As I was eating my breakfast the other morning - six ounces

of non-fat unflavored yogurt - I experienced an epiphany. 

I’m not speaking about the religious kind but “a new understanding of reality because of a sudden intuitive realization.”  It stopped me in my tracks. 

I was just sitting there, contemplating a chance remark a friend had made to me that there was not a single problem ever experienced by anyone that didn’t have a solution that could be found in a movie.  Contemplating the number of movies made in the world and the number of people with problems they want solved proved to be a math problem that exceeded my computational skills at breakfast time.  So I abandoned that train of thought and wandered off into a variation of it. 

If I could pick any 10 movies that best illustrated my life or the various periods in my life, what movies would I pick?  Now there was a breakfast topic more suited to my capacities and as the yogurt slid down my throat, spoonful by spoonful, movie titles came flooding into my mind.  My list began with “Hope and Glory”, a John Boorman film that perfectly depicted the World War Two England of my own childhood.  Follow that with Mario Lanza in “The Student Prince” and then follow that with “Blackboard Jungle”, a film that scared my mother so badly she didn’t want me to attend school at all.  “The Wanderers” came next as the film that describes in exquisite detail, my teen life in the Bronx amid the gangs, the girls and the incredible music that became known as of Rock and Roll.  This was getting quite enjoyable.  I finished off the yogurt, sat back and picked-up my coffee.

“I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do,” explained Palin, “is rid the world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation.”  The interviewer, just to be certain that I understood what Palin had said summed it up for me.  “The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us.”  As if George would use the words “anticipatory” and “preemptive” in the same sentence, or even use them at all.

So there I had it, The Bush Doctrine, all neatly wrapped up in a package of words that even I could understand with my breakfast mind.  Yet something nagged at me, pulled at the memory strings, and suddenly, the realization struck me full force and my epiphany was almost complete.  I’d heard those ideas before.  Had Bush stolen that doctrine (I should have guessed) but from whom?  It came to me in bits and pieces, slowly but surely.

Banking corruption is rampant.   Drugs and alcohol are abused all over America.  Moral decline is evident.  Immorality is rampant among politicians.  Gambling is flourishing in all of its forms.  Women are exploited as though they were consumer products.  Sex trade corporations are established in the name of art, entertainment, tourism or freedom.  We pollute the environment with industrial waste and gases.  We have a corrupt legal system and laws that support only the rich and wealthy. We make war, not to defend principles and values, but to secure our interests and profits.

Was this Palin?  Was this Hillary?  Obama?  WHO?  Who?  Who?  Ahhhhhhhh!  And that’s when I recognized the author.  It wasn’t Palin or Bush or Hillary!  It was clear and loud.  It was stolen!   Bush stole it.  It wasn’t the Bush Doctrine at all!

“God has given us permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back.  Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy.  And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.”                                   Osama bin Laden, 2002.

1. -Geoffrey