Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Where We Goes, Nobody Knows

Rebecca Solnit has an entertaining piece in TomDispatch written from the year 2025. A snippet:
The World Court and related human rights, environmental rights, and criminal courts became more powerful presences as the sun set on the era of nation-state. Multiple changes often combined into scenarios impossible to foresee: for example, the belated U.S. recognition in 2011 that the International Criminal Court did indeed have war-crimes jurisdiction over Americans coincided with the worldwide anti-incarceration movement. This explains why, for example, former President Bush the Younger, extradited from Paraguay and found guilty in 2013, was never imprisoned, but sentenced to spend the rest of his life working in a Fallujah diaper laundry. (People who are still bitter about his reign are bitter too that the webcam there suggests, even at his advanced age, he still enjoys this work that accords so well with his skill-set.) His assets - along with those of his Vice President, and of Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, and other war profiteers - were famously awarded to the Vietnamese Buddhist Commission for the Iraqi Transition. After almost a decade of the bitterest bloodshed, Iraq, too, had broken into five nations, but by this time so many nation-states were being reorganized into more coherent units that the Iraqi transition, led by the Women's Alliance of Islamic Feminists (nicknamed the Islamofeminists), was surprisingly peaceful when it finally came.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Must be how Jimmy Carter got sentenced to Habitats for Humanity.

helmut said...

Well, it would be kind of a bone if Bush ended up doing some kind of humanitarian work, post-presidency, given that the motivation would likely not come from his dead heart and mind.

Carter has that on him.

Anonymous said...

Dead heart? Well if that's strong dislike, I'd not want to see what words you reserve for someone you actually hate.