Eliot Weinberger 1/15/03 - New York: Sixteen Months After

Eliot Weinberger 1/15/03 - New York: Sixteen Months After: "Perhaps the problem is that there are no words to describe this Administration. All the pejoratives, however accurate, that might be applied-- 'warmongers' and 'imperialists,' 'corrupt' and 'bloodthirsty,' 'fanatical' and 'criminal'—have been drained of their meaning by decades of propaganda. They are as banal as the rhetoric of the think tanks. Small wonder that American writers have generally been either silent or bathetic ('9/11 reminded me of the day my father died') on all that has happened in the last two years. We no longer have the words to even think about what is happening, about violence that is not 'just like a movie,' about people like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Perle and Wolfowitz and Rice and Ashcroft and Bush, who are not Pol Pot or Stalin or Hitler, who are lesser forms of evil, but evil nonetheless. To begin to talk about them is to relive the old nightmare of the scream with no sound."