Molly Ivins: Merry Christmas from Dick Cheney

[Dudley_DUright]

Vice President Cheney's Christmas card this year not only offers best wishes in this holiday season but also bears the following quotation from Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention: "And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?" Food for thought there: a heavy meal, in fact.

Interpreting what the Lord intended by one thing or another has always been a dicey pastime. Ten years ago, we had one of those outbreaks where lots of people do ridiculous things and then claim it was because the Lord told them to. That was the summer a family of 20 people from Floydada, Texas, got naked, piled into a GTO (five kids in the trunk) and drove to Vinton, La., where they ran into a tree. Surprised hell out of the Vinton cops to see 20 nekkid people get out of one car. The family said the Lord told them to do it. There was so much of that kind of thing going around, I developed a theory about a dangerous Lord impersonator being on the loose.

I'm not saying that either Cheney or Franklin has heard from a Lord Impersonator, but just for starters on this empire biz, it was the Roman Empire that crucified Jesus. Then your Turkish Empire, not too tasty. Your Moghuls, ditto. Aztec Empire, fairly liberal on human sacrifice. Of the colonial empires -- French, Dutch, British, Portuguese -- all were contenders for the title of Worst Ever at different times and in different places -- but I think the crown probably goes to the Belgian Empire under King Leopold, believed to be responsible for the deaths of 10 million Africans when the entire Congo was Leopold's private plantation.

Of course, in the United States, we like to believe in American exceptionalism, to see ourselves as the Shining City on the Hill, a light and beacon unto all the world, and -- as it says on that statue given us by our friends, the French -- opening our arms to the world's tired, hungry and poor. We would naturally prefer to forget that the country was founded on genocide and slavery, but we have amongst us many nags and scolds who keep bringing it up, especially when we're having one of our snits of American triumphalism.

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http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=16201

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. "a dangerous Lord Impersonator being on the loose"

LOL!

:7