John Brown (TomDispatch): On Waking Up Sleepless

[Jack Rabbit]

From TomDispatch.com
Dated Sunday April 23

On Waking Up Sleepless in the Middle of the Night
By John Brown

TO: The President

FROM: A former American diplomat

SUBJECT: Waking up in the middle of the night

Mr. President: Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night? Do you? Do you ever wake up sleepless in the middle of the night?

What have you done in Iraq? Do you ever realize, in the middle of the night, what you've done? Do you?

Read more.

John Brown is a former diplomat who resigned from the State Department over the planned war in Iraq.

[Oversea Visitor]

1. He must have

watch Pink - Dear Mr President.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. This reminded of Pink's song

They'll be singing that years from now as a historical/cultural icon of these dark days. Pink has given us the Waist Deep in Big Muddy of the Bush regime era.

[Oversea Visitor]

3. Pink song has a deeper depth

It is about Bad Leader and the suffering citizen
That song is not going to be allow in lots of countries

There are goverment and there are people
We chose leader to govern us
But they govern us to make money
Finding a good leader is like trying to find a needle in a haystack nowadays.

[Jack Rabbit]

4. That is also true

Pete Seeger wrote Waist Deep in Big Muddy when Lyndon Johnson was President. The song was a broadside at LBJ's stubborn and foolish policies in Vietnam:

Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

Parallels are drawn in this respect to Bush's stubborn and foolish policies in Iraq.

However, Pink's Dear Mr. President is about a man over his head as a leader. G. W. Bush is fundamentally a hapless spoiled brat who grew up in wealth and privilege. He thinks that the wealthy are superior to others; this includes him, even though he did nothing to earn his wealth like American industrial luminaries of the past like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison or of the presnet like Ross Perot. Pink takes a broadside at Bush's undemocratic world view right at the start:

Let's pretend we're just two people and
You're not better than me

In Pink's world view, it is Bush's wealth and privilege and his failure to comtemplate what life is for those not among the "haves and have-mores" that make him fundamentally unfit to be a leader of a democratic state:

Let me tell you bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way
Let me tell you bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away
Let me tell you bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box
Let me tell you bout hard work, hard work, hard work
You don't know nothing bout hard work, hard work, hard work, O!

[Oversea Visitor]

5. The you no better than me is very strong

It let people to feel that the singer is them

The daughter and the father and daughters right .... this song wont get a chance to be play in Saudi
If you stop listening to the song as an Americans
You see that it is universal in so many way
Those words has so many meaning depending on the listener.