Be Thankful Your're Not Dubya

Be Thankful You're Not Dubya

Craving more juicy reasons to offer up profound gratitude this Thanksgiving
Day? Try a few of these

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, November 26, 2003

This Thanksgiving, as you sip the wine and hug the family and toast the friends
and hoard the stuffing and curse the airport security, remember to give thanks
you are not G.W. Bush. Hey, it's important.

1) Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya's massive crushing karmic
burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious
unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a firehose of
giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.

For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of the most reviled and openly
disrespected major world leaders in modern history. America has never been so
embarrassed and reluctant to send a president abroad. We cringe when the man
takes the stage. We offer humiliated apologies to our former allies, and to the
200,000 Bush/war protesters in London, just last week.

In Bush's defense, it cannot be easy to be so undeservedly powerful, yet so
bumbling and inarticulate and globally loathed for your abhorrent policies and
hollow corporate agenda and baffled doofus manner. This Thanksgiving, be
grateful you are not him.

2) Thanks, you might want to give, that you are not Iraqi. Be grateful you did
not go from brutal scowling despot who at least kept the damn lights on to
brutish occupying army no one asked for that is right now laying waste to
whatever remains of your once semi-proud oil-rich nation.

Give thanks, furthermore, that you are not one of the estimated 10,000 Iraqi
civilians killed to date by U.S. forces, not to mention one of the untold tens
of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were hammered by our million pounds of
billion-dollar ordnance in the first few days of the massacre. Be grateful you
are not dead in the name of American political and petrochemical profiteering.

3) Give thanks you are not a member of the much-abused U.S. military. Sad but
true. Be grateful you are not right now suffering that sickening sinking
feeling that you are not, in fact, protecting America from any sort of
marauding terrorists, or defending our honor, or our way of life, or guarding
innocents from swarthy evildoers and nonexistent WMDs.

But that you are, instead, a wholly disposable henchman for the BushCo
corporate regime, with the odds increasing every minute that you will soon join
the more than 9,000 U.S. wounded or more than 430 "necessary" dead U.S.
soldiers Rumsfeld mentions when he shrugs off the latest round of guerrilla
bombings that killed another batch of your friends. Support our troops. Bring
them home right now.

4) Be grateful BushCo's ratings are slipping lower than an SUV's mpg rating,
and there is only one year left until he joins his father as one of those
embarrassing historical footnotes, a jagged scar on the heart of a wary America
that other countries point to in years to come and say wow that's a nasty scar
where'd you get that, and we reply, George W. Bush, and they go, oh my God,
that's right. So sorry.

5) Be grateful you are not right now in any way related to, or serve as a
spokesperson for, or are employed as one of the apparently very deranged or
heavily drugged plastic surgeons who worked on Michael Jackson. This is a
gimme.

6) While you're at it, give thanks you're not Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith,
Bennifer, Britney, Liza Minnelli, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Ann Coulter,
Ashton Kutcher, Bill O'Reilly, Anna Kournikova, Madonna or Mary Hart. These are
lives you probably do not want to lead. Give thanks your soul is not all
withery and Botoxed and that it still manages to radiate cool colors like one
of those funky cheesy fiber-optic lamps from the '70s.

7) Be thankful they have yet to figure out a way to blot out the sun. Or, for
that matter, the moon.

8) Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort on
the part of numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty much slap
down most all tender offerings of the planet, Earth still manages to produce
for us an astonishing array of flora and fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies
and awe-inspiring trees and relentless merciless beauty.

9) Be thankful the planet rather effortlessly continues to baffle scientists
and confound astronomers and completely entrance biologists and philosophers
and poets. We still, for example, have no idea why whales sing, or how long
they live, or where blue whales, the largest and most magnificent creatures on
the planet, go to mate. Be grateful for the Mystery.

10) Kneel down, right now, for free speech. Oh yes. We must. Because it is
under severe duress. To exercise it now, to speak out against BushCo and war
and global corporate profiteering, is a true sign that you are a traitor and an
al Qaeda operative and a personal friend of Barbra Streisand. This is what they
sneer at you.

Give it up, instead, for free unfettered alt-news sources like truthout.org.
And commondreams.org. And alternet.org and counterpunch.com and buzzflash.com
and smirkingchimp.com and even Slate and the BBC and The Onion. Cheney scowls,
Rove oozes, Ashcroft would love nothing more than to shut down the entire
impious godforsaken Internet. Be grateful they can only quiver and hiss and
rattle their chains. So far.

11) Molly Ivins. Gore Vidal. Michiko Kakutani. David Foster Wallace. Don
DeLillo. Maureen Dowd. Caroline Myss. W.G. Sebald. Tom Robbins. Starhawk.
William Rivers Pitt. Rob Brezny. David Attenborough. Dave Eggers. Joseph
Campbell. Lewis Lapham. Haruki Murakami. Katha Pollitt. Et al. Thank you.

12) For baskets of locally grown organic small-farm produce delivered to your
door. For handmade whiskey-filled chocolate truffles smeared over a lover's
tailbone. For Bernese mountain dogs. For the return of Opus. For Rufus
Wainwright and Beth Orton and the Mini Cooper. L'Occitane honey incense and the
Apple iPod and "Six Feet Under." For Cate Blanchett, The Sun magazine, The New
Yorker, Peet's coffee and "Spirited Away."

13) Here is the big cliché. Here is the final praise. It cannot be overstated:
Despite an impressive assault on civil liberties, despite savage BushCo attacks
on everything from national forests to air quality to rivers and oceans and
water quality and health care, despite attempts to numb the national
consciousness overall, we must give enormous, unfettered thanks for this
incredible and kaleidoscopic America.

Ours remains the most breathtakingly beautiful, diverse, epic, multifaceted,
multiorgasmic landscape on the planet today. It's true.

We tend to forget. We take for granted. We presume it must be like this
everywhere. But one quick trip abroad will only serve to remind you and
reinforce your devout appreciation for what this country can offer, the free
expression and the religious autonomy and the clean water and the good
dentistry and the fresh produce and the space to explore.

We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and insolent and
abusive and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with astounding acts of love
and beauty and art, nature preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex
positivism and community awareness and quiet personal spiritual questing and
lots and lots of great bookstores.

14) Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the
cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get quiet,
look around, look inside, check the karmic inventory and offer up heaping pies
of gratefulness for what you find.

Sure it seems clichéd. Of course you don't need some holiday to be deeply
thankful for the radiance in your life. But, hey, an opportunity is an
opportunity. Just remember, big meaty drumsticks of general gratitude are
absolutely fine. But the divine, personal gravy is where the real flavor is.

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