Words are Meaningless

There stood the president of the United States speaking passionate words into a Rose Garden microphone. He was excoriating Russia's "dramatic and brutal escalation" of violence toward Georgia, "a sovereign neighboring state," in retaliation for Georgia's suppression of Ossetia, its breakaway province. The action, George Bush said with properly restrained indignation, has "substantially damaged Russia's standing in the world."

It was a stupefying moment. In response to Russia's troop movements into Georgia in defense of South Ossetia ,a province on Russia's southern border, George Bush, architect of the invasion of the still embroiled and desperately damaged "sovereign nation of Iraq" declared to the world that "such action [as Russia took] is unacceptable in the 21st century." Yo, George! Aren't you forgetting something?

So how is it that a president can make such an officious display of condemning - demonizing -- another nation for doing the very thing we have done? How can we possibly threaten them with international opprobrium while we bask in fabricated virtue and ignore public opinion entirely?

In a world that has become the global village Marshall McLuhan predicted in the '60s --20 years before the personal computer - "the medium," has indeed, "become the message." A president who can criticize others with such vehemence for doing exactly what he has just done and can neither redo nor undo nor solve and resolve, is a message for the world: Words are meaningless now.

-- excerpted from Joan Chittister