of Americans now disapprove of George W. Bush. The consensus is that he lied like a rug, and lead us into an unwise, unnecessary and unjust war in Iraq. And amazingly, as far in over his head as he is, he just keeps digging. He wants to attack Iran so badly that he can taste it. Which has me wondering a few things this fine morning:
Will the people in Tehran still think American culture is cool after we bomb them?
Where does Bush think his support is going to come from, now that we all know he’s all hat and no cattle?
What ever happened to the pro-Bush, pro-war people who used to haunt the Comments function of this blog?
How long did it take to rebuild Dresden? I mention it because this week was the anniversary of that cataclysm, from which we obviously learned nothing.
Dresden, as you may know, was widely considered the most beautiful city in Germany – Florence on the Elba – before it was plastered with incendiary bombs on and about Valentines Day 1945. Estimates of the dead range to 135,000 civilians in three days, from a firestorm that reached 2300 degrees Fahrenheit.
We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub. We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and from, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from. [Link]
My final question of the morning:
When are we going to learn?
Metaphor 
We firebombed other German cities in that same campaign and–without as much "fanfare"–destroyed Tokyo with a similar holocaust a few months before we dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo was a tinderbox, countless (literally) civilians died (as many as died under the two atomic attacks, it's estimated) and the materials in Tokyo, as with Dresden, created a self-sustaining inferno, a firestorm.Ain't war grand?
Kurt Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden at the time of the fire-bombing. Slaughterhouse 5 was one of the results. Another was his abiding hatred of war. And I don't think he likes George Bush very much, either.