I feel impotent right now (no pun intended) as I sit and wait in my locked up home, afraid to go out, waiting for a ‘new leader.’ I hope that the country, my city, and my neighborhood can withstand the last months of this era of imperialism and crawl to the post election finish line in November 2008!
“. . . the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law OUGHT to be King; and there ought to be no other. “
Thomas Paine: Common Sense(1776)
Adrienne Zurub is an Author/Speaker/Actor/RN and Comedian/Humorist living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
cristian lapusan
