Why Mother is considered offensive? Here's one idea...

[Guest guest]

> Remember that the present "war of words" started when Isvara Prabhu wrote

> that Malati Mataji would be laughed at by samskrita scholars for insisting

> that women be addressed as "Prabhu"...

 

And as Kurma prabhu so rightly responded, since when do we give a damn what

some Sanskrit scholars think?

[Guest guest]

Thought you all might enjoy this article and its glorification of a :Mother's

love". SP said that was the closest thing to real love in this world.

 

 

What do you think? The t r u t h o u t Town Meeting is in progress. Join the

debate!

 

Cindy's Victory

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 15 August 2005 This thing, the wheels are coming off it.

- Gen. Barry McCaffrey, after returning from an inspection of Iraq, 08/12/2005.

They are sunburned and storm-lashed. They sleep in tents that sit along the

muddy earth of drainage ditches by the side of the road. They have been heckled

by "counter-demonstrators" who chanted "We don't care!" during a rendition of

"God Bless America." They have been attacked by fire ants and hassled by local

health inspectors. On Thursday morning, at about 5:30am, they were blasted

awake by a fourteen-car convoy of Secret Service SUVs which roared through the

camp at high speed while leaning on their horns the whole time.

They have been jolted with fear when a local resident fired his weapon into

the air several times to make them go away. When the shooter, one Larry

Mattlage, was asked why he was firing his gun, he said, "We're going to start

doing our war and it's going to be underneath the law. We're going to do

whatever it takes." It is safe to say, therefore, that their lives have been

threatened.

The thing is, they've already won.

Cindy Sheehan and her ever-growing band of supporters intend to stay in

those ditches outside Bush's Crawford "ranch" until he comes out to talk or

until August 31st, whichever comes first. If he does not come out by the end of

the month, she intends to follow him to Washington and camp out in front of the

White House. She and the others have been there for more than a week now,

garnering more and more attention from the national and international press.

Yes, they are tired. Yes, they are uncomfortable. Yes, they have already won.

The nearly 2,000 crosses, crescents and Stars of David that make up the

Arlington West cemetery, erected by the demonstrators a few days ago to

represent all the fallen American soldiers in Iraq, stretch almost a mile down

the country road. Bush had to drive past that on Friday when he went to his

fundraising shindig at the Broken Spoke Ranch. 54 crosses have been added to

the cemetery since he first showed up for his vacation at the beginning of

August. It takes a while to drive past them all. This man, who cannot abide

hearing or seeing anything in the way of dissent or disagreement, saw those

crosses whistle past his window. That is a victory.

 

August 10, 2005 | A portion of Arlington West in Crawford.

(Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) Over the weekend, as the camp prepared

for the arrival of the counter-demonstrators, a huge diesel pickup truck

rumbled into camp with its nose menacingly pointed towards the tents. It sat

for a while, and everyone waited to see what would happen. Ann Wright, the main

organizer of camp activities, finally approached the truck and met the driver.

He was a father, Wright discovered, and his son had been killed in Iraq.

He did not agree with this protest, he said, but wanted to know if his

son's name was on one of the crosses in the Arlington West cemetery. Ann Wright

invited the man to walk the rows of crosses and find his son's name. They found

it. Ann and the man from the truck sat down in front of the cross, wrapped

their arms around each other, and wept. Later, the man shared a beer with Cindy

Sheehan and told her he loved her. That is a victory, one that surpasses any

sort of mean politics.

 

August 10, 2005 | The grave of Casey Sheehan, who died in Iraq, from the

Arlington West cemetery.

(Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) For three years now, both before the

invasion of Iraq began and then after it was unleashed, millions of people have

marched and screamed and stomped in order to try to put a stop to this

disaster. The Bush administration was not pushed off its tracks even an inch in

all this time. Discussions and debates on why we are there and whether or not

we should leave have been bunted aside.

Half a dozen reasons for the invasion and occupation have been put forth -

weapons of mass destruction, ties to al Qaeda terrorism, the building of a

democracy, Hussein was a bad man - but in the end, the debate is halted by the

kind of brainless thinking that left us in Vietnam for far too long: "We are

there, so we have to stay." This was the accepted wisdom.

Not anymore.

All the protests, all the articles, all the books, all the whistleblowers,

all the criticism combined have not packed the kind of punch that one mother in

a ditch has delivered to this administration's carefully crafted fantasy vision

of what is happening in Iraq. Suddenly, Bush has been forced to go before

cameras and try to explain why staying in Iraq is the only option available.

Suddenly, the accepted wisdom isn't so accepted anymore. A majority of

Americans, according to every available poll, agree with the lady in the ditch

and not with the president.

Bush isn't doing a very good job of explaining his side of things, and his

people seem unable to keep their stories straight. After the fourteen Marines

from Ohio were killed in Iraq, Bush got up and stated that it would be

unreasonable for him to lay down a timetable for withdrawal. Yet at the same

time, his generals were bent over maps and logistics notebooks, trying to do

exactly that.

The Los Angeles Times on Saturday took a look at the mixed messages coming

from the war party. "Are the president and the Pentagon on the same page over

the war in Iraq?" asked the Times. "That question is percolating in Washington

after President Bush twice in the last 10 days tried to clarify a message sent

by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military leaders. After Rumsfeld

and other Pentagon officials indicated their desire to shift away from

discussing the struggle against terrorism as a 'war' - saying it placed too

much emphasis on military solutions to terrorism - Bush repeatedly used the

word 'war' in an Aug. 3 speech to conservative state legislators."

"Then," continued the Times article, "on Thursday, Bush dismissed as

'rumors' and 'speculation' reports that U.S. commanders were contemplating

significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq next year. His comments

came after Army Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. military official in Iraq,

and Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, the top ground commander, had publicly raised

exactly that possibility."

Hm.

On Sunday, out of nowhere, the Washington Post published a page-one story

titled "US Lowers Sights on What Can Be Achieved in Iraq." The story stated,

"The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be

achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for

far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end

in four months. The United States no longer expects to see a model new

democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of

people are free from serious security or economic challenges."

The article goes on to describe how any "democracy" will have to bend

itself around the laws of Islam, a fact that chucks the secular-government

talking points into the round file. Iraqi women, should not get their hopes up

about being granted significant rights of any kind. The kicker came in the

third paragraph, which quotes an unnamed US official saying, "What we expected

to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the

ground. We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in

and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

In other words, the whole thing was a Charlie Foxtrot from soup to nuts.

There are no weapons of mass destruction, the terrorists connected to 9/11 were

not there (though there are plenty there now learning how best to kill

Americans with bombs), and democracy is not to be found anywhere on the menu.

The hearts and flowers we were promised have not come, and are not coming.

Sure, Hussein is still a bad man, but that rationale for this war is an

outright laugher when compared to the cost of getting rid of him. Though Bush

clings desperately to his canned lines to defend his actions, the facts speak

for themselves. This whole bloody enterprise has been a colossal, expensive,

murderous failure.

 

August 10, 2005 | Wearing a hat with supporting messages from friends, Cindy

Sheehan of Vacaville, California, takes a moment's rest in the ditch on

Wednesday. On Friday afternoon, she was contacted by Coretta Scott King and

Rosa Parks.

(Photo: Will Pitt / t r u t h o u t) The funny part is that Bush almost

certainly could have maintained the public fantasy with one simple act. He

could have jumped into his pickup truck last Saturday, when Cindy Sheehan was

alone except for her sister in that ditch, and driven down to see her. He could

have invited her into the shotgun seat and driven her around the neighborhood

for a few minutes. He could have then gone back up to the "ranch" and told the

press corps that he met with her, and that they had looked into each other's

hearts. That would have been the end of it.

He did not do that. Now, his generals are at loggerheads with the public

line coming from the White House about getting out of Iraq. Unnamed officials

are going on the record to state that the whole plan was hare-brained from the

word "go," and that the entire deal sits now in the ashes of its own utterly

ruined failure. Bush has to keep explaining why we have to stay, why

rearranging the deck chairs on this Titanic is a noble and worthwhile process.

Meanwhile, the whole world mocks him for hiding from one woman and her broken

heart.

Cindy Sheehan has done this with one act of conscience. She has managed to

do what no other protest or action or statement has been able to do. She has

knocked the wheels right off this absurd applecart. She has called the man to

account. She can hang her own "Mission Accomplished" banner above her tent in

that ditch. She has already won.

Her son would be very, very proud.

 

 

 

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling

author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and

The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

 

 

-------

 

Jump to today's TO Features: Today's TO Features t r u t h o u t Cindy

Sheehan: One Mother's Stand -------------- Antiwar Sentiment Gets Champion Tom

Engelhardt | On Being in a Ditch at the Side of the Road UN Nuclear Watchdog

Rebuts Claims that Iran Is Trying to Make A-Bomb US Troops Begin Afghan

Offensive New Homeland Security Work Rules Blocked Bob Herbert | Lives Blown

Apart Patrick Sabatier | Iraq: Desert Mirage Howard Dean: "We Need to Leave"

Cindy's Message Repudiates Bush - And Howard Dean Robert Fisk | A Constitution

That Means Nothing to Ordinary Iraqis Military Recruiting: The Struggle to Fill

the Ranks Antonia Juhasz | Bush's Economic Invasion of Iraq Religious

Conservatives Urged to Pray and Act about Supreme Court Paul Krugman | Social

Security Lessons William Raspberry | A Bad Shift for the Court As Gaza Pullout

Starts, Sharon Warns Palestinians Papers Increasingly Note Antiwar Views in

Covering Funerals of the Fallen Rove and Ashcroft Face New Allegations in

Plame Case William Rivers Pitt | Cindy's Victory -------------- t r u t h o u

t Town Meeting t r u t h o u t Home

 

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© : t r u t h o u t 2005

| t r u t h o u t | town meeting | issues | environment | labor

 

"Basu Ghosh (das) ACBSP (Baroda - IN)" <Basu.Ghosh.ACBSP (AT) pamho (DOT) net> wrote:

Remember that the present "war of words" started when Isvara Prabhu wrote

that Malati Mataji would be laughed at by samskrita scholars for insisting

that women be addressed as "Prabhu"...

 

Here's a comment by one of the observers of the present "war"...

 

> If I have to say why the issue is being bantered about, it is because

> Mother Malati makes a stink every time some man addresses her as Mother

> Malati. That is the rock thrown into the pond that causes all the

> circles to move outwards.

>

> The hidden agenda is to make KC palatable for Westerners. Our take is

> that Westerners should gradually be acclimatized to KC high culture.

 

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