Cindy Sheehan

A few days ago Cindy Sheehan, appalled that the democrats folded up their attack on the greedy bloodthirsty enterprise that is the war in Iraq, gave up and went home. And most Americans said nothing. Americans couldn't bring themselves to mourn the fall of this heroine. Why couldn't they mourn and why is she a heroine?

They couldn't mourn because they form part of a sick society so addled by palliative bromides and Goebbelsian propaganda that they cannot bring themselves to miss the presence of someone who is willing to sacrifice herself for a reflective moment from her people- an answer to why they love the wars that kill their own. In despair, "raging against the dying of the light", she described America as

“a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people (American troops in Iraq) will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives.”

Perhaps she was "a soccer mom" when her son was growing up- a son who went and joined the military. A home environment that produces soldiers probably isn't a granola crunching hippie one. More middle of the road I think. That's what makes this mother's transformation remarkable. Her anti-war stance is understandable as her son died in a meaningless conflict. But that is not the transformation. Sheehan could have been another "hero's mom" that took in the small town accolades and curdled and bristled inside at the inhuman insanity of her culture. No, she decided to turn around and go to the top, take on the President of the United States, in the classiest possible fashion, asking him for one meaningful conversation.

She reminds me of both Don Quixote and Aung San Su-Kyi. Perhaps I am being unfair, Aung San Su Kyi stands with Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King as custodians of the greatest values, people who decided to play dice with the universe. Yet she reminds of those people because she lost a great deal, had to hit the wall of value, and chose to take on the most powerful of people. Normal people do not do anything like that. For some reason Cindy Sheehan turned into the best that America could be.

But the Americans have repeatedly failed their best. They cannot bring themselves to understand much less celebrate people like Nader and Sheehan. Politically, they only lurch towards Gore because they know they made a mistake picking Bush over him (as a custodian of their vacuous over-consumption). They celebrate John F. Kennedy, giving him the credit for Martin Luther King's struggle. Kennedy's election was rigged (the Mafia brought Illinois in). He had a great deal of Southeast Asian, Cuban and Latin American blood on his hands. His successors LBJ, Carter and Clinton were all presidents responsible for great suffering.

The truth is that the Democratic are far more evil than the Republicans. In Germany, their ilk were not the maniacal nazis, they were the calm rational supine supporters who stood by watching. They have no spine, no values, and no religion . The Republicans may be mostly immoral but he Democrats are uniformly amoral. Thus they are plaint to anyone's wiles, a bunch of losers. The only way they win elections and get people to trust them is when the shit comes down and everything smells.

Somewhere in all this is a piece of mythology that when the press is free, when information ins available, then people will realise and act when their government strays from their values.