“Be afraid, be very afraid”
You know the image… it’s from one of the defining movies of the late twentieth century - Dr. Strangelove. The actor Slim Pickins plays the pilot of a B52 nuclear attack bomber ‘a hoopin’ and ‘a hollerin’ as he rides a nuclear bomb down to blow the hell out of “them Ruskies” as if he’s riding a bucking steer at a Texas rodeo. For those of you not familiar with this North American folk custom Wikipedia can help explain it to you.
You may have been reading in the news recently about the recent exchanges between Iran and America (with Russia getting in on the act also now, but that’s another story…) where Iran Warns U.S. Not to Play with Nuclear ‘Fire’ (Update - Reuters has removed this story from their website). Since then there has been a depressingly predictable unfolding of events - America sending over spy drone planes, Iran threatening to shoot them down, and Bush denying that they intend to attack or invade Iran to stop Iran’s nuclear (weapons) program. However in that very same statement Bush also said “you never want a president to say never.”
I don’t know who scares me more - Bush or the “mad” mullahs et al. Both claim, in their own way, to have that most fervently claimed, but most abused of ‘rights’ - divine right. Most worryingly, both seem equally assured that they know what is ‘right’ for the rest of us. The rest of us, I suspect, just wish they would both go away. They’re like the ‘neighbours from hell’, you know the type.
However back to the picture of Slim Pickins, playing the gung ho Texan waving his ten gallon hat as he rides down to oblivion on the bomb, which prompted me thinking about this in the first place. I just can’t get away from the thought that the person with his ‘finger on the button’ is also a Texan… fond, no doubt, of ten gallon hats.
Strange juxtaposition.
However, in the movie, the President who actually “pressed the button” was a east coast democratic liberal. As was the President who took the USA into WW1, as was the President who took the USA into WW2.
Actually in the movie, Dr. Strangelove, the president wasn’t the person who actually “pressed the button” as in being the person who had the intent to descend into the horrors of nuclear war. It was the Commanding General of the B52 nuclear air strike force, one Jack D. Ripper, who illegally engineered the pre-emptive strike. From looking at him in the movie I would have pegged him as a republican
Be that as it may, at the present it is not Jack D. Ripper (thank god) who is president of the US but George W. Bush, and he just happens to a republican. But whether republican, democrat or a mullah is not important - what is important is how the person in power conducts himself and wields the power that he has - and George ‘double u’ makes me nervous. And he is not alone in having that dubious distinction.