Maximus
Paramendra Bhagat
February 24, 2003

--- Iraq is all over the map, on NPR, screaming headlines at newsstands, on the TV screen at truck stops, online in small towns when waiting to get loaded, at public libraries, Main Street eateries
--- Bush dismissed the largest anti-war demonstration in history: "I respectfully disagree ..."
--- Mandela charged. Bush can not "think properly." The United States has been the only power in history that has irresponsibly used WMDs. They wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki when "the Japanese were retreating on all fronts ..."
--- Arundhati Roy appeared alongside Mandela on NPR. The author of the Booker Prize-winning book I got as Christmas gift: The God Of Small Things. "Should we bomb Bush out of the White House?" she asked ...
--- "Then the girstly-bristly face contorted, and Estha's hand was wet and hot and sticky. It had egg white on it. White egg white. Quarter-boiled ... The lemondrink was cold and sweet. The penis was soft and shriveled like an empty leather change purse. With his dirtcolored rag, the man wiped Estha's other hand." (page 99)
--- There's Petro, Flying J, Pilot, Love's, William's
--- And there are little independent ones with local character, the Tiger Truck Stop in Louisiana, replete with live tigers and Cajun cooking, the Segovia Truck Stop in the oversize state of Texas, the one in Needles, California, and the Triple T Truck Stop in Tucson, Arizona, where several movies have been shot
--- Saddam is indefensible
--- But the anti-war rhetoric is not about him
--- The country with the largest stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons preaches the evils of WMDs
--- The talk of non-proliferation makes sense only within a framework of universal disarmament, which is nowhere close to forthcoming ...
--- But then if it is the distrust of a non-democratic regime, India is the largest democracy, and there still was loud talk against India's nuclear weapons
--- Since Saddam is indefensible, and there is no domestic or regional power that can get rid of him, enter USA
--- Will it be liberation, or will it be occupation
--- Will there be the dominoe effect of fallen autocratic regimes in large swathes of the Arab world, by any standards a welcome change
--- Germany, Japan, and now Iraq
--- A country apparently willing to spend a few hundred billion dollars to "liberate" Iraq
--- A costly repartee to Saddam's attempt on the senior Bush's life
--- The same country should be able to pay the UN a billion when it is due, or spend about 10 or 50 billion dollars each year to fund domestic movements in every country that lacks democracy
--- For democracy
--- Non-violent, domestic movements, domestic leadership
--- Much, much cheaper in terms of dollars as well blood
--- But then too many American companies benefit from war: those bombs get manufactured somewhere
--- Yes, oil, yes, profits, capitalism, bottomline, special interests
--- The racism of double standards
--- A trucker talking to another at a L.A. terminal informs a friend of his has offered to "whack" his ex-wife, and then, in the same breath, he launches into a tirade on Iraq
--- The US is the new colonial power
--- The kind of folks for whom Bush paints simplistic pictures of good and evil, for ready consumption, people who Bush screws with his massive tax cuts for the super rich, but who are for him anyway
--- They would invent war if they did not have one
--- No signs the U.S. economic meltdown is about to slow down
--- "I nominate Secretary Powell for President of the United States," a fawning Senator says at a hearing
--- Is this a slightly different kind of Republican
--- One that finally shows Trent Lott the door
--- Lott once wished lightning strike Hillary Rodham Clinton
--- He still had his job after that
--- The remark was sexist, not personal, or partisan
--- Lott, Helms, representing poor, white, racist males whose vitriolics have been to the tune of concentrated sulphuric acid
--- If it is about democracy
--- The right to vote is a Homo Sapien thing
--- One person, one vote all the way to the top
--- A different kind of United Nations
--- Yes to a universal spread of democracy
--- Yes to world government
--- Globalization needs political wings