November 3, 2004

Hush. Enough chatter about the stupid American election. I'm trying to listen to Fallujah right now.

Stop telling me how closest advisors to the aggressor in chief hugged each other this morning in the Oval Office, and expressed great relief. Scrubbed teeth, shining all around.

I'm trying to hear the sounds of their helicopters overhead, trying to feel the rattle in my bones as chop, chop, chop, over Falluja, they draft the very air into war.

No more stories please about the four-hour lines, the embargoed ballots, Supreme Court refusals, or the missing youth vote. Speak of battleground states no more. They didnít even try to change the South. Crashes and cries are what I'm listening for. Not more stupid talk about "margins of litigation," that politico-mathmatic trigger point in which stupid embargoed ballots exceed differences in stupid ballots cast.

Chinaview reports (8 hours ago) that two have been killed and six injured in Fallujah ( http://www.uruknet.info/?p=6803 ), but we know since reading last Friday's article in the Lancet that we have to multiply these numbers times ten.

So shush that grating talk about how we're all soon back together in some conspiracy of imperial purpose, all hailing the chief.

I'm listening for the still-born child, the heart attack, the stroke. The sound a little person makes when she covers her head with her bare hands.

Please mute that electoral count recap, would you?

I've got to listen to Falluja right now.

Greg Moses writes for the Texas Civil Rights Review. Moses contributed a chapter on civil rights under Clinton and Bush for Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils. He can be reached at: gmosesx@prodigy.net

http://www.counterpunch.org/moses11032004.html