LET'S DANCE.

Just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon issued a sweeping defense strategy detailing a new vision for winning swift wars against global terrorist networks and outlaw regimes. One year later, the White House unveiled its "National Security Strategy," which discussed using the U.S. military to launch preemptive wars and snuff out threats before they materialized - a strategy that would later be known as "The Bush Doctrine."

Now, with nearly 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq two years after the fall of Baghdad, along with commitments in Afghanistan and for the global war on terrorism, many Pentagon officials admit that the bloody insurgency in Iraq has tempered that vision of what the U.S. military can and cannot do."-from Truthout..

This is insanity but accepted as a "sane" rationale. I remember when I was teenager and would go to house parties. We'd all be in the basement fast and slow dancing. The rhythms would emanate from every young body in the room and it looked like a universal communion based in natural rhythms. Later, I would go home and watch TV. I would tune into "American Bandstand" to look at the white kids dance. I saw uncoordinated bodies that begged to find some continuity with nature and the universe. I would see little white feet hopping around and bodies doing something I just didn't understand instead of sliding and gliding like those basement dancers to the sounds of ancestral memories.

Today I watch the grandsons and granddaughters of those basement dancers. To me they look like mechanical windmills in some bizarre dance with some phantom impulses coming from who knows where. They sometimes hop around and contort their bodies in jerks and synchronous motions like some spastic child crying for attention. And they enjoy it thinking they have pushed dancing to another level.

By now I'm sure you are probably asking what in the hell does this have to do with war plans, global terrorist and the "Bush Doctrine." It has a great deal to do with them. Just like the Bush Doctrine is in place to bring "western continuity" to the world, so were the dancers on American Bandstand with regard to dancing. They knew that they looked and probably felt strange as well as out of place when watching the basement dancers, so they began to change the idea of what is rhythm. The Bush Doctrine attempts to do the same thing, change the idea of cultural sovereignty.

The ideas of capitalism, western democracy, religions, laws and political systems don't/didn't fit most cultures whose history was steeped in some form of cultural socialism (dance). That would make the Bush Doctrine's dancers "hoppers" on the world stage instead of sliders and gliders in tune with the majority of the world's cultural rhythms. Those European cultural ideologist, like the ones on the Bush Doctrine's "American Bandstand," throughout history couldn't learn to synchronize with nature, so they changed the essence of human rhythm and natural synchronization. It took them centuries as witnessed by the invasions of Scythia, Greece, Rome, Crusaders, England, France, Germany, etc., etc., etc.,. on the "rhythmic" dancers of the world.

Believe it or not, I can understand the need for the hoppers of the world to change the dance, to bring another idea of rhythm to the world. What I don't understand is why does the world allow it to happen? What is it that prevents the world from understand that "hopping" is not in tune with nature's rhythm, but with some dance from someplace even I don't understand? Why does the world keep trying to understand this spastic drummer and adopt their style? Why doesn't the world just ignore their paternalistic desire to mechanize nature and let them keep trying to learn the glide and slide?

The answers are complex, but the primary reason is the world doesn't understand why they only learned to hop instead of slide and glide. The world just can't understand that the hopper's drummer never fully developed the depth or ability to drum, however he did understand how to hit the damm thing and make "big" noises.

The kids today have no idea the importance of dancing to universal rhythms. The world has no idea of how important it is to evolve their culture from their ancestral memory. The world has no idea how important it is to learn to dance with different styles, but the same rhythms?