TALKING BEHINDS

In a Friday, July 30, 2004 story, USA TODAY writer, Peronet Despeignes, inadvertently exposes how much people talk out of their behinds (polite word). Peronet quotes people on their responses to the Democratic Convention and John Kerry. It’s much too easy for someone who pays attention all four years to the issues and to the decisions the President and Congress make to see the men and women who have no idea what’s going on and who only mimic what the news tells them to think. If I hear “flip-flop” once more or “too soft” on defense, I’ll be chewing my bowler brim in frustration.

Here’s a woman: “The convention’s not swaying anyone’s mind.” How does she know that? I know I’ve heard commentators say over and over that there aren’t enough votes left to sway so the conventions will be ineffectual, but I ain’t seen no polls yet. She’s talking through her b---.

Here’s another, a male: “Many consider Kerry elitist, the kind of liberal that looks down on working class people here [Boston].” Just an impression. No facts to back it up. No reference to his record which would show otherwise. Sounds like a man who’s been listening to Fox news. He’s talking through his b---.

Here’s another: “We are in a war against murderers trying to kill us and take over the Western world.” This guy’s a paranoid type, easy to convert into a chest thumping bushman. He shows the ability of an orangutan to discriminate complex issues. I bet he doesn’t realize that somewhere over in Baghdad, there’s a dirty guy with a bomb, thinking the same thing of our American bushmen. Both men are talking out of their a---- and don’t have a fact to rest their b---- on.

It’s just so obvious how many Americans pay no attention to what goes on for four years and then get their opinions second hand a month or two before the election.


LET THEM SIGN LOYALTY OATHS

In 1964, I was awarded a teaching assistantship at Southern Illinois University. Upon arrival, I was surprised to find I had to sign a loyalty oath in order to get the assistantship and enter the graduate program. In Illinois, McCarthyism was still alive, and they would not offer government employment to people suspected of being harmful to America.

Today, as I watch fundamentalist Christians, Muslims and Jews causing trouble all over the globe and endangering America, I’m not so sure that we shouldn’t revive loyalty oaths. In Marietta, Georgia, for example, a fundamentalist school board has decided to undermine the Constitution of the United States and to teach Creationism for which there is no evidence (Adam and Eve, etcetera) even though we all know that Creationism is a Christian interpretation of human evolution. Furthermore, fundamentalist President Bush constantly pushes his religion on all of us.

To protect American freedoms, our new loyalty oath ought to ask job applicants if they are an American first or a fill in a religion first. If candidates can’t vow they are Americans first, they should not be allowed to hold government jobs. Anyone who can’t put the Constitution above their religion is attacking the heart of America as surely as someone who flies a plane into an American building. The Constitution is all that guarantees our freedoms. It’s an oath no true American should have any trouble with, and it doesn’t discriminate against any one religion but rewards everyone who swears loyalty to the Constitution above their religious book.
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"Is life worth living? That depends on the liver." —Alcholic Anonymous