What's Wrong With This Picture?

It shows Bush as a leader,
out in front,
where he's actually risking his precious ass.


This from Bad Attitudes:


In 1962, American journalist Eugene Lyons, author of the 1937 nonfiction classic Assignment in Utopia, gave a lecture about what turned him from a pro-Leninist radical in 1928, when he took a news job in the Soviet Union, into the conservative, fiercely anti-communist Reader’s Digest editor he became years later.

“It was ... the appalling contempt for human life which I found to be the hallmark of communism in practice. For I found myself in a world where such age-old concepts as justice, conscience, human dignity, the values that set man apart from the beasts, were despised as a species of treason. ...”

“Do men and women have an intrinsic worth, or are they merely the raw stuff for building some dehumanized state structure? Is the human being the final measure of all things, or merely a statistic?”

Two generations have passed since Lyons gave that talk, and the Soviet empire has been, as conservatives say, “on the ashheap of history,” for going on two decades.

A great irony is how true this sounds for 2006 if one substitutes “global capitalism” for “communism” and “corporate structure” for “state structure.” Communism is all but dead; yet, in our new world economy, dehumanization seems very much alive and on the march. The biggest difference is that the perpetrators' flag isn't red.

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