A Donkey on the Edge

So Clemmie was wearing her mommy wants a new president teeshirt today at the toddler playgym and a couple of people commented negatively. One said, “what has George W Bush done to your daughter” and Nicki practically spat her breakfast. Just for the record, Clemmie wears the shirt (at least in part) because

1. Without the UN in a believably strong position, her world is less safe.
2. She is more likely to die as a result of freedom-fighting initiatives or civil unrest.
3. Her cousins in Connecticut are less likely to be able to go to college.
4. The water she drinks and the air she breathes are less safe without Kyoto.
5. She can say “class war” with the best of them, and she knows that the American babies that are killing Iraqi babies before themselves being mutilated, dehumanised and blown up are the children of America’s poorest families, the same families that feed all war. These kids have very few practical options open to them as they grow up in towns with no jobs, no education and no future. I was amazed by the performance of the United States marines recruiter in Fahrenheit 9/11 who convinces a black teen that because Shaggy was a Marine, this is really his best chance of making it. Sadly, this may have been true, but Clemmie isn’t happy that in George Bush’s America, those sorts of realities are accepted without question.
6. She would like to eventually read De Tocqueville without him being an amusing anecdote.

One of the many revitalising things about hanging out with little children is that they have a binary view of morality. Something is right or something is wrong, good or bad. This may seem simplistic, but morality was invented under just those terms (I am an intermittently jealous god doesn’t quite have the same ring to it).

I guess I’m writing this because I can’t time-travel back to the gym to defend Nicki and Clemmie from the onslaught of the merchant-banking middle classes who seem to think Bush is the best thing since Margaret Thatcher.