Memoriam

I'm old enough to remember Bhutto's rise to power in the 80s, and was old enough at the time to wonder why what we called "Third World" nations back-in-the-day managed to have female leaders when the good ol' USA hadn't. (It was, after all, the groundbreaking decade of Indira Ghandi, Maggie Thatcher, Cory Aquino, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Sandra Day O'Connor, et. al.) How interesting--and significant--that the places (I'm looking at America, France and Canada in particular) that claim to be the mailing addresses of freedom and equality and human rights somehow seem to keep putting white, straight Christian guys in charge.

I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton, and think that her Presidency would be DOA due to the hysterical anti-Clinton ravings of the right infecting the middle. But I'm starting to think that it would be worth the price of the blue team going four-and-out to smash that glass ceiling for once and all. I'd be happy to do it myself, but for some crazy reason the world hasn't yet made me its Benevolent Dictator For Life. Maybe it's related to the crazy reason that I never win the lottery (for which I've never bought a single ticket).

Across two scripts, Shakespeare's Henry V laments the weight of the crown, "subject to the breath of every fool,"--the burden and nuisance, in a nutshell that keeps me at arm's length from active involvement in politics. Mercifully, I've only ever experienced that (up close) on a very local level. "Local" as in the kind of politics where Letters to the Editor and cranky old people with nothing better to do than attend board/council meetings are the hazards of the trade.

Bhutto took her shot, and I salute her pure nerve, playing with higher risk (i.e. wearing a bigger bulls-eye) than her male counterparts. The deluded soul who gave her (and nearly two dozen other people) what passes for martyrdom has, I fear, signed in blood the death-warrant of Pakistan. Musharraf has been living on borrowed days for years already. It's a matter of time before the long-dodged bomb or bullet or blast finds its mark. Time that may well have been shortened by today's assassination. Then an already-corrupt dictatorship will give way to corrupt anarchy and thence to corrupt theocracy. The first theocracy to have nuclear weapons at their fingertips.

Somebody stop my feet from dancing...

To me, the saddest part is that the deaths are even more wasted than any loss of life. Pakistan will certainly not be shocked into collective tolerance and cooperation.

And here in 'merica, the lesson will not be absorbed because, quite bluntly, we expect "those brown people" to slaughter each other with aplomb. The notion that our own waxing dictatorship, fueled by the blatant anti-intellectualism and jack-booted arrogance of the Christian Right might just be pulling us down the same road would never, EVER occur to most Americans.