If you are interested in what my blog is likely to morph into once I have more time to pay attention to it, here's a sample. I was struck by an editorial in the Tribune today (really just a selection from Thomas Paine's "The American Crisis"). I doubt that I took it the way the rightwingers at the Trib expected. This my letter to the editor.
I wonder if the irony of your posting of Thomas Paine's words from "The American Crisis" will be recognized by many of your readers. (Or perhaps the irony was intentional on your part.)
While written near the beginning of our country's struggle to throw off the military and economic presence of a government thousands of miles away, one does not have to alter very many of Paine's words words to assume the perspective of a Iraqi citizen today. Consider: "[The United States] with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has the right..."to bind us in all cases whatsoever" and if being bound in that manner is not slavery..." or "Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds [George Bush] can look up to the heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a housebreaker, has as good a pretense as he..." The latter quote from Paine is doubly ironic, given its similarity to the phrasing often used by Muslims today to describe the international behavior of the United States.
We have become accustomed to believe that ours is the only perspective that matters. But other people live in the world. Paine, Jefferson, Madison--even Hume and Rousseau--wrote for humanity, not the narrow parochial interests of a single nation. Today, Paine would be writing for the Iraqis, not the country that began to lose its way seven and a half years ago. Perseverance and fortitude are undoubtedly required today. With them we can take back our country from those who have stolen it and trampled on the rights that Thomas Paine defended so eloquently in 1776.
Craig West
Bloomingdale
