"Some Thoughts on the Bombings in London" from July, 2005

(the below piece of mine was published last July 7th in the online magazine the-hold.com):


One day after it was announced that London was chosen to be the site of the 2012 Olympic games, there were multiple bombings, and multiple deaths, on subways and buses there. A group calling itself "the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe" has claimed responsibility for this debacle. Increasingly, sadly, it appears that Al Qaeda of Iraq, and now Al Qaeda of Europe, are brought to you by Halliburton, and the CIA who trained Bin Laden and his boys when they were rogue rats back in Afghanistan. They've since been equipped, educated, and promoted, to be real live, hot wired terrorists. Worse still, one fears that the trail of infamy leads back to the Oval Office, and that even Tony Blair, prime minister, has blood on his hands. War makes strange bedfellows; capitalism even stranger. Halliburton growing fatter by the minute, China eating up our oil supplies, Bill Gates courting Beijing. The reign of terror surpassed only perhaps by the acid rain of history.

Just yesterday, we watched Judith Miller being led off to prison like a good little sacrificial lamb (not unlike Martha Stewart) while Karl Rove, Bob Novak, and the big boys of Enron get to keep manufacturing lies, and war toys. Cheney's Halliburton just got a $5 billion contract for military operations in Iraq. A beautiful old lady, on the BBC, who was punched, and had pieces ripped from her during the London subway bombing was socked by plain old corporate greed, the same corporate greed that sodomized the Statue of Liberty, and continues to rape the U.S. Constitution. Tony Blair, while shaken, had the presence of mind (unlike his American counterfart) to say that these dreadful events while devastating will not be used as an excuse to divest Great Britain of those freedoms they have come to hold near and dear. Good for him! How sorry for this planet that we have an empire with a loose cannon as commander-in-chief who has navigated this nation, and the world, into a nightmare that makes the apocalypse look like cotton candy.

Perhaps those who revel in Creationism shall yet have their way, and the Apocalypse will come sooner rather than later. Possibly, we are witnessing the coalescing of various elements that make for cosmic catastrophe, but then catastrophe preceded the dinosaurs and comets. Maybe these terrible days of innocence bombed, and burned, will show us how important it is for us all to work together as a world, as a planet, and not as a collection of half-wit nationalists bent on buffing up their own bottom line at great peril, carnage, and at the expense of what generations have seen, and continue to see, as civilization.