Stories like these about Colin Powell are cutesy...
“The signal is green to cross Broad Street!” the recording of Powell’s voice declared, helping people safely get to the other side of the busy road.
But we should never forget the good general's real legacy to America:
As a First black man, he got roped into using his reputation, experience and credentials to advocate for a false war that was unnecessary and illegal under international standards. America had no true justification for invading Iraq and slaughtering -- yes, slaughtering -- so many innocent lives. Children, elders, most of them brown and black, and poor by Western standards.
The Establishment used this First black man -- much as the war machine churned up and spit out Barack Obama and his pajama-clad crew years later when they told us they could turn it off... -- to sell its wars of choice.
Colin Powell, with his natural blackface and Condoleeza Rice* as the photogenic tall and willowy Barbie accompanying his uniformed Ken -- successfully made the cross-over into White Establishment society, as so many young Black strivers today, blessed especially with mixed-race looks and loose affirmative-action educations, are also doing...
In the end, we won't remember Colin Powell for his boyscout-helping-elders cross the street voice, though kudos for the editors looking for flattering tales that have yet to be told about our great general...
In time, of course, Powell's name will be lumped in with the Evil Trio of History, as an assorted player with the White men like Wolfowitz (sp?), McCain, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush the Boy. He will remembered not only for remaking the Middle East, and flooding the world with refugees, but for crashing the United States economy by undertaking wars that the country was not prepared to pay for...
But the lives. Oh my God, the lives America took... The numbers, the blood, the browned and blackened bodies. The lost potential... As a nation, we need to acknowledge what was done by our military in our name before we can rightly and justly move on politically as a country hissing now with civil-war battles of our own...
The weakness of America's military decisions showed itself very soon in the American invasion, in that the Iraqi people we were allegedly helping to liberate did not even have the strength -- physically as a group -- to pull down the symbolic statues of their own leaders they allegedly were so keen to overthrow in their revolution. It was all a basically a lie. = An American war of choice...
And a poor choice, at that.
The American military had to be paid to do that for them too. Use our military equipment to tear down the statues of their leaders. Sad.
The Iraqis were not ready, physically, militarily or with the fight-might -- the will, to pull down statues and overthrow their own actual leaders in the flesh (US soldiers were paid to do that for them too), much less to create another government structure to replace the one they had been living under before the United States invaded, hyped up by Colin Powell's deadly testimony...
The Iraq war of choice was led on paper by Bush the Boy (but really by Veep Cheney and his Big Business haliburton connections...) and is still being paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Many of us still out here understood from the start, back at the turn of this century^ -- unlike the experienced genius military go-along-to-get-along mind of Colin Powell *sarcasm off* -- that the United States had no business invading or attacking the oilfields and museums of a sovereign nation, as much as one might have hated the heavy-handed tactics of their internal leaders.
The American media still in power didn't much learn from the war years.
The politicians think there will be no reckoning, that the damage inflicted was all in the past, that the war is now over because we said it is... But actions have consequences, like leaders have legacies. Colin Powell, in his heart, was a good man. But he is a cautionary example to African-American immigrants today coming up in America: stick to what you know, not who you know. Stand on your own two feet, and never sign on with an organization that will pay you well, but harm your integrity.
It's too late for Colin Powell to re-live his life and correct his course knowing what he knows now. But... surely the man himself, the great general, would be embarrassed by those touting his cross-the-street help, instead of insisting that a complete portrayal of his work, even as a patronized black man as all the early Firsts are..., contain a detailed description of where he went wrong trusting the White Establishment who ultimately played him, used up his reputation for their own goals, and killed so many darker innocents in his once-solid country's name...
PS. Rooting for the Red Sox is a bit like rooting for the Stock Market, isn't it? Old money coastal wealth, Daddy dollars feeding the children's endless ambitions. They can hire the Hispanic soul and firepower, but they have no idea how to generate it in themselves. Old World Whites, guilty as hell and trying to get others who don't share their economic backgrounds to pay their penance and blood-money debts. # Houston and Atlanta: that's the series the young and growing part of the country needs to see... Let the Hispanic men represent their own.
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* You know Condi? Her legacy will be as Georgie, the Boy,'sfriend -- she and he shared sticks of gum once upon a time. She likes him and he likes her. They crossed a Boomerish color line the way Colin Powell's voice once helped people in Philly cross the street! (*news / not news. You choose.*)
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^ We were the ones who weren't laughing when Bush the Boy lampooned himself one year at the Washington press dinner gala, with Hollywood celebritites and DC politicians, looking under couch cushions and in Grandma's cupboard for those... weapons of mass destruction. "Nope, not here!" the lil imp told the crowd, to laughs.
They weren't so concerned with the costs of blackened brown bodies back then, I guess. #NeverForget #OldAmercaVThoseComingUp... #TruthJusticeTheAmericanWay!
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