It was good to go to the rally today. I posted a couple of photos on Flickr . It’s good to protest, and to be among like-minded people. As they say, all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. The speakers were all good, especially Hannah-Beth Jackson, and Steve Sherrill from Veterans for Peace. It’s right to applaud when someone calls for bringing the troops home, ending the slaughter, impeaching the very bad president. But there is, regrettably, the small matter of futility.

The word juggernaut was used by speakers today, and the thing about a juggernaut is that it’s hard to stop. Once set in motion, a juggernaut of war and hate creates its own fuel, its own momentum. It’s a chain reaction, because hate begets hate, and violence begets violence. This ravenous beast was conjured in the dark heart of fanatical self-righteousness, by men of unqualified power and corrupt moral vision. After three years, it’s just as lumbering, roughshod and hungry as it ever was.

This is a strange and bitter kind of war. It’s not over territory, or riches, or power within a traditionally calculable scope. By the Bush administration’s own admission, this is, “global struggle against violent extremism.” (Donald Rumsfeld.) Perhaps only the Third Reich had such broad ambitions for a new world order, and so little respect for its place among nations.

“It ought to be ‘the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.’ ”
— George W. Bush

The goal is to conquer the consciousness of the world. We haven’t won until the Stars & Stripes are planted in Thought itself, until the conscience of the free world has supplanted by force all opposing conscience. Bush has made enemies with whom he cannot hope to make peace, and every effort to destroy them creates exponentially more of them. (And aren’t they people, after all? Damn it, when did our language make room for eradication of men, as though they were vermin?)

The end can never be in sight, because no end is contemplated. In the frigid thorax of this beast, there is nothing but the vacuum of obsession. I’m afraid that George W. Bush has opened Pandora’s Box, and he couldn’t close it, even if he wanted to.

Nevertheless, we stop at nothing but to say Impeach Bush, wrest Congress from the Republicans in November, hope the Democrats grow a backbone by then, and always Pray for Peace.