Artistry in Despair

From The Daily Kos

How does the hard rain not fall?
by kay dub
Thu Feb 08, 2007 at 10:51:02 AM PST

I don’t know how it ends. I saw a bleak presentiment, five years ago. Saw destruction hang like a dark satanic cloud over the bully’s pulpit at the UN, where the President preached his disdainful jeremiad to the lesser nations. I heard the blood dimmed tide roar when the Secretary of State proclaimed his holy justification for the slaughter of innocents.

I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard.

Still, I blew on the embers of hope as best I could. Cooler heads could yet prevail. Grownups could come to the rescue, a light could spring over the dark brink eastward.

I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it

Now I find it hard to look. Our president can’t. He foretells ends that confound reason. Full of passionate intensity, he professes beliefs that reveal only a fool’s understanding. Yet even so, I hope, I pray, I hope again, that it will somehow turn out. Not good, maybe but please God, not disastrously bad.

Inshallah, not apocalypse bad, not Gotterdammerung bad.

But I don’t know how that happens.

I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children

And I got a bad, bad feeling.

For I can see the American president, desperate to arrest what he at long last grasps is a long slide to ruin, turning to Iran. Some captain sent to patrol in confrontational territory provokes another captain. Shots are fired, men die. Bombs explode. Hamas and Hizbolla are stirred. Israel, threatened, and given a long-awaited opportunity, attacks. The Straits of Hormuz are blocked.

Oil goes to $150. Iraq vanishes from the television screens as quickly as Afghanistan before it. Congress doesn’t know whether to stagger into the street or stand at attention. The president is a wartime president again.

I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'

None of the other possibilities look much better.

For the streets, now red with blood, could become rivers. Sunni and Shia and Kurd slaughter each other at genocidal rates. The Saudis call on the president in private. This cannot go on, they say. The Turks threaten to calm by force a destabilizing Kurdistan. The Russians put their fingers meaningfully to their lips. The worried rulers of the "moderate" oil states, contemplating the conflagration’s spread, hint that they may have to intervene if Washington does not do something.

Bush announces, "Powell was right. We broke it. And now we own it. Regrettably, liberation will have to wait Bottom line--we invaded it and we conquered it, and now its ours." He halts forty years’ practice of sanctioning the government of client states by locals, and says "You know the trouble was, we just weren’t running the place like a business. And this time it by god will pay for itself."

Two hundred fifty thousand troops deploy. And take over all governmental function. No more letting the locals ruin the place while we stand by. That, they conclude, was part of the trouble, as it had been in Vietnam earlier.

Read all of it here.