What Happened in London

What happened in London had, despite everything Mr. Blair, Mr. Bush, and others have said, has nothing to do with attacking "freedom" and the "way of life" of the British, just as 9/11 had nothing to do with attacking American freedom or the American way of life. On Thursday morning the first thing I heard from the PM was something along those lines, just as though it had been scripted by one of Bush's speechwriters (Bush, judging by his stumbling comments that morning, must have loaned his traveling speechwriter out to Mr. Blair). I started talking back to the TV, never a good sign.

The attacks of 7/7 were all about British support for US imperialism in the Middle East, from which (Mr. Blair believes) the UK benefits. The attacks of 9/11 were all about having American soldiers in Islamic holy lands, about American support of the corrupt House of Saud, about American support of Israeli crimes, and a variety of other things that have nothing to do with the American way of life. Or maybe I should say they have everything to do with the American way of life, because our foreign policy is designed to keep the masses happy by providing cheap oil. That commodity is what allows us to cut ourselves off from each other in our cars and SUVs, to transport Chinese-made shoes cheaply across our vast territory, to fill our Wal-Marts with cheap TVs assembled in far-off countries, and to do a lot of other things that ultimately will come back to bite us.

But getting back to what Mr. Blair said: it's the duty of every right-thinking person to challenge those words and those thoughts. In conversations with friends and co-workers, you have to bring up this idea: it's our (collective Western) foreign policy that they hate, not our forms of government or even our decadent, supposedly immoral lifestyle. It's our actions. To change our actions, we have to do everything we can to 1.) become less dependent on foreign oil and cheap consumer goods imports; and 2.) elect a set of politicians that won't be servants of the multi-national corporations (this is true of nearly all Republicans and most Democrats). Do you really need that new Samsung plasma TV? Do you really want to take advantage of GM's employee discount program--can't you get a few more years out of your current car?