Pitt Pens "It was a dark and stormy revolution"

[zeitgeist]

Someone please sober up CalPig who is ovulating all over this Pittiful screed.

The writing is barely worthy of a pimply high school girl.

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/10025984969

WilliamPitt (57,535 posts)

The Beginning of the End of the Cold War
 

A Cuban flag flies over a street in Havana, Dec. 19, 2014. President Barack Obama’s restoration
of diplomatic ties with Cuba this week has snatched a major cudgel from his critics and potentially
restored some of Washington’s influence in Latin America. (The New York Times)

The Beginning of the End of the Cold War
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Saturday 20 December 2014

I was walking home from grammar school one day beneath the bright blue ceiling of a late September afternoon. My street lay across the top of a hill and enjoyed a commanding view of the Brighton neighborhoods leading into downtown Boston. A storm was out to sea east beyond the city, and the clouds towered in the distant sky. At some point I looked in that direction, and stopped dead in my tracks, because one cumulus formation seemed the very definition of a mushroom cloud, and a trick of light and distance made it appear to be right over the city. I ran all the way home, terrified.

One night not long after, I was looking out the windows that faced the city. The distant buildings were beautiful in the evening light, but as I watched, a bright dot appeared in the sky. It was solid, unblinking, and moving fast toward downtown. My breath caught, and my hands tightened on the windowsill as I waited to be incinerated by a wall of nuclear fire.

One could, I suppose, chalk it up to the overactive imagination of a boy. The cloud above the city was just that, and not the aftermath of a nuclear strike. The light streaking toward downtown was a helicopter, or a plane headed for Logan Airport, and not a missile carrying destruction in its nosecone. But for a child mired during his formative years in the Reagan-era hysterics of the Cold War, a boy conditioned to listen for the sirens that could erupt at any moment to announce onrushing nuclear doom, these little hallucinations were daily fare. Living in constant low-grade fear of the possibility that "The Day After" would one day no longer be televised fiction was, as it turns out, the price of doing business.

These memories have been much on my mind as I watch these new and frankly remarkable developments unfolding between the United States and Cuba. My generation missed that whole show completely - the Cuban Missile Crisis happened nine years before I was born - and people my age are required to be students of history to understand what all the damned static is about in the first place. Read every book, watch every old white-knuckle black-and-white news broadcast from that time, however, and in the end those who did not go through that particular period are still left blinking in confusion under wrinkled brows: What's the big deal? Why did this take so long?

Answers: Serious human rights concerns, the politics of Florida and its Electoral College votes, and the lingering grip of the Cold War itself - the embedded policies that came from it, and the enduring influence of those who miss not only the simplistic binary polarity between "good" and "bad" it represented, but also the astonishing taxpayer cash spigot it provided. The reasons why the world has seemingly gone utterly and completely berserk in the years since the Berlin Wall came down are due in massive degree to the acts and actions of powerful nations during the Cold War, but there is a certain breed of cat that misses those days anyway, because the bright definitions at play helped the world make some semblance of sense. Plus, of course, dudes got mad paid.

(snip)

The Soviet Union may be gone, but the Cold War never really ended. This is a nation that needs an enemy, and beneath the bright blue ceiling of another September day thirteen years ago, a new one was established. Our haywire economy requires a state of permanent war; we lost it for a time when the Wall fell, but found it again when the Towers fell. The savage irony is that those Towers came down thanks to the chesswork of Cold Warriors who thought they could control the beast they created in Afghanistan in their desire to undo the Soviets. By any measurable standard, the United States of America, its people, its politics and its profiteering ethos stand as a bent monument to that era, which never really ended, but only metastasized into the so-called "War on Terror."

Yet the generations-old war against Cuba - which Castro won, by the way, hands down - appears to be coming to an end. This has to be a good thing, has to be made into a good thing, has to count for something beyond an opportunity for table-pounders to raise their voices and yell about Communists from the close end of the long, echoing corridor of history. The president is to be commended. At a bare minimum, we will soon hopefully have one less thing to argue about.

The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28122-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-cold-war 1 replies, 131 views

 


Response to WilliamPitt (Original post)

Sat Dec 20, 2014, 11:49 AM

Star Member CaliforniaPeggy (112,735 posts)

1. As always, most excellent, my dear Will!
 
You take these world-changing events in all their magnitude and bring them into sharp focus by making them personal. You create a story, a true story, that we can relate to and there we find the truth.
 

Truthout?  Should be called Timeout

[tanstaafl]

Someone please sober up CalPig who is ovulating all over this Pittiful screed.

The writing is barely worthy of a pimply high school girl.

http://upload.democraticunderground.com/10025984969

Truthout?  Should be called Timeout

I don't recall the eighties being a scary time. And I remember the missile crisis of '62. If I recall the eighties correctly, it was a time for Americans to again strut with pride as "That shining city on the hill".

[obumazombie]

If owebuma holds true to his track record we should have a disaster of epic proportions with this Cuba fiasco.
I only say that because the best predictor of future performance is past performance.

[DumbAss Tanker]

I guess he might as well try for a Bulwer-Litton award, it's the only major literary prize he has a chance at.

[BlueStateSaint]

I guess he might as well try for a Bulwer-Litton award, it's the only major literary prize he has a chance at.

 

Yes, I Googled it.  H5!

[JohnnyReb]

Yes, I Googled it.  H5!

^^^^^^^^^

Taking the collective advice of the above intellectual group, I too googled it and they were correct.

[USA4ME]

There's a lot about lil willys writing that makes it not even rise to the level of sub-par, but it's things like this...

Yet the generations-old war against Cuba - which Castro won, by the way, hands down

... that highlights his stupidity. Because he believes Castro won the "war against Cuba," he writes as though it is the undisputed fact. Not his call to make. Never was. Never will be. Lil willy doesn't understand his place, which leaves him stuck in the same rut he's been in for over a decade.

.

[ChuckJ]

Sometimes, when I read stuff written by Pitt, I wonder if he is actually George Costanza who has given up on pretending to be an architect or a marine biologist and decided to pretend to be a writer. Then it dawns on me that George Costanza isn't real. Georgia is just a character. Plus, George would pretend to be a much better writer.

George Costanza: The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli!

[I_B_Perky]

I only scanned the first two paragraphs and that is two seconds of my life I'll never get back.

That particular Pittstain bowel movement was the literary equivalent of valium.

[Ralph Wiggum]

I only scanned the first two paragraphs and that is two seconds of my life I'll never get back.

That particular Pittstain bowel movement was the literary equivalent of valium.

It so often is.  He often just tries too hard.  Adds in far more detail, analogy, or flowery fluff in order to build up word count.  And to make him seem more intelligent.

Then there are other times when he just throws out short, staccato vulgarity mixed with nonsense leftist narrative.  Both types can be written at varying levels of his drunkenness, it is always hard to tell.

[BattleHymn]

I guess he might as well try for a Bulwer-Litton award, it's the only major literary prize he has a chance at.

H5.  I'll never look at another Pittstain opening the same again.   

[Big Dog]

WilliamPitt

Writing from his mom's kitchen.

If I said I read it, I would be giving Pitt far more credit than he deserves.

I scanned for keywords as I scrolled through his verbal diarrhea- and he didn't disappoint: the politics of Florida and its Electoral College votes.

Pitt is down to two brain cells. One has the implanted memory of Pitt's moment of almost-near-sorta-glory (November 2000, when the other Dummies usd to pay attention to what he had to say- just before he was caught trying to get into the pants of those 12 year old schoolgirls). The other contains one word: "****".

Those two brain cells are on opposite sides of his cranial cavity. Sometimes they wave at each other across no man's land, but mostly they do their own thing. This time around, he tried to connect Bush/Gore 2000 to Obama/Castro.

Stupid drunken ****.*


*Used for ironic effect.

[BattleHymn]

Those two brain cells are on opposite sides of his cranial cavity. Sometimes they wave at each other across no man's land, but mostly they do their own thing.

  Oh, that's good stuff.

[obumazombie]

Big Dog has just crystalized a thought for me about libs.
Some get stuck on a moment in time and just become frozen there.
I'm glad about that.
It gives me yet another insight into the mind of a lib.

[BattleHymn]

Big Dog has just crystalized a thought for me about libs.
Some get stuck on a moment in time and just become frozen there.
I'm glad about that.
It gives me yet another insight into the mind of a lib.

So true.  Think of how many of the 65+ primitives are stuck in the sixties.

[DumbAss Tanker]

So true.  Think of how many of the 65+ primitives are stuck in the sixties.

Right around 1968, it seems to me.  In Pitt's case, it could be subtitled "Dreams of my Mother" - a second-hand delusional system taught to his empty little pitcher of a mind by his Mommy.

[JohnnyReb]

Right around 1968, it seems to me.  In Pitt's case, it could be subtitled "Dreams of my Mother" - a second-hand delusional system taught to his empty little pitcher of a mind by his Mommy.

He's an old hippy and he don't know what to do......should he hold on to the old, should he grab on to the new.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzdvQOXxRD4