July 19, 2008

For years Bush has refused to consider a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Now, with the U.N. mandate authorizing our military to remain in Iraq set to expire at the end of this year, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki flexing his muscles by demanding that the U.S. provide some sort of pull-out plan, Bush has decided to consider a time "horizon".

Timetable? No can do. Time horizon? Why, that's exactly the kind of vague and meaningless phrase we've been looking for. Yes, a horizon, a far off, almost mythical place where the Earth meets the sky, where governmental gibberish meets a short term memory, where, if you squint real hard, you can just barely make out an American soldier walking away from Iraq, or maybe he's walking toward Iraq, difficult to tell at that distance, but it's definitely a soldier and he's definitely walking and...no, wait, that's a camel, ah well, what's the difference, eh? It's a beautiful sunset isn't it?

Yes, the horizon, what a marvelous metaphor for such a muddled policy. In one direction the sun is rising, in the opposite the sun is setting, in yet another the sun neither rises nor sets but rather leads a life of ambiguity, never really staying, never really leaving, never really here and never really gone.

Just the thought of a horizon makes you want to go horizontal, and perhaps that's been the plan all along, to get us to focus on a phony, far-off date that never actually arrives and makes us sleepy to think about, and maybe when we wake up we'll be closer to the horizon, but of course we never are because it's a horizon and it's always exactly where we left it - in an unreachable place.

Jesus fucking Christ, when will this bullshit end?

Copyright 2008 John Bizarre

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