#92, December 22, 2005

Weather Report

You don’t need to be a weatherman

To know which way the wind blows.

Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"

The quintessential counter-hegemonic, anti-imperial, counter-cultural text is the Walt Disney movie, “Mary Poppins.” If you don’t believe me just think about the Irish fox being hunted by the dastardly redcoats, who jumps up on the horse of the cockney chimney-sweep to make his escape; just think of the downtrodden, if ditsy, suffragist mother fighting for women’s rights; just think of the chimney-sweeps who turn into “hottentots” under fire from a British admiral; just think of the banker who suddenly throws his brolly in the face of injustice; and so on. OK, it’s a bit of a stretch, but the movie is certainly about the winds of change in a family. A father who is working himself into an early grave unable to relate to his family all of a sudden wakes up to see what’s wrong with the world, and goes out to fly his kite. And, of course, there is Mary, the centerpiece, who arrives on the scene and stays to educate one and all until the wind has changed direction, or until she has made it bend to her will. The weather-vane turning around, signaling Mary’s departure, becomes the symbol for a changing world, the challenge to the “Organization Man,” the beginning of a 60s counter-culture. Well this was how I read the movie when I was eight years old – I knew that this was what it was about.

Well, I am being somewhat facetious, but only somewhat. And who cares anyway? This was just a grandiose way of introducing my main point, which is that the WIND HAS CHANGED, the WEATHER HAS TURNED, the bastards are going to get theirs – now let’s not get carried away. But let’s face it. After four years of this nonsense of having to listen to the most outrageous lies coming out of Washington DC, we are now seeing changes happening; and people are even recognizing this fact. How do we know the wind has changed? You turn on the TV and see a kid’s show and kids are making jokes about Bush screwing everything up; “Curb Your Enthusiasm” treats a Republican as though he has completely lost his mind in thinking that Bush might be a good president; one talks to students at college, and there is no way that any of them are on same page as this administration, when they would have been three years ago; a judge shows his contempt for intelligent nonsense; there is shock and horror at the latest revelations about Bush authorizing spying on American citizens in the United States – when we probably knew or could have guessed that this was going on back in 2002 – and a judge even resigns over this issue; finally one of Bush's potential appointees, Judge Michael Luttig, writes a decision refusing to support the admininstration in the Padilla case. These things are refreshing.

Whether or not the main newspapers want to do polls on whether the public thinks that Bush should be impeached (and they don’t because they know that large sections of the population think that he should be and they don’t want to publish such figures), impeachment is in the air. IMPEACHMENT IS IN THE AIR -- even if it never happens, everyone knows it ought to, even Republicans who don't want their country and their party embarrassed by the scandals. Poppins would be pleased.