I’ve picked up a contract job that’s taking a lot of the time and energy I’d otherwise spend loafing about, surfing the web, and coming up with things to write about here. The good news is that it’ll pay my bills this year without putting me over the income tax line. The bad news is that for a while, The Picket Line will be likely to have less original material and more collections of links, like today:
Interesting and Inspiring Excerpts from around the Web
Non-combatants. Celebrating on a disabled U.S. vehicle, granted. But civilians nonetheless. Certainly not in combat against any U.S. troops.
In the foreground, a reporter just doing his job, frowning over some little technical glitch, maybe something he forgot to do…
Bang, boom. No warning. Just an incoming U.S. aerial attack. “To prevent looters from stripping the vehicle,” the Pentagon later says, classifying everyone within thirty feet as “looters” and sentencing them to summary execution.
Blood splashes on the lens. The camera spins. Tiny glimpses of terrible carnage.
Without a beat, without reflection, without even a moment of minimal thought, Wolf Blitzer moves on. As do we, collectively.
And that’s that. America kills innocent civilians. Lots of them. And it’s no big deal now. Not controversial. No reason to ask questions or rationalize or even pretend to soul-search like the national media once did. America kills civilians. Lots of them. Just part of the fabric of things now.…
We are killing in large numbers. And we are numb to what we are doing.
That’s it. Game over. We have lost.
Not the war. Ourselves.
From Our savage numbness
by Bob Harris
Milton Mayer’s “Rendered Unto Caesar” can be found in the book We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.
Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).
From But Then It Was Too Late
by Milton Mayer
from The Military-Industrial Man
by Chalmers Johnson
from Shakedown at Gucci Gulch
by Edward J McCaffery & Linda R. Cohen
