Friday 9 February 2007

The presidential library lends out colouring book

The damage of laughter
If my computer desk stool were not a strait jacket contraption that keeps me from overreacting to things I read in the news, I would have brought myself into greater harm than any triage team would have been able to deal with, all from fits of uncontrollable laughter and involuntary spasms.
George W. Bush is proposing a presidential library at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas to be built after his term and many would wonder what it would contain.
Generally, a presidential library would contain the bequest of presidential papers, documents, archives, records and other unclassified information pertaining to a president’s term of office from the time of Herbert Hoover.
Much to read or plenty to colour?
In the case of George W. Bush, being a two-term president along with all the world defining events encapsulated in chapters that would be emblazoned from the twin towers collapsing upon themselves in a hail of dust through the chants of USA, onto the Mission Accomplished “Hot Gun” stunt into Mess-O-Potamia and the kindling of World War III in the Middle East, there must be a lot for any researcher to leaf through long after we have all turned to dust.
Some dons in the university have been raising hackles, they do not want the academic purity of their esteemed institution to be tarnished with such a presidential legacy, and it is unlikely that any other university would be leaping into the fray for consideration.
Wherever that library gets built and stocked, be it in the cowboy corral of the Crawford ranch or some other Wild West memorial where you are welcomed with a Texan twang delivered by a Dubbiyew look-a-like in a 10-Gallon hat, it is unlikely that there would be much to read or research.
Many would leave knowing that all the pages were large blocks of blanking, blacking or blotting out all text that the only thing we would make out would be 2 or 3-letter prepositions or words strung together as “on - by - and - to - who” leaving the every researcher the liberty to fill in the blanks with imagination beyond what this administration has ever dared to think up.
Shush! It is a secret
The reason being, in 2001, the president signed an executive order restricting access to presidential records in library archives, the cult of secrecy that pervades this administration would make a freemasonry look like an open beach on a summer holiday and this ghoulish tendency is expected to live beyond this regime.
The amazing thing about the way humanity and history works is that whatever has been done ever and has been witnessed to by more than one person, even if they are all sworn to secrecy on a blood oath, light eventually gets shone on that pact and through the ingenuity of the seeker of knowledge the truth does get revealed.
History will not be rewritten
Concealing the evidence in those archives with an executive order might keep us from seeing some facts about the workings of the Bush administration, but it would not change the lasting legacy of this regime, neither can it change the course of how history would be written and how this regime would be judged and probably quite harshly eventually.
Knowing that the Bush administration already has form, we can deduce that if a visit to the library does not require taking along your wax crayons rather than notepad, we would know that one of the things this regime did was cart $12 Billion cash weighing 360 tonnes into a war zone – how is that for a trailer introducing the George W. Bush Presidential Library?
References

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are accepted if in context are polite and hopefully without expletives and should show a name, anonymous, would not do. Thanks.