Friday, May 27, 2005

Billmon's Take On Laura Bush's Visit



It's a good one. He builds up a story by using nothing but snippets from various newspaper stories and one quote from his own archives, this one:

The point of Shrub's "revolution" seems to be this: Get yourself a token parliament, hold a few rigged elections, make a few noises about rights for women, and you, too, can be in good graces with Uncle Sam and Big Oil. Playing host to a few American military bases doesn't hurt, either.

That's it, the plan in a wingnutshell, and the reason why I don't get very excited when Laura Bush gives speeches on women's rights in the Middle East. She's probably quite sincere, but she has no power to make any of these things real. And at home women's rights count only as a device for getting the wingnut masses really outraged. To fight against those rights.

What's worse, linking women's rights with the rest of the empire's agenda is bad news for women in the Middle East. Even suggesting that equality might be a good thing will make you look like a pro-Bush colonizer. Feminism is now just another arm of the American Empire, and the date when women in those countries will have equal rights has thereby been postponed by a few millennia. Or so I think.