Moving Tim Robbins Essay at Huffington Post: "Our Better Adult"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-robbins/our-better-adult_b_41420.html

Our Better Adult (44 comments )
READ MORE: Tim Robbins, New York, United States, Iraq, Washington
Written for the January issue of Pulse Magazine, Berlin

So here we are again. A new year faces us, a clear message has been sent to Washington - and some might say the world - by the people of the United States. Get out of Iraq. And the idiot drunk of a president says, "I hear you.

So we'll send more troops." And the opposition parties who should be representing the voice of the American people by shouting it from the rooftops are instead talking about how they have to vote to support the troops, grumbling about the president but proposing nothing close to withdrawal. And so it goes. And so we will stay. And remain targets for very angry people. There will be no voice that is standing up to say that we were wrong. There will be no apologies. There will be no reparations. We have too much invested in our lie to admit it was a lie. And so we will equivocate, and stall, and more will die, and on and on. But we will keep our pride. And we won't show the weakness of a man apologizing. We won't have the look on our face of the guilty being led to jail. We will not pay for our crimes in any way. No one will jeer at us from beneath the gallows. Why? Well... we meant well.

I found a letter I wrote to a friend recently. It was written on an old typewriter in late 2001. I don't know why I wrote it on a manual typewriter. Maybe I wanted to go backwards, find a Luddite inspired way to proceed. Here it is.


At the time I didn't know what we were trading our soul in for. I'm still not sure.

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We had a shining moment of greatness - and potential greatness - just after that awful day. And we flushed it straight down the crapper.

Thanks for posting this, even though it's SO sad. This whole disgraceful six-and-some years has been a GREAT sadness. What a blight it's been - and still is.

:(

The bastards closed everyone out. I'll never forgive them for that.

our desire to help, our "can do" attitude, our generosity, and also our commitment to the rule of law--all have been not exactly flushed down the crapper by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld--I wouldn't put it that way, exactly--I would say have all been crapped on. Yet I think however crapped on we are--however degraded, and spat upon, and sneered at--by these SOBs--something keeps shining through. Some beautiful idea that never dies. Something born here on these shores--from the Iroquois, to Thomas Jefferson, to us, that Jefferson tried to articulate, but that really can't be expressed in words. Something beautiful that emerged in Tim Robbins' soul--I watched it unfold through that controversy (he was among the very first to speak out!)--and that has been unfolding all along. I noticed it in the 56% of the American people who opposed Bush's war, way back at the beginning, before the invasion, before all of Colin Powell's lies were exposed. 56%! Who ARE these people--the MAJORITY of Americans--whom you NEVER hear about, or hear from, in the war profiteering corporate news monopolies?, I wondered to myself. 56% opposed! (I hadn't thought up the phrase "war profiteering corporate news monopolies" then. Now I know.) To me, THIS was America. America the fair. America the just. America, the people who want to do the right thing. America, who rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, and tried to set the world on a course for peace, with the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations. America, who rejected the unjust and horrible Vietnam War, and sent two presidents packing because they wouldn't stop it. America, the land of hope, where the People can CHANGE THINGS.

It's been here all along, that America, OUR America. The America that resisted the most toxic barrage of relentless, 24/7 warmongering that any people has ever been subjected to, and stuck to THEIR understanding of just and unjust war. This beautiful thing, America, keeps shining through the muck and crap these ugly, awful men keep trying to transform into a mirror of themselves: greedy, bloodthirsty, callous. This ugly thing that the war profiteering corporate news monopolies keep shoving in our faces is not us. It never was. It never will be.

As to Congress and its "non-binding" resolution, I know enough about our extremely compromised voting system to know WHY Congress is STILL not very representative of the American people. 74% now oppose this war and want it ended. Yet Congress dawdles, and has to use clever strategies (like Rep. Murtha's plan to make multiple tours of duty more difficult) to gradually wind down and end the war. 74% of the people want the war ended, yet only 57% of the House could bring themselves to vote for a "non-binding" resolution against the ESCALATION of it. That is better than the previous, Bush "pod people" Congress. But it is still not responsive enough to the will of the people. Basically, the good people in Congress--those who deserve to be there, those who were truly elected--are trying to overturn a fascist coup, and that is not easy. The fascist power is very entrenched, even to the "trade secret," proprietary control over our vote counting system.

So I see Congress realistically. We're INCHING forward toward better representation. But what I see in the American people is what gives me hope and great optimism. This beautiful thing--the America that lives in our hearts, and that these ugly men cannot kill.

And, Tim, if you're reading this, please know how much your courage and outspokenness, helped me during our darkest hour, 2003. You spoke for all of us. For the majority. For the beautiful thing that America is. We were 'disappeared' by the corporate news monopolies. Marginalized. Ignored. Black-holed. Crapped on. You helped us recover. You helped me recover. What a beautiful thing you did!

I am no longer moved by words.

I am still waiting for actions to be taken by those who have the microphones.

O.K. He's on the far right (of the photograph!). He is the tallest person in the picture. Susan Sarandon is pointing out something to him.

we interrupted him -- to call for impeachment? And he looks at us like, "you spoiled my punchline!" with a big smile on his face.

He was outstanding, and listening to him was, all by itself, worth the two days of travel. :)

"Only now, as the child-like hysteria and shrieking panic has died down, and as more adults try to take the dangerous toys out of the children's hands, have we come to understand that this war was a terrible idea sold by a very small amount of neoconservatives through an enormous megaphone." Tim Robbins

.......And sold it they did. Unfortunately, they seem to have a no return policy. I've been thinking the past few days that impeachment may be our only option.

corporate news monopolies made you and me FEEL as if it HAD BEEN sold.

Demoralizing, disempowering, and, above all, disenfranchising the progressive and peace-minded majority has been the key to the whole Junta. Its power has been an illusion, a trick. You see Bush on the TV all day long and you begin to think he is president. Look for the votes that supposedly gave him that power, and you find TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite electronic voting corporations--in their new voting systems, fast-tracked all over the country during the 2002 to 2004 period, with virtually no audit-recount controls. There were no countable votes in one third of the country, and 0% to 1% auditing in the rest! There were secretly coded ELECTRONS shot at the speed of light from Diebold's and ES&S's central tabulators into an AP computer, thence to your TV screen, where the war profiteering corporate news monopolies DOCTORED the outcome of their own exit polls (Kerry won) to force them to FIT the results of Diebold/ES&S's secret formulae (Bush won)!

It's all an illusion. The people dying in Iraq are not an illusion. Your dwindling income is not an illusion. Everything else is an illusion. Bush and Cheney are in office completely illegitimately, by agreement with the war profiteering corporate news monopolies and certain collusive Democratic leaders (--direct collusion of Sen. Christopher Dodd and DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe in turning our vote counting system over to rightwing Bushite corporations and their secret code; and indirect collusion by about half the Dem leadership who supported the war). These Democratic leaders took care of whoever wasn't already scared shitless by the anthrax letters and Paul Wellstone's state-of-the-art plane falling out of the air on a clear day with no wind. Fear, intimidation, bullying silenced the rest.

I watched this phenomenon--Democrats silencing Democrats--in California. In 2002, we elected a very good Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, just as the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002 was passed by the Anthrax Congress (--the $3.9 billion boondoggle for Diebold and ES&S). Shelley barely had his pencils sharpened before he began to smell a rat--but several elections occurred, including the weird recall election that put Schwarzenegger in office (125 candidates on the ballot) before he had sufficient evidence to sue Diebold for the lies they told about the security of their voting machines. He demanded to see their source code, decertified their touchscreens (no paper trail voting machines), and provided Californians with a paper ballot option, just prior to the 2004 election. The Bushites were thus unable to steal California for Bush(--although I have developed evidence that they did shave votes from Kerry and give them to Bush, to help manufacture and pad Bush's national popular majority).

Shelley was then "swiftboated" out of office, on entirely bogus corruption charges (--there is hardly a politician in the land who was more of a straightshooter than Shelley), while the Democrats, with 2 to 1, and 3 to 2, majorities in the state legislature hid under their desks or actively colluded in his demise, in collusion with Connie McCormack, head of Los Angeles elections--a Diebold shill (does sales brochures for Diebold! --best friend was Diebold's chief salesperson in California), and 17 mostly Republican, and very corrupt, county election officials. The state Democratic leadership strongarmed the good Democrats into silence, and LET THIS HAPPEN, and then colluded with Schwarzenegger to APPOINT a REPUBLICAN Diebold shill to the Secretary of State's office, who immediately began to undo all of Shelley's reforms.

This same phenomenon--corrupt and collusive Democrats--occurred in Congress, when the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" was originally passed, along with the Patriot Act and the Iraq War Resolution. It was all about 'disappearing' our votes.

What happened in Florida's 13th in 2006--18,000 Democratic votes for Congress getting 'disappeared'--happened all over the country in 2004, before anybody had time to catch up with this new, secretly coded, unauditable voting system, owned and controlled by two Bushite corporations (--corporations with nauseating rightwing associations, one tied directly to Bush-Cheney fundraising--Diebold--the other tied by its initial funder, rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, to an extremist 'christian' foundation that touts the death penalty for homosexuals--ES&S--and the two corporations tied TOGETHER, ES&S a spinoff of Diebold, the two corporations run by two brothers).

There is no proof that Bush/Cheney won the 2004 election--and volumes of inferential evidence that they did not. In fact, Bush/Cheney were so unpopular in 2004--with the war lies exposed (no WMDs) and the Abu Ghraib torture--that not even Diebold/ES&S's "trade secret" code could insure their "reelection," and they had to actively, in broad daylight, suppress the black vote in Ohio, in open violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then had to commit additional felonies to prevent a proper recount (--demanded by the Green and Libertarian Parties). Several Ohio election officials have now gone to jail for their role in preventing the recount. In addition, they had to purge millions of black voters from the voting rolls in places like Florida (using electronic means), and had to 'disappear' tens of thousands of Absentee Ballots in Democratic areas, and commit other crimes.

The Democratic Party leadership (McAuliffe, Brazille) then actively colluded with the corporate media to suppress this story--the most important political news story in our entire history. They 'Iron Curtain'-ed it! It was embargoed. It was verboten. The researchers who put it together--including many scientists--were shut out of the corporate media. The Democratic Party shut it down within the party. People who talked about it were even blackballed on leftist blogs (DKos being a good example), and leftist talk shows (Al Franken), who were both currying favor with the Democratic leadership of the moment. For about a year after the 2004 election, DU was the only place where you could get news of this fraudulent election system, and help with research and development of the facts. Then, finally, it hit "Rolling Stone" (RFK, Jr.'s article). But it is still embargoed by the corporate news monopolies. The only thing that is permitted in the corporate news monopolies are some "questions" about the "security" of the machines. And what our Democratic Congress is doing about it is larding billions more taxpayer dollars on Diebold and ES&S to "fix" the system (--add printers, and a completely inadequate audit).

Illusions.

The only illusion that they "sold," that we "bought," was that we, the peace-minded, progressive majority were ever in the minority. We never were.

Demoralization.
Disempowerment.
Disenfranchisement.

That's what they did. And we still have too many of these same Democrats in power, who colluded with the Junta on the election system and the war. That's why we can't get Congress to stop the war--or why it's going to be an uphill battle to do so.

Seriously. Pass this essay around, folks.