Post Quake: Ommigod, Is the Washington Monument Leaning?

This morning, not even 24 hours post-quake, I googled “is Washington Monument leaning” and got 7,120,000 “results.” Hilarious! The first URL in the queue said that Fox News says its leaning to the right and MSNBC says it’s leaning to the left. Go figure . . .

Here’s rense.com’s depiction of it, probably photoshopped, but worth pondering.

Back in the early ’80s, when I was a “violent peace activist” (I can say that now; back then I was, of course, deadly serious and righteous and constantly creating the very hostility I was trying so hard, I thought, to heal), I was the first person I knew of to call nuclear missiles phallic symbols, out loud, loudly, and often.

And of course, the Washington Monument is the granddaddy of them all. Which is why I love the possibility, even the remote possibility, that the Washington Monument might now be leaning.

Could it be that even in daring to ask if the Washington Monument is leaning, we are collectively recognizing that this possibility symbolizes the beginning of the end of the obscenely bloated U.S. corporatized military hard-on that has been battering, poisoning, raping, ravaging, and devouring the weak and the vulnerable and the entire Earth ever since the Soviet Union went through its own collapse and, rather than dismantling our own bristling defensive/offensive MAD doctrine, instead swelled into the world’s single, utterly dominant “hyperpower”?

Is this humongous cancerous monstrosity that has taken all our treasure, ruined our values and ideals and what remained of our innocence actually beginning to deflate, to go soft, to become impotent? If so, let us breathe a sigh of relief, let us celebrate, and let us pray that it falls all the way to the ground.