Author Barbara Kingsolver arrives at the White House for State Dinner hosted by Genocide Joe Biden, May 23. Photo: AP/Jacquelyn Martin
Barbara Kingsolver is a writer who has taken good stands in the past. Twenty years ago, she paid a heavy price for speaking out strongly against George W. Bush’s wars conducted in the name of “the war on terror”—wars which ended up taking well over a million lives and creating further horrific misery throughout the Middle East/Central Asian region. She has written many novels and other books of a progressive or generally positive nature—including The Poisonwood Bible that, among other things, did some exposure of the effect of the crimes that the U.S. and the rest of the imperialists had done in plundering and dominating Africa.
So you would not expect her to go to a White House state dinner honoring the latest U.S. puppet in Africa, President William Ruto of Kenya. (Ruto is “distinguishing” himself not only by cooperating with U.S. schemes to further dominate Africa but by promising to send police to Haiti, carrying out dirty work for the U.S. which is desperately trying to control a country spinning into anarchy.) And you would definitely not expect her to do this at a time when that same White House was not only backing a genocide by Israel, but loudly and shamelessly defending Israel's leaders against a warrant from the International Criminal Court charging those leaders with war crimes and crimes against humanity! But there she was—and you can be sure that the mainstream media made sure to cover the fact. The New York Times said she was “circumspect”—that means, she wouldn’t say much. But the pictures of her presence at the dinner spoke 1,000 words—all of them ugly and shameful.
By going to this dinner, Kingsolver has given a patina (a cover) of progressivism to Biden, the man financing and backing a horrific genocide and hence the genocide itself. She has blessed by her presence the latest U.S. effort to contend for power and plunder in Africa. She has, with this craven act of bootlicking, covered herself in shame.
