I finished watching the one-hour-and-ten-minute Sean Penn-narrated documentary War Made Easy. It hasn’t happened recently, but by the 57th minute, I found myself shaking in anger and anxiety, filled with a rage about the war that has been costly and useless. The film ingeniously makes use of now-historical footage from Vietnam and Iraq in which administrations and the media co-actively constructed the cause, needs, continuity, and deceipt of war.
The documentary ends with parts of Martin Luther King’s powerful 1967 speech Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence. Here are just some of the words he spoke, back then, over 40 years ago, just long enough for us to have forgotten:

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

And this:

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Jim Holt, a newish writer I believe, wrote a very compelling piece eight days ago for the London Review of Books about the real logic behind the war in Iraq. I had to read it twice (nay, three times) because what he articulates is what every citizen of the world kind of already knows and what Alan Greenspan already spilled: “In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.”

From my perch up in The North, the United States has been undergoing a tremendous upheaval politically, full of high crimes, misdemeanors, symptomatic illegalities, and impoverished will. But it’s been accompanied by, to my eyes, an American public that is more docile than I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve been in email conversations with some friends in the States about this and we’re trying to figure it out.
But I thought I’d make a list of some of the more, crazy, heinous or venal activities of the past year or so just so I’d have a record of it.
Here:

• Darfur, despite the word “genocide” being uttered by some in the Bush administration, continues to be a word that describes “genocide.”
• Democrats were elected to office recently in a fantastic “sweep” and it appears that the Congressional janitorial staff have done more in their offices than elected officials have.
• Polls indicate that both Americans and Iraqis (by a large majority) want the U.S. to calmly and intelligently leave Iraq; despite this, there is neither calm nor intelligence in Iraq.
• In nearby Iran, thumbing one’s dirty nose at the U.S. has become a national pasttime of the picking variety.
• Taking responsibility global warming have become industrial design terms for large corporations, indicating that the message to them is loud and clear and that they’ll shout back in quiet advertising.
• Michael Moore released a movie called “Sicko” a while ago. That was so cool that he made a movie again.