Feb. 6, 2002
URGENT CALL FROM CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN
On the President's desk in the Oval Office, a phone's red light urgently flashes. It's the signal for an incoming call. Only calls from deep inside the vast command-center redoubt known as Cheyenne Mountain come in on this line. Constructed during the Cold War, this hollowed-out mountain contains a virtual Pentagon satellite-city built to survive a hundred years behind million-ton blast-proof doors.
The president gleefully picks up the receiver. He just loves getting important calls.
"Howdee!"
"Mr. President, this is a secure line, so we may speak freely."
"Dick, you old son of a gun, how's it goin' out there, livin' under the mountain an' all? T'aint getting' to ya none?"
"I'm just fine, Mr. President, don't concern yourself. You know, I spent a lot of time as a congressman with folks who live in abandoned missile silos and mine shafts.
"Anyway, compared to some of those places, this is just damn luxurious. The mountain's totally climate-controlled, and we have an artificial beach under sun lamps on the distilled-water reservoir."
"A goddam climate-controlled mountain! Jeez, Dick, I jus' gotta get on out there one of these days an' see that."
"Good idea, Mr. President, uh, er, of course, once the crisis is over."
"Crisis? Oh, y'all mean that there Osama guy? Don't worry none 'bout him. He ain't goin' nowheres, an', I'll tell ya, the only damn climate-control his damn mountains got is two-thousand pound bombs re-arrangin' the lan'scape…(guffaw, guffaw)"
"No, Mr. President, the crisis I'm talking about is the next election. We have to get you through that looking the part of commander-in-chief."
"Oh, I get your meanin', Dick. Well, I'm a working on that, real hard. Ain't even thinkin' of another month at the ranch. An' I'm doin' jus' what ya said for me to do.
"After dinner, I come back here an' jus' sit by the window for a while, wearin' my glasses, turnin' pages on one them big reports. Once or twice, Laura comes in with a cup of hot cocoa to keep me goin', an' puts her arm on my shoulder jus' like ya showed us.
"Don dropped by on the way home from the Pentagon t'other night an' checked me out. He said I looked good, real presidenshul, in the window. He said the T.V. guys'd be eatin' it up."
"Wonderful to hear, Mr. President. Remember, nothing but liberal scum is going to vote against a seated president in wartime. I'll keep the war going here. You just keep sitting."
"Righto, Dick. Say, how they all feedin' ya down there?"
"I've got to say, Mr. President, the food could be better. It's freeze-dried rations. A lot of my survivalist friends swear by them and eat nothing but. They're okay for a couple of days."
"Dick, y'all want me to have some nice big juicy steaks flown on up from the ranch?"
"No, thank you very much, Mr. President, I'll stick to what the boys in uniform are having. Good mess-hall photos, sets a fine example. Anyway, they went and sealed the blast-proof doors, and it’s a major operation getting them open again. Nothing gets in or out of here with those damn doors sealed.
"Well, you know, Mr. President, (chuckle, chuckle) it does have its advantages. They can't exactly serve any subpoenas for Enron, now can they?"
The President enjoys a hearty laugh.
"Tarnation, that's right, Dick. I almos' forgot about that shit, sittin' here by the window an' all.
"Don't worry none, 'cause I jus' keep tellin' 'em we got ya outta harm's way with all them damn terrorists flyin' 'roun' the country. An' I tol' 'em how all the head guys in them big oil companies never fly on the same plane or even take the same elevator." "Now, George, I mean Mr. President, you're not saying anything off the script, are you? Especially nothing about a certain company?"
"Oh, shucks, no, Dick, I know better'n that."
"Good, Mr. President, just call Ari to check on any little thing you're thinking of adding. He can always pass it by Don. Mark my words, Mr. President, sticking to the script's going to get us through this."
"Okay, Dick. So what else y'all up to down there, you ol' rascal?"
"The officers have an underground driving range and putting green, Mr. President, so the golf score won't suffer too badly.
"We get satellite feed right from the B-52s, so we're watching the boys give all those damn turban-heads what they deserve. You can freeze the action, do re-plays, or move in for close-ups."
"Anything else, you ol' rascal? I know ya can't stick to serious stuff long."
"Well, Mr. President, we do have a couple of those special channels, if you know what I mean?"
"Shucks, Dick, I know egzac'ly what y'all mean. An' ya ain't got Lynne down there, sniffin' out your trail.
"Mr. President, just between you and me, that is the part that's just like a real vacation."
"I tell ya, Dick, she's havin' the time a her life out here, scowlin' an' spoutin' them goddam librarian pamphlets a hers at anyone that says things is less than hunky-dory!"
" 'Libertarian,' Mr. President, they're 'libertarian pamphlets.' "
"Well, still, don't ya go worrin' none 'bout what she's up to. She's doin' a hell of a job goin' after them no-good fifth wheels!"
" 'Fifth columnists', Mr. President, I think you mean 'fifth columnists.' "
"Shucks, Dick, I think I gotta go. I jus' seen the docs pullin' up out front. I reckon they're a comin' to change the bandage."
"Excellent, Mr. President, that bandage locks-in the sympathy vote. America has already forgotten all about your pretzel caper. Joe Six-pack never thought it was anything unusual anyway. But just the sight of a wounded President in time of war gives us an 80% floor-rating.
"Do you think you could ask them to just put the new one on a little higher up? I noticed it's not showing up on some of the news shots."
"Okay, Dick, what ya figure, 'bout half an inch?."
"That'd be just about right, Mr. President. And try not to spill any more gravy on it. That's a real turn-off for some of the women."
"Gotchya, Dick. Be talkin' to ya soon."
"Thank you, Mr. President."
Friday, March 31, 2006
WHY REPUBLICANS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR, A POLITICAL SATIRE
January 19, 2002
WHY REPUBLICANS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR
It may have something to do with a life spent scowling, years of squeezing facial muscles and lips so tightly the skin comes to resemble cracked swollen grapes. It may relate to the hemorrhoid-inducing strains of bad potty training, although research is unclear as to whether this is a cause or an effect. "Not sparing the rod" may play a role - you can't look into the hard-boiled-egg face of Second-Lady, Lynne Cheney, without thinking about Sam Spade slapping around uncooperative witnesses. But I wouldn't insist on the point. Her face may just reflect explosively-high blood pressure. Or an abnormally large spleen.
There may be a genetic basis for many of the large divisions of human nature - not for all the details and refinements, but for the basic dichotomies, such as optimism and pessimism, open to new ideas or close-minded, generous or greedy, smiling or sour, peaceful or violent. I certainly don't know this to be the case, but it seems a plausible hypothesis.
So I do think it possible there is a genetic basis for Republicanism. It is difficult otherwise to explain why the same mix of traits turns up over and over - greedy, narrow, sour, and lacking in humor, always excepting for the kind of sophomoric stuff mumbled and stumbled over by a pretzel-challenged President.
Whatever the cause, it is an easily confirmed observation that Republicans have no sense of humor. I'm sure there are readers - especially the ones that send me notes advising that J.K. Rowling is a pseudonym of Beelzebub - now thinking, "Then how do you explain Rush Limbaugh?"
Well, this just proves my point. If that is your idea of a sense of humor, you have none. The words of "Naziism with a Friendly Face," as Rush is warmly known to closeted Hitler-Jugend and aspiring pimply-faced predator-entrepreneurs across the United States, provide a sure test for lack of humor. If he makes you laugh, you have a problem. Or, rather, the country has a problem if there are enough of you.
If Republicans had a sense of humor, they'd laugh their own leadership off the platform. The party's Washington mob could be the cast of extras from one of those old Hammer Studio horror films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Scary, ugly and dopey - all at the same time.
Strom "The Living Corpse" Thurmond: It is reliably reported that a Senate page is assigned, full time, to yank sash cords from a secret room in the Senate basement that run up Strom's pants, attach to his jaw, and make his mouth move. Strom is no dummy though, having been granted several honorary degrees from Bob Jones University.
Tom "The Roach Exterminator" DeLay: Here is a man who almost certainly ingested too much rat and roach powder while working as a pest exterminator in Texas, the kind of entrepreneurial experience deemed, in that neck of the woods, as fully qualifying you for a career in national politics. Tom fancies himself a Constitutional scholar though, always carrying a folded-up copy of the sacred text in his back pocket and showing some adeptness at its interpretation. The only trouble is it's the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.
Trent "Prancey Boy" Lott (a.k.a. "Big Hair"): This former star agricultural-college cheerleader still performs at private benefits on behalf of the George Wallace Memorial Chapter for the Preservation of our Glorious Confederate Heritage. If you want to catch him going through his moves, book early - they're always sell-out crowds.
Dennis "The Crusher" Hastert: Nick-named in recognition of his tireless efforts on behalf of election-finance reform as well as his remarkable resemblance to one of those WWF plastic dolls, a man said by some to suffer from extended exposure to crop dusting in southern Illinois. And that barely scratches the surface for miserable, threadbare material in the Republican Party.
We have Jesse "Don't Tread on Me" Helms: He represents the one known species of viper that weird Carolina fundamentalists avoid using in their snake-handling acts.
Newt "Hydrophobia" Gingrich: Almost resembling a very large Kewpie doll in a business suit, Newt seems quite innocuous until he displays his piranha-like smile and suddenly strikes with rows of glittering razor-teeth. The Beanie Baby version of Newt has been declared hazardous for children.
Phil "As my ol' Mama said, 'Some gotta clim' down outta the wagon…' " Gramm. This guy's failure to put together a wad of dough as big as the one that made Bush president, spared generations of school kids from memorizing mind-numbing quotes off the sides of a giant marble wagon in Washington.
Bob "The U.S. government's running a damned concentration camp down there in Washington, an' they got Elian locked up in it!" Smith. Smith does have a certain gentility, earning him the epithet, "New England's Own Big Bubba." Big Bubba's career heroic moment was quitting the party, not for anything so unrewarding as principle, but so he could be lured back with a committee position. His feat of crawling back to Washington over the rocky New England landscape is the stuff of Republican legend.
Bob "I want Ron and Nancy stuffed and put in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian!" Barr. The acerbic Barr has a tender side, he has been known to weep openly at the sight of a bowl of jelly beans. Former associates at the CIA still affectionately refer to him as the Agency's Nincompoop Quota.
Henry "The Two-Ton Hypocrite" Hyde. Well, at least Bush's "youthful indiscretions" stopped, instead of starting, at forty. Hyde, a consummate ham actor, gave his most memorable performance in the role of noble, white-maned statesman heroically struggling against the forces of reason, good sense, and good taste to cast down an elected President over a dribble on a dress. In his own mind, he was repeating the magic of Charles Laughton in Advise and Consent.
And, we have a new star in the Republican firmament since September 11, John "Speaks in Tongues" Ashcroft. Here is today's indispensable man. In the course of years rolling around on the dirt floors of revival tents in Missouri, blubbering incomprehensibly, he gained immense insight into fundamentalist financial networks that he now applies to the damned heathen fundamentalists who believe the wrong fundamentals.
Of course, with a party that doesn't think there should be a government - just a contracted-out private army with an unlimited budget for weapons from Fortune 500 companies plus a secret-police network whose computers hook-up to every home (this last is a self-funded scheme from the sale to corporations of the greatest stash of intimate, personal marketing data ever assembled) - such ballot choices are not terribly surprising. But still, even this partial roll call provides powerful evidence of a complete lack of humor.
Just as I was about to complete this important piece of investigative journalism, the following item came in on the wire from a large Eastern research facility. I believeit requires no additional comment.
IMPORTANT NEW FINDING!
Important new research has made a startling discovery. Autopsies on the brains of hundreds of cadavers have revealed that the vestigial bit of reptilian brain long known to exist in all humans is three times larger than normal in Republicans.
Preliminary follow-up work with MRIs on living Republicans not only confirms the finding but indicates a dominate role in many of their brain functions.
WHY REPUBLICANS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR
It may have something to do with a life spent scowling, years of squeezing facial muscles and lips so tightly the skin comes to resemble cracked swollen grapes. It may relate to the hemorrhoid-inducing strains of bad potty training, although research is unclear as to whether this is a cause or an effect. "Not sparing the rod" may play a role - you can't look into the hard-boiled-egg face of Second-Lady, Lynne Cheney, without thinking about Sam Spade slapping around uncooperative witnesses. But I wouldn't insist on the point. Her face may just reflect explosively-high blood pressure. Or an abnormally large spleen.
There may be a genetic basis for many of the large divisions of human nature - not for all the details and refinements, but for the basic dichotomies, such as optimism and pessimism, open to new ideas or close-minded, generous or greedy, smiling or sour, peaceful or violent. I certainly don't know this to be the case, but it seems a plausible hypothesis.
So I do think it possible there is a genetic basis for Republicanism. It is difficult otherwise to explain why the same mix of traits turns up over and over - greedy, narrow, sour, and lacking in humor, always excepting for the kind of sophomoric stuff mumbled and stumbled over by a pretzel-challenged President.
Whatever the cause, it is an easily confirmed observation that Republicans have no sense of humor. I'm sure there are readers - especially the ones that send me notes advising that J.K. Rowling is a pseudonym of Beelzebub - now thinking, "Then how do you explain Rush Limbaugh?"
Well, this just proves my point. If that is your idea of a sense of humor, you have none. The words of "Naziism with a Friendly Face," as Rush is warmly known to closeted Hitler-Jugend and aspiring pimply-faced predator-entrepreneurs across the United States, provide a sure test for lack of humor. If he makes you laugh, you have a problem. Or, rather, the country has a problem if there are enough of you.
If Republicans had a sense of humor, they'd laugh their own leadership off the platform. The party's Washington mob could be the cast of extras from one of those old Hammer Studio horror films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Scary, ugly and dopey - all at the same time.
Strom "The Living Corpse" Thurmond: It is reliably reported that a Senate page is assigned, full time, to yank sash cords from a secret room in the Senate basement that run up Strom's pants, attach to his jaw, and make his mouth move. Strom is no dummy though, having been granted several honorary degrees from Bob Jones University.
Tom "The Roach Exterminator" DeLay: Here is a man who almost certainly ingested too much rat and roach powder while working as a pest exterminator in Texas, the kind of entrepreneurial experience deemed, in that neck of the woods, as fully qualifying you for a career in national politics. Tom fancies himself a Constitutional scholar though, always carrying a folded-up copy of the sacred text in his back pocket and showing some adeptness at its interpretation. The only trouble is it's the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.
Trent "Prancey Boy" Lott (a.k.a. "Big Hair"): This former star agricultural-college cheerleader still performs at private benefits on behalf of the George Wallace Memorial Chapter for the Preservation of our Glorious Confederate Heritage. If you want to catch him going through his moves, book early - they're always sell-out crowds.
Dennis "The Crusher" Hastert: Nick-named in recognition of his tireless efforts on behalf of election-finance reform as well as his remarkable resemblance to one of those WWF plastic dolls, a man said by some to suffer from extended exposure to crop dusting in southern Illinois. And that barely scratches the surface for miserable, threadbare material in the Republican Party.
We have Jesse "Don't Tread on Me" Helms: He represents the one known species of viper that weird Carolina fundamentalists avoid using in their snake-handling acts.
Newt "Hydrophobia" Gingrich: Almost resembling a very large Kewpie doll in a business suit, Newt seems quite innocuous until he displays his piranha-like smile and suddenly strikes with rows of glittering razor-teeth. The Beanie Baby version of Newt has been declared hazardous for children.
Phil "As my ol' Mama said, 'Some gotta clim' down outta the wagon…' " Gramm. This guy's failure to put together a wad of dough as big as the one that made Bush president, spared generations of school kids from memorizing mind-numbing quotes off the sides of a giant marble wagon in Washington.
Bob "The U.S. government's running a damned concentration camp down there in Washington, an' they got Elian locked up in it!" Smith. Smith does have a certain gentility, earning him the epithet, "New England's Own Big Bubba." Big Bubba's career heroic moment was quitting the party, not for anything so unrewarding as principle, but so he could be lured back with a committee position. His feat of crawling back to Washington over the rocky New England landscape is the stuff of Republican legend.
Bob "I want Ron and Nancy stuffed and put in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian!" Barr. The acerbic Barr has a tender side, he has been known to weep openly at the sight of a bowl of jelly beans. Former associates at the CIA still affectionately refer to him as the Agency's Nincompoop Quota.
Henry "The Two-Ton Hypocrite" Hyde. Well, at least Bush's "youthful indiscretions" stopped, instead of starting, at forty. Hyde, a consummate ham actor, gave his most memorable performance in the role of noble, white-maned statesman heroically struggling against the forces of reason, good sense, and good taste to cast down an elected President over a dribble on a dress. In his own mind, he was repeating the magic of Charles Laughton in Advise and Consent.
And, we have a new star in the Republican firmament since September 11, John "Speaks in Tongues" Ashcroft. Here is today's indispensable man. In the course of years rolling around on the dirt floors of revival tents in Missouri, blubbering incomprehensibly, he gained immense insight into fundamentalist financial networks that he now applies to the damned heathen fundamentalists who believe the wrong fundamentals.
Of course, with a party that doesn't think there should be a government - just a contracted-out private army with an unlimited budget for weapons from Fortune 500 companies plus a secret-police network whose computers hook-up to every home (this last is a self-funded scheme from the sale to corporations of the greatest stash of intimate, personal marketing data ever assembled) - such ballot choices are not terribly surprising. But still, even this partial roll call provides powerful evidence of a complete lack of humor.
Just as I was about to complete this important piece of investigative journalism, the following item came in on the wire from a large Eastern research facility. I believeit requires no additional comment.
IMPORTANT NEW FINDING!
Important new research has made a startling discovery. Autopsies on the brains of hundreds of cadavers have revealed that the vestigial bit of reptilian brain long known to exist in all humans is three times larger than normal in Republicans.
Preliminary follow-up work with MRIs on living Republicans not only confirms the finding but indicates a dominate role in many of their brain functions.
THE DEVIL AND GEORGIE BUSH: A POLITICAL SATIRE
THE DEVIL AND GEORGIE BUSH
The Real Story Behind a Possible Second Term
George Bush sits quietly at his desk in the Oval Office. Suddenly, with a puff of acrid, yellow smoke, a dark figure appears at his shoulder, arrogantly leaning an elbow against the back corner of the big leather chair. He wears a soot-stained stovepipe hat, a rumpled, dusty suit, and his whiskered, rather cherubic face has an almost benign smile as he gazes down.
"Ahem, ah, Mr. President, I do believe we have some business?"
Although he immediately recognizes the figure, the President is astonished at this sudden appearance. With his face drained of color, he reaches instinctively for the hidden buzzer to the Secret Service at the edge of his desk.
"Mr. President, all those gadgets have been disabled. Surely, by now, you have more respect for my powers than that?
"Oh," with a rude little chuckle, "and until we've transacted our business, no one will be able to come through the door."
"Mr. Scratch, I meant no disrespec'…"
"I'm sure, Mr. President."
"It's what they all taught me to do if anyone's here, ya know, without an appointment an' all…"
"Yes, quite, Mr. President. Now, about our business…"
"But ain't there more'an two years left on ma contract?"
"Ah, indeed, two years, one month, eleven days, and fifty-four minutes, to be exact." The dark figure reaches out, and, again with a sulphurous little puff of smoke, a sheet of paper appears in his hand. He reaches down and waves it in front of the President's face.
"Perhaps, you would care to review the terms, Mr. President?"
"I'm sure you're right, Mr. Scratch, you're mighty careful 'bout these things."
"Careful, indeed, Mr. President, which brings me to the point of my little visit.
As you know, the original contract was for seven years."
The President, his face withered and frightened, mechanically shakes his head in agreement.
"And then there was the matter of an extension we negotiated?"
The President again shakes his head.
"And I trust there's no disagreement about the party of the second part," with another gruff chuckle, "that's me, having met fully all terms agreed?"
Still another doleful shake of the head.
"It says here, 'One George W. Bush, having succeeded at virtually nothing in his adult lifetime, except getting into a whole lot of embarrassing trouble, fighting with his family, and consuming inordinate amounts of alcohol, in return for certain services, specified below, promises his immortal soul to the said Mr. Scratch,' that is," chuckle, chuckle, "yours truly."
Here the figure makes a slight flourish, briefly doffing his hat and creating a small cloud of soot.
"Services rendered in return," clearing his throat, "Ah, just summarizing here, Mr. President, include making a killing on a baseball team, becoming governor of Texas, and in general having gained recognition for turning around a worthless life."
The figure looks down at the President with a somewhat twisted smile.
"Yielding you, I might add, boundless goodwill from legions of pious-fraud fundamentalists. Is that not right, Mr. President?"
Again, almost like a sleepwalker responding to unseen voices, the President shakes his head.
"The extension to the contract assured your becoming - you'll note, Mr. President, the very careful language about 'becoming,' with nothing said about 'being elected' - President of the United States."
Another dull shake of the head.
"Well, it doesn't allow for a second term, now does it, Mr. President?"
"Mr. Scratch, I jus' reckoned when ya consider the kinda president I been…"
"You mean loosing the forces of war, ignorance, and misery upon the world?"
"Why, sure, ain't I done a good job on that?"
"Agreed, Mr. President, but I wouldn't expect anything else of a man who's made the kind of bargain you have.
"You'll recall, when we negotiated the extension, that you wanted credit for all the prisoners executed in Texas. And all the slimy business deals you winked at, defrauding all kinds of decent folks. I admit such activity keeps good trade coming my way, but, strictly speaking, Mr. President, they just aren't part of our terms."
"But look'it the stuff we're doin'. We're redesignin' the country. Givin' it back to the folks what owns it, an' armin' 'em to the teeth so's they kin keep it. Ya can't go makin' omelets like that without breakin' a mighty heap of eggs. Why, I kin guarantee it'll mean years of misery for all them losers out there."
"Again, Mr. President, I hate to be like one of your heartless corporate contributors, but that's just not part of our deal. No, No, what you do with the office I gave you is up to you."
"But surely, Mr. Scratch, recognizin' what a great job I'm doin' here for you, we could come to some understandin' 'bout another li'le extension?"
"Well, I see what it is you want from me, Mr. President, but it just fails me what you're offering that I don't already have. The contract states clearly that the immortal soul of one George W. Bush is to be delivered up promptly at expiration…."
"Ain't there nothin' I kin do for an extension, Mr. Scratch?
"Ah, that desperate, pleading tone does appeal to my better side. Come to think of it, there just may be, Mr. President."
The President regains some color, and, for the first time, there's some animation in his manner, "Yes, yes, what is it?"
"Well, I'm not so sure you'll share my enthusiasm for the idea."
Looking like a puppy about to be handed a treat, "Mr. Scratch, I'll do jus' 'bout anythin', honest to God!
A severe, disapproving look flashes across the dusty figure's face.
"Oh, I'm mighty sorry 'bout that, but like I said, I'll do jus' 'bout anythin'."
"I do like your attitude, and I'll note it in my little book.
"Mr. President, it does bother me considerably that a mob of evangelical frauds in silk suits - you know the ones I mean, there isn't one of them not headed my way when their days of fleecing lonely folks watching television are ended - get all the credit for your conversion. You and I both know the truth of the matter. I would be strongly tempted," ha, ha, "to further extend your contract in return for a promise to tell people the truth."
The President again turns ashen, "I jus' don't see how that's possible, Mr. Scratch?"
"Oh, I don't insist you just go and blurt it out. You may do it slowly over a period of time. You may use all the arts of twisting the truth, so long as in the end this one truth comes out. That doesn't seem like too great a task for the caliber of people you've surrounded yourself with."
"But, Mr. Scratch, how kin I tell folks I made a deal with the devil?"
"Well, given your resources and past record of achievement, I do not see an insurmountable barrier. A lot of folks will have already guessed the truth. It's the ones that roll around in church aisles babbling incoherently or go to meetings to get slapped in the head to heal cancer that are going to be a might difficult to reach. But these are your people, and you are, after all, asking a great service of me. I rarely extend contracts. Two extensions is almost unheard of."
"But suit yourself, Mr. President. Right now it's the only offer that would entice me," chuckle, chuckle, "into so extraordinary an act."
"I, I jus' don't see…"
"As you please, Mr. President. I will claim what's mine on the stroke of midnight two years, one month, eleven days, and forty nine minutes, hence, unless, of course, you see your way to improving my image with the public. After all, it's no small miracle I've worked in your case. People just might look at me in a whole new light if they only knew the truth."
"But…but…"
"I'll leave it at that, Mr. President. You can let me know anytime right up until expiration. Just snap your fingers twice and consider it done for a second term."
The dark figure instantly disappears in another puff of acrid smoke.
The Real Story Behind a Possible Second Term
George Bush sits quietly at his desk in the Oval Office. Suddenly, with a puff of acrid, yellow smoke, a dark figure appears at his shoulder, arrogantly leaning an elbow against the back corner of the big leather chair. He wears a soot-stained stovepipe hat, a rumpled, dusty suit, and his whiskered, rather cherubic face has an almost benign smile as he gazes down.
"Ahem, ah, Mr. President, I do believe we have some business?"
Although he immediately recognizes the figure, the President is astonished at this sudden appearance. With his face drained of color, he reaches instinctively for the hidden buzzer to the Secret Service at the edge of his desk.
"Mr. President, all those gadgets have been disabled. Surely, by now, you have more respect for my powers than that?
"Oh," with a rude little chuckle, "and until we've transacted our business, no one will be able to come through the door."
"Mr. Scratch, I meant no disrespec'…"
"I'm sure, Mr. President."
"It's what they all taught me to do if anyone's here, ya know, without an appointment an' all…"
"Yes, quite, Mr. President. Now, about our business…"
"But ain't there more'an two years left on ma contract?"
"Ah, indeed, two years, one month, eleven days, and fifty-four minutes, to be exact." The dark figure reaches out, and, again with a sulphurous little puff of smoke, a sheet of paper appears in his hand. He reaches down and waves it in front of the President's face.
"Perhaps, you would care to review the terms, Mr. President?"
"I'm sure you're right, Mr. Scratch, you're mighty careful 'bout these things."
"Careful, indeed, Mr. President, which brings me to the point of my little visit.
As you know, the original contract was for seven years."
The President, his face withered and frightened, mechanically shakes his head in agreement.
"And then there was the matter of an extension we negotiated?"
The President again shakes his head.
"And I trust there's no disagreement about the party of the second part," with another gruff chuckle, "that's me, having met fully all terms agreed?"
Still another doleful shake of the head.
"It says here, 'One George W. Bush, having succeeded at virtually nothing in his adult lifetime, except getting into a whole lot of embarrassing trouble, fighting with his family, and consuming inordinate amounts of alcohol, in return for certain services, specified below, promises his immortal soul to the said Mr. Scratch,' that is," chuckle, chuckle, "yours truly."
Here the figure makes a slight flourish, briefly doffing his hat and creating a small cloud of soot.
"Services rendered in return," clearing his throat, "Ah, just summarizing here, Mr. President, include making a killing on a baseball team, becoming governor of Texas, and in general having gained recognition for turning around a worthless life."
The figure looks down at the President with a somewhat twisted smile.
"Yielding you, I might add, boundless goodwill from legions of pious-fraud fundamentalists. Is that not right, Mr. President?"
Again, almost like a sleepwalker responding to unseen voices, the President shakes his head.
"The extension to the contract assured your becoming - you'll note, Mr. President, the very careful language about 'becoming,' with nothing said about 'being elected' - President of the United States."
Another dull shake of the head.
"Well, it doesn't allow for a second term, now does it, Mr. President?"
"Mr. Scratch, I jus' reckoned when ya consider the kinda president I been…"
"You mean loosing the forces of war, ignorance, and misery upon the world?"
"Why, sure, ain't I done a good job on that?"
"Agreed, Mr. President, but I wouldn't expect anything else of a man who's made the kind of bargain you have.
"You'll recall, when we negotiated the extension, that you wanted credit for all the prisoners executed in Texas. And all the slimy business deals you winked at, defrauding all kinds of decent folks. I admit such activity keeps good trade coming my way, but, strictly speaking, Mr. President, they just aren't part of our terms."
"But look'it the stuff we're doin'. We're redesignin' the country. Givin' it back to the folks what owns it, an' armin' 'em to the teeth so's they kin keep it. Ya can't go makin' omelets like that without breakin' a mighty heap of eggs. Why, I kin guarantee it'll mean years of misery for all them losers out there."
"Again, Mr. President, I hate to be like one of your heartless corporate contributors, but that's just not part of our deal. No, No, what you do with the office I gave you is up to you."
"But surely, Mr. Scratch, recognizin' what a great job I'm doin' here for you, we could come to some understandin' 'bout another li'le extension?"
"Well, I see what it is you want from me, Mr. President, but it just fails me what you're offering that I don't already have. The contract states clearly that the immortal soul of one George W. Bush is to be delivered up promptly at expiration…."
"Ain't there nothin' I kin do for an extension, Mr. Scratch?
"Ah, that desperate, pleading tone does appeal to my better side. Come to think of it, there just may be, Mr. President."
The President regains some color, and, for the first time, there's some animation in his manner, "Yes, yes, what is it?"
"Well, I'm not so sure you'll share my enthusiasm for the idea."
Looking like a puppy about to be handed a treat, "Mr. Scratch, I'll do jus' 'bout anythin', honest to God!
A severe, disapproving look flashes across the dusty figure's face.
"Oh, I'm mighty sorry 'bout that, but like I said, I'll do jus' 'bout anythin'."
"I do like your attitude, and I'll note it in my little book.
"Mr. President, it does bother me considerably that a mob of evangelical frauds in silk suits - you know the ones I mean, there isn't one of them not headed my way when their days of fleecing lonely folks watching television are ended - get all the credit for your conversion. You and I both know the truth of the matter. I would be strongly tempted," ha, ha, "to further extend your contract in return for a promise to tell people the truth."
The President again turns ashen, "I jus' don't see how that's possible, Mr. Scratch?"
"Oh, I don't insist you just go and blurt it out. You may do it slowly over a period of time. You may use all the arts of twisting the truth, so long as in the end this one truth comes out. That doesn't seem like too great a task for the caliber of people you've surrounded yourself with."
"But, Mr. Scratch, how kin I tell folks I made a deal with the devil?"
"Well, given your resources and past record of achievement, I do not see an insurmountable barrier. A lot of folks will have already guessed the truth. It's the ones that roll around in church aisles babbling incoherently or go to meetings to get slapped in the head to heal cancer that are going to be a might difficult to reach. But these are your people, and you are, after all, asking a great service of me. I rarely extend contracts. Two extensions is almost unheard of."
"But suit yourself, Mr. President. Right now it's the only offer that would entice me," chuckle, chuckle, "into so extraordinary an act."
"I, I jus' don't see…"
"As you please, Mr. President. I will claim what's mine on the stroke of midnight two years, one month, eleven days, and forty nine minutes, hence, unless, of course, you see your way to improving my image with the public. After all, it's no small miracle I've worked in your case. People just might look at me in a whole new light if they only knew the truth."
"But…but…"
"I'll leave it at that, Mr. President. You can let me know anytime right up until expiration. Just snap your fingers twice and consider it done for a second term."
The dark figure instantly disappears in another puff of acrid smoke.
AN ANGEL APPEARS AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB: POLITICAL SATIRE
January 14, 2002
AN ANGEL APPEARS AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
This morning, an angel - yes, that's right, an angel - appeared to a gathering of reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. The stunningly beautiful creature with satiny white wings and glowing pink skin announced that it was appearing on behalf of the Creator for a brief, informal press conference.
The Almighty wants people to understand that He is getting mighty tired of being asked ten million times a day to bless America. It is beginning to grate on His nerves. Twenty-four hours a day from truck stops, pool halls, jumbo television screens, and shag-carpeted basement rec-rooms, the noise just never lets up.
The angel said that it was widely recognized that few other people have enjoyed so many blessings - heaps of them, whole mountains and rivers and seas of them - and He has mighty little sympathy with folks who ask for more. The Creator regards it as impertinent to be stuffing your face with whole fried chickens, French fries, biscuits, gravy, and beer while praying for an extra slice of pecan pie.
He wants other people to understand that America has no special standing with Him, despite having received enough material stuff to choke every horse on the planet several times over. Throwing blessings at America was just one of His thousands of experiments with life forms, and it has not been a particularly happy one.
As to taking sides in America's idiotic wars, Jehovah suspects it's only because the President is from Texas that he's so addled on this point. The Eternal One has been mildly diverted once in a while by scantily-clad cheerleaders and armored hominids bowing in prayer before stadiums full of Texans yelling for blood. God does have a sense of humor. But He always credited this lunatic behavior to something in the water - perhaps too much arsenic or runoff of bovine growth hormone - or to eating pork rinds. Now He is concerned that it appears to be national trend.
And that "no special standing" goes double for the Demander in Chief. Talk about a guy who has received more than his share and still asks for more! Without a heavy dose of unearned blessings, this guy would be selling popcorn in a Cineplex.
God never does endorsements. But if He did, He sincerely hopes everyone on the planet recognizes that the Maker and Destroyer of Universes could do a whole lot better than that.
He would like to remind people that Heaven is not a gold-plated trailer park with sequined loud-speakers and fields of tent-meetings. He actually hates country and western music. He is sick of people who claim they've found God when all they've found is that they're burnt out at forty. He can't imagine anyone thinking for a moment that heaven resembles a baton-twirling finale with acres of big hair and mascara and preachers blubbering for quadrillions of years about the Clintons, gays, and the need to send larger donations.
In fact, no one who makes a buck holding tent-meetings or speaking in tongues or selling self-help books and tapes ever gets past the Pearly Gate. St. Peter is under strict orders.
On a more serious note, God was more than a little upset about that name Infinite Justice, suggesting as it did that He would ever confuse vengeance with justice. And He would like it noted that B-52s at thirty-thousand feet versus peasants with muskets is not His idea of a fair fight, much less justice.
God had strongly considered suggesting that this stupid war be ended with just two champions fighting it out - Osama and Dubya, mano a mano.
But with Dubya felled by a pretzel while watching football from his couch, He has decided to postpone the proposal at least until there's a full recovery.
AN ANGEL APPEARS AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB
This morning, an angel - yes, that's right, an angel - appeared to a gathering of reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. The stunningly beautiful creature with satiny white wings and glowing pink skin announced that it was appearing on behalf of the Creator for a brief, informal press conference.
The Almighty wants people to understand that He is getting mighty tired of being asked ten million times a day to bless America. It is beginning to grate on His nerves. Twenty-four hours a day from truck stops, pool halls, jumbo television screens, and shag-carpeted basement rec-rooms, the noise just never lets up.
The angel said that it was widely recognized that few other people have enjoyed so many blessings - heaps of them, whole mountains and rivers and seas of them - and He has mighty little sympathy with folks who ask for more. The Creator regards it as impertinent to be stuffing your face with whole fried chickens, French fries, biscuits, gravy, and beer while praying for an extra slice of pecan pie.
He wants other people to understand that America has no special standing with Him, despite having received enough material stuff to choke every horse on the planet several times over. Throwing blessings at America was just one of His thousands of experiments with life forms, and it has not been a particularly happy one.
As to taking sides in America's idiotic wars, Jehovah suspects it's only because the President is from Texas that he's so addled on this point. The Eternal One has been mildly diverted once in a while by scantily-clad cheerleaders and armored hominids bowing in prayer before stadiums full of Texans yelling for blood. God does have a sense of humor. But He always credited this lunatic behavior to something in the water - perhaps too much arsenic or runoff of bovine growth hormone - or to eating pork rinds. Now He is concerned that it appears to be national trend.
And that "no special standing" goes double for the Demander in Chief. Talk about a guy who has received more than his share and still asks for more! Without a heavy dose of unearned blessings, this guy would be selling popcorn in a Cineplex.
God never does endorsements. But if He did, He sincerely hopes everyone on the planet recognizes that the Maker and Destroyer of Universes could do a whole lot better than that.
He would like to remind people that Heaven is not a gold-plated trailer park with sequined loud-speakers and fields of tent-meetings. He actually hates country and western music. He is sick of people who claim they've found God when all they've found is that they're burnt out at forty. He can't imagine anyone thinking for a moment that heaven resembles a baton-twirling finale with acres of big hair and mascara and preachers blubbering for quadrillions of years about the Clintons, gays, and the need to send larger donations.
In fact, no one who makes a buck holding tent-meetings or speaking in tongues or selling self-help books and tapes ever gets past the Pearly Gate. St. Peter is under strict orders.
On a more serious note, God was more than a little upset about that name Infinite Justice, suggesting as it did that He would ever confuse vengeance with justice. And He would like it noted that B-52s at thirty-thousand feet versus peasants with muskets is not His idea of a fair fight, much less justice.
God had strongly considered suggesting that this stupid war be ended with just two champions fighting it out - Osama and Dubya, mano a mano.
But with Dubya felled by a pretzel while watching football from his couch, He has decided to postpone the proposal at least until there's a full recovery.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
SORRY, MR. PRIME MINISTER, AFGHANISTAN IS NOT OUR WAR
March 25, 2006
SORRY, MR. PRIME MINISTER, AFGHANISTAN IS NOT OUR WAR
John Chuckman
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he has trouble understanding Canadians who feel ardently that their country's soldiers should not be involved in Afghanistan.
Toronto Globe and Mail
Afghanistan is not our war, Mr. Prime Minister.
We are not threatened by voices in the Middle East opposing American policy, unless you believe one reference in a recording of bin Laden mentioning Canada along with other countries. That recording, along with other post-invasion recordings, was almost certainly a CIA fraud, for Osama bin Laden had to be killed in the heavy bombing of his mountain redoubt.
Even if you do not believe that bin Laden is dead, what is beyond question is that American activities in Afghanistan and Iraq are building a vast reservoir of resentments and a training school for future terrorists. Tens of thousands of disaffected young Muslim men not only now have something to deeply resent but they have the operational conditions to perfect their arts of covert war. According to countless witnesses from Afghanistan and Iraq, America's brutal, thoughtless tactics have only inflamed tempers. Canada's good name should not be associated with this.
The previous government's making an under-the-table deal with Bush to place Canadian troops in Afghanistan surely does not make it our war. Your continuing, rather shrill, insistence still does not make it so. The deal was, of course, an effort to placate Bush for our not supporting his illegal invasion of Iraq. America is Canada's neighbor, but it is a fatuous and immoral argument that you help your neighbor in criminal activities just because he is your neighbor.
You and other voices from Western Canada have made much of reforming Canada's democratic institutions, and I agree that a number of them do need reforming. Yet no greater vice to democracy can exist than a government's committing the lives of young people and the whole nation's reputation to war without any consultation or debate. If you believe in democratic values, as you claim, you cannot support such behavior.
The argument is all the more powerful when war is the behavior of a minority government. Your government represents the will of less than forty percent of Canadians. How can you believe then that your views on the war should be the views of most Canadians? Through polls and every other indication of public opinion, the majority of the Canadian people have made it clear they do not support America's wars in the Middle East.
The Canadian general in charge of operations in Afghanistan has made public statements that are shameful to Canada's reputation in the world. Stuff about going over to do some killing. He sounds like an American wannabe raised on Rambo movies.
Canada did have a terrorist incident every bit as dreadful as 9/11. I refer to the bombing of the Air India flight years ago. Taking account of Canada's size, this event killed proportionately more Canadians than 9/11's American victims. While the outcome of that investigation has been disappointing, Canada never contemplated bombing Sikh communities because of it. America's logic in the war on terror is simply that ridiculous.
SORRY, MR. PRIME MINISTER, AFGHANISTAN IS NOT OUR WAR
John Chuckman
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he has trouble understanding Canadians who feel ardently that their country's soldiers should not be involved in Afghanistan.
Toronto Globe and Mail
Afghanistan is not our war, Mr. Prime Minister.
We are not threatened by voices in the Middle East opposing American policy, unless you believe one reference in a recording of bin Laden mentioning Canada along with other countries. That recording, along with other post-invasion recordings, was almost certainly a CIA fraud, for Osama bin Laden had to be killed in the heavy bombing of his mountain redoubt.
Even if you do not believe that bin Laden is dead, what is beyond question is that American activities in Afghanistan and Iraq are building a vast reservoir of resentments and a training school for future terrorists. Tens of thousands of disaffected young Muslim men not only now have something to deeply resent but they have the operational conditions to perfect their arts of covert war. According to countless witnesses from Afghanistan and Iraq, America's brutal, thoughtless tactics have only inflamed tempers. Canada's good name should not be associated with this.
The previous government's making an under-the-table deal with Bush to place Canadian troops in Afghanistan surely does not make it our war. Your continuing, rather shrill, insistence still does not make it so. The deal was, of course, an effort to placate Bush for our not supporting his illegal invasion of Iraq. America is Canada's neighbor, but it is a fatuous and immoral argument that you help your neighbor in criminal activities just because he is your neighbor.
You and other voices from Western Canada have made much of reforming Canada's democratic institutions, and I agree that a number of them do need reforming. Yet no greater vice to democracy can exist than a government's committing the lives of young people and the whole nation's reputation to war without any consultation or debate. If you believe in democratic values, as you claim, you cannot support such behavior.
The argument is all the more powerful when war is the behavior of a minority government. Your government represents the will of less than forty percent of Canadians. How can you believe then that your views on the war should be the views of most Canadians? Through polls and every other indication of public opinion, the majority of the Canadian people have made it clear they do not support America's wars in the Middle East.
The Canadian general in charge of operations in Afghanistan has made public statements that are shameful to Canada's reputation in the world. Stuff about going over to do some killing. He sounds like an American wannabe raised on Rambo movies.
Canada did have a terrorist incident every bit as dreadful as 9/11. I refer to the bombing of the Air India flight years ago. Taking account of Canada's size, this event killed proportionately more Canadians than 9/11's American victims. While the outcome of that investigation has been disappointing, Canada never contemplated bombing Sikh communities because of it. America's logic in the war on terror is simply that ridiculous.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
LIBERAL MEDIA? IN AMERICA? YOU MUST BE KIDDING
January 24, 2002
LIBERAL MEDIA? IN AMERICA? YOU MUST BE KIDDING
How was this fine word (liberal) reduced to shabbiness? The answer is through endless repetition of the parody in magazines, newspapers, and on television. That's not exactly prima fascie evidence for liberal bias in the media.
One the silliest expressions used in America is "liberal media."
The word "liberal" itself has been so abused and twisted in the last few decades, you'd think the Ministry of Truth had decreed its meaning must be changed. "Liberal" has become a contemptuous epithet for opposition to economic liberty, Constitutional principles, and even religious expression.
This is a parody of the word. "Liberal" has to do with open-mindedness, dedication to principles of intellectual liberty, and a strong regard for human rights. Over the last two and a half centuries, expanding the franchise, achieving religious liberty, defending human rights, and concern for the environment were all liberal causes.
Not a bad record, that.
How was this fine word reduced to shabbiness? The answer is through endless repetition of the parody in magazines, newspapers, and on television. That's not exactly prima fascie evidence for liberal bias in the media.
Nothing has changed to erode the truth of that wonderful remark about freedom of the press existing for those who own one. In fact, with massively increased concentration in the ownership of American corporations, including the news business, the remark is more pertinent than ever.
Just reeling off the names of some major owners of America's press and broadcasting tells a story. Rupert Murdoch (Australian billionaire newspaper magnate), Disney Corporation, Dow-Jones, Tribune Corporation, Knight-Ridder, Hearst Corporation, and General Electric. In what possible sense are any of these liberal?
Even the New York Times, often regarded as the liberal paper in America, a paper whose very name causes sagebrush politicians to curl their lips in contempt, is actually a very cautious one, as befits the flagship publication of a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
The Times always defends the establishment. It becomes positively hot and bothered about supporting often-abusive institutions like the FBI over the rights of individuals, as in its hideous, long-term attack on Wen Ho Lee.
Where's the liberal bias? In pompous editorials that read like press releases for the American Imperium? In a slick magazine whose mostly-vapid stories float in a thick ooze of advertising for expensive clothes, perfumes, and furniture? In a letters column whose writers often use two lines to give their titles? Try finding a tough op-ed piece in the New York Times. They're as common as farts in a church service.
Ah, there's public broadcasting, isn't there? But America's public broadcasting is the most sanitized, politically correct that I'm aware of. Public television is hopelessly fluffy,
featuring gorilla pictures narrated by authorities like Martin Sheen and puff-piece investigative reports.
Its evening news specializes in pseudo-debate, invariably with dependents of the two parties exchanging slogans. The program focuses on Beltway babble rather than investigation. Holders of think-tank sinecures are regular seat-fillers. American public radio, which does a better job than television, still lacks breadth of view, lacks bite, and, for the most part, contains precious little not found in mainstream media.
America's public-broadcast officials collapsed in a heap when Newt Gingrich and his band of Texas Visagoths attacked them about running a sandbox for yuppies, and they haven't recovered yet. Public broadcasting has lost much of its government financing over the years, and it lives under constant threat of losing more. After all, the party in power doesn't even pay its UN dues. What's support for public broadcasting compared to international-treaty obligations?
"Is Dan Rather a Republican? Peter Jennings? Tom Brokaw?" ask readers who think they have a definitive point, but the point they make is quite different to the one they think they're making.
Who cares what these gentlemen are as long as they do their jobs? What is it about the right-wing ("conservative" is really too gentle a word) that insists on knowing the details of one's political ties and bedroom habits? Isn't this a little like what you would expect in the old Soviet Union? And who has more influence on the overall character of a news organization, a paid news reader or the guys paying the bills? Anyone with a very good job doesn't have to be told not to seriously irritate the boss.
Reflect on events over some decades and ask yourself about the American press's "liberal" role in them. Did the press ever tell us what happened in the Gulf War? Has it given us much more than Pentagon press releases on Afghanistan? Does the gloss on the Middle East ever go beyond what you'd expect from the State Department?
Did the press ever reveal to the American people what a manipulative monster J. Edgar Hoover was? Did the press tell people, while he was destroying people's lives, that Joe McCarthy was a desperate drunk trying to revive a failing political career? Such questions are endless, and the answer to virtually all of them is "no."
LIBERAL MEDIA? IN AMERICA? YOU MUST BE KIDDING
How was this fine word (liberal) reduced to shabbiness? The answer is through endless repetition of the parody in magazines, newspapers, and on television. That's not exactly prima fascie evidence for liberal bias in the media.
One the silliest expressions used in America is "liberal media."
The word "liberal" itself has been so abused and twisted in the last few decades, you'd think the Ministry of Truth had decreed its meaning must be changed. "Liberal" has become a contemptuous epithet for opposition to economic liberty, Constitutional principles, and even religious expression.
This is a parody of the word. "Liberal" has to do with open-mindedness, dedication to principles of intellectual liberty, and a strong regard for human rights. Over the last two and a half centuries, expanding the franchise, achieving religious liberty, defending human rights, and concern for the environment were all liberal causes.
Not a bad record, that.
How was this fine word reduced to shabbiness? The answer is through endless repetition of the parody in magazines, newspapers, and on television. That's not exactly prima fascie evidence for liberal bias in the media.
Nothing has changed to erode the truth of that wonderful remark about freedom of the press existing for those who own one. In fact, with massively increased concentration in the ownership of American corporations, including the news business, the remark is more pertinent than ever.
Just reeling off the names of some major owners of America's press and broadcasting tells a story. Rupert Murdoch (Australian billionaire newspaper magnate), Disney Corporation, Dow-Jones, Tribune Corporation, Knight-Ridder, Hearst Corporation, and General Electric. In what possible sense are any of these liberal?
Even the New York Times, often regarded as the liberal paper in America, a paper whose very name causes sagebrush politicians to curl their lips in contempt, is actually a very cautious one, as befits the flagship publication of a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
The Times always defends the establishment. It becomes positively hot and bothered about supporting often-abusive institutions like the FBI over the rights of individuals, as in its hideous, long-term attack on Wen Ho Lee.
Where's the liberal bias? In pompous editorials that read like press releases for the American Imperium? In a slick magazine whose mostly-vapid stories float in a thick ooze of advertising for expensive clothes, perfumes, and furniture? In a letters column whose writers often use two lines to give their titles? Try finding a tough op-ed piece in the New York Times. They're as common as farts in a church service.
Ah, there's public broadcasting, isn't there? But America's public broadcasting is the most sanitized, politically correct that I'm aware of. Public television is hopelessly fluffy,
featuring gorilla pictures narrated by authorities like Martin Sheen and puff-piece investigative reports.
Its evening news specializes in pseudo-debate, invariably with dependents of the two parties exchanging slogans. The program focuses on Beltway babble rather than investigation. Holders of think-tank sinecures are regular seat-fillers. American public radio, which does a better job than television, still lacks breadth of view, lacks bite, and, for the most part, contains precious little not found in mainstream media.
America's public-broadcast officials collapsed in a heap when Newt Gingrich and his band of Texas Visagoths attacked them about running a sandbox for yuppies, and they haven't recovered yet. Public broadcasting has lost much of its government financing over the years, and it lives under constant threat of losing more. After all, the party in power doesn't even pay its UN dues. What's support for public broadcasting compared to international-treaty obligations?
"Is Dan Rather a Republican? Peter Jennings? Tom Brokaw?" ask readers who think they have a definitive point, but the point they make is quite different to the one they think they're making.
Who cares what these gentlemen are as long as they do their jobs? What is it about the right-wing ("conservative" is really too gentle a word) that insists on knowing the details of one's political ties and bedroom habits? Isn't this a little like what you would expect in the old Soviet Union? And who has more influence on the overall character of a news organization, a paid news reader or the guys paying the bills? Anyone with a very good job doesn't have to be told not to seriously irritate the boss.
Reflect on events over some decades and ask yourself about the American press's "liberal" role in them. Did the press ever tell us what happened in the Gulf War? Has it given us much more than Pentagon press releases on Afghanistan? Does the gloss on the Middle East ever go beyond what you'd expect from the State Department?
Did the press ever reveal to the American people what a manipulative monster J. Edgar Hoover was? Did the press tell people, while he was destroying people's lives, that Joe McCarthy was a desperate drunk trying to revive a failing political career? Such questions are endless, and the answer to virtually all of them is "no."
GOMER AS CLAUDIUS: PERHAPS THE BEST ARGUMENT FOR IMPROVING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IS THE LAMENTABLE QUALITY OF ITS EMPERORS
April 20, 2002
GOMER AS CLAUDIUS
There has been a fair amount written recently about whether America should just get over the inhibitions of its anti-imperial origins and boldly embrace the fact of its having swelled and fattened into a full-fledged empire - a kind of imperial coming out of the closet, if you will. Favoring, as I do, honesty in politics and human affairs, I tend to support this approach.
But before all the drawling, born-again, yahoo-patriots with custom shotgun racks in the rear windows of their Cadillacs and faded little flags fluttering from the antennas break into the chorus of "Onward Christian Soldiers" (actually, an excellent choice for a new Imperial Anthem), a few qualifying reflections are in order.
Rome built magnificent roads, aqueducts, forums, and theaters where its imperial footstep trod. America leaves behind Coca-Cola bottlers, Lay's potato-chip distributors, piles of trash, cluster-bomb canisters, and landmines. Rome built beautiful temples and embraced all religions. America sends loopy fundamentalist missionaries and people who believe God is an alien life form speaking from tin cans to disparage the ancient beliefs of others.
Rome at least had some great emperors before it fell into decline and experienced such notable events as a group of legionnaires declaring a horse to be emperor. America starts off with the likes of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush - one intelligence, immersed in hormones, sandwiched between two bell hops elevated to the imperial purple. I know, I forgot the whining, snobbish mama's boy who doesn't eat broccoli and who kept looking at his watch when others spoke in a debate, but then, so have most Americans.
It has been observed that so often true evil has a banal appearance, and in the case of
many of history's most evil people, this appears often to have been the case. Think of Hitler eating his beloved pastries, the vegetarian, non-smoker and teetotaler, watching Marlene Dietrich movies. Or Himmler, the weak-chinned, former chicken farmer who ran the dread powers of the SS and other state security for the Third Reich. Think of Stalin, generally sitting quietly at meetings or dinners, always praised by outside observers for his modest manner, quietly smoking his pipe and rarely drinking much even while those around him were reduced to comradely stupor.
These are the kind of people who once in power set in motion the machinery that employs the psychopaths and thugs that constitute some natural share of any society's population in order to turn bad dreams into reality. Generally, their own boots are not splattered with the blood of their victims.
And so we have Emperor Bush, certainly not ranking as one of the great menaces of history, but a man whose banality comes married to a decided taste for the stupid and brutal use of power.
As to his banality, it would be hard to match not just among the world's leaders but among the men briskly walking by on any busy downtown street. His droning, nasally voice suggests a cardigan-sweatered Ozzie Nelson giving Dave and little Ricky a homily after being caught chugging root beers in the kitchen. One senses in Mr. Bush intense earnestness about insignificant matters and uninformed self-righteousness about big ones. One imagines him fitting right in as the manager-trainee going nowhere in the ladies' garments department at a Wal-Mart or the petty assistant vice-principal at an elementary school whose life swells with purpose when disciplining ten-year olds.
Actually, if it weren't for his slurred pronunciation, his Archie-Bunker vocabulary, and the odd, deliberate nincompoop-phrase like "Axis of Evil" or "homicide-bombers" cropping up, there would be no reason ever to listen to his speeches. You can learn nothing from them. They are imperial gestures. His words and views are utterly predictable and commonplace in their expression. The empire would be no worse off were his staff to prepare a multi-purpose, all-occasion, error-free DVD and distribute it to the press corps and members of Congress.
But in so many of Mr. Bush's words and actions one also senses that same conscience-numbed, sniggering tone he used during his campaign in speaking of the scores of prisoners executed in Texas. Whether it's thousands of innocents killed in Afghanistan, murdered and mistreated Afghan prisoners, or Mr. Sharon's running a Murder Incorporated, the tone is the same. Just as with the prisoners in Texas, his emphasis is always on, not the plight of those suffering before him, but on the crimes they are presumed to be answering for.
The banal Mr. Bush in a comparatively short period has managed to give the world a nasty whiff of in-your-face Americanism and, while doing so, to create the beginnings of a dark, unholy alliance. While I fully recognize the inconsistency of speaking about foreign policy and morality in the same breath, still America is the world's first great empire that pretends to adhere to principles of democracy and concern for human rights. There is some reason at least to hope that the mold of history in these matters might one day be broken.
Well, the simple fact is, that with virtually every breath Mr. Bush has worked against these important principles. His idiotic, undefined War against Terror has created needless destruction and privations, threatening itself to become a kind of global terror. That and his cavalier attitude towards international treaties have set a frightening precedent and basis for relationships with the rest of the world.
Israel's Sharon is free to crush Palestinians' hopes, crushing a good many of their people along the way. Russia's Putin, in return for toning down his criticisms of American policy, has been given carte blanche to continue state-terror in Chechnya, the bulldozing of Jenin on a vaster scale. And Turkey, in return for its support of a future attack against Iraq, appears to have received the same carte blanche for its campaign against the Kurds, a people who have suffered under Iraq, Iran, and Turkey and who were treated atrociously by that tireless worker for peace, Henry Kissinger.
Oh, and then there's the new alliance, complete with an exchange of bounty for information and cooperation, with a military man in Pakistan. And the "we'll bomb, you fight" pact with cutthroat warlords of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Of course, they are looking for someone to fill the same role in Iraq, but it's going to be tough with the record of flip-flops and betrayals the U.S. has earned amongst various groups there over the years.
I am reminded of the old joke, "What do you get when you cross a canary with a gorilla?" "I don't know, but when it sings, you had better listen."
Perhaps better than any image I can come up with, this joke describes Mr. Bush as Emperor. A weak, narrow, uninformed man married to a colossal, imperial military machine. And you had better listen.
GOMER AS CLAUDIUS
There has been a fair amount written recently about whether America should just get over the inhibitions of its anti-imperial origins and boldly embrace the fact of its having swelled and fattened into a full-fledged empire - a kind of imperial coming out of the closet, if you will. Favoring, as I do, honesty in politics and human affairs, I tend to support this approach.
But before all the drawling, born-again, yahoo-patriots with custom shotgun racks in the rear windows of their Cadillacs and faded little flags fluttering from the antennas break into the chorus of "Onward Christian Soldiers" (actually, an excellent choice for a new Imperial Anthem), a few qualifying reflections are in order.
Rome built magnificent roads, aqueducts, forums, and theaters where its imperial footstep trod. America leaves behind Coca-Cola bottlers, Lay's potato-chip distributors, piles of trash, cluster-bomb canisters, and landmines. Rome built beautiful temples and embraced all religions. America sends loopy fundamentalist missionaries and people who believe God is an alien life form speaking from tin cans to disparage the ancient beliefs of others.
Rome at least had some great emperors before it fell into decline and experienced such notable events as a group of legionnaires declaring a horse to be emperor. America starts off with the likes of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush - one intelligence, immersed in hormones, sandwiched between two bell hops elevated to the imperial purple. I know, I forgot the whining, snobbish mama's boy who doesn't eat broccoli and who kept looking at his watch when others spoke in a debate, but then, so have most Americans.
It has been observed that so often true evil has a banal appearance, and in the case of
many of history's most evil people, this appears often to have been the case. Think of Hitler eating his beloved pastries, the vegetarian, non-smoker and teetotaler, watching Marlene Dietrich movies. Or Himmler, the weak-chinned, former chicken farmer who ran the dread powers of the SS and other state security for the Third Reich. Think of Stalin, generally sitting quietly at meetings or dinners, always praised by outside observers for his modest manner, quietly smoking his pipe and rarely drinking much even while those around him were reduced to comradely stupor.
These are the kind of people who once in power set in motion the machinery that employs the psychopaths and thugs that constitute some natural share of any society's population in order to turn bad dreams into reality. Generally, their own boots are not splattered with the blood of their victims.
And so we have Emperor Bush, certainly not ranking as one of the great menaces of history, but a man whose banality comes married to a decided taste for the stupid and brutal use of power.
As to his banality, it would be hard to match not just among the world's leaders but among the men briskly walking by on any busy downtown street. His droning, nasally voice suggests a cardigan-sweatered Ozzie Nelson giving Dave and little Ricky a homily after being caught chugging root beers in the kitchen. One senses in Mr. Bush intense earnestness about insignificant matters and uninformed self-righteousness about big ones. One imagines him fitting right in as the manager-trainee going nowhere in the ladies' garments department at a Wal-Mart or the petty assistant vice-principal at an elementary school whose life swells with purpose when disciplining ten-year olds.
Actually, if it weren't for his slurred pronunciation, his Archie-Bunker vocabulary, and the odd, deliberate nincompoop-phrase like "Axis of Evil" or "homicide-bombers" cropping up, there would be no reason ever to listen to his speeches. You can learn nothing from them. They are imperial gestures. His words and views are utterly predictable and commonplace in their expression. The empire would be no worse off were his staff to prepare a multi-purpose, all-occasion, error-free DVD and distribute it to the press corps and members of Congress.
But in so many of Mr. Bush's words and actions one also senses that same conscience-numbed, sniggering tone he used during his campaign in speaking of the scores of prisoners executed in Texas. Whether it's thousands of innocents killed in Afghanistan, murdered and mistreated Afghan prisoners, or Mr. Sharon's running a Murder Incorporated, the tone is the same. Just as with the prisoners in Texas, his emphasis is always on, not the plight of those suffering before him, but on the crimes they are presumed to be answering for.
The banal Mr. Bush in a comparatively short period has managed to give the world a nasty whiff of in-your-face Americanism and, while doing so, to create the beginnings of a dark, unholy alliance. While I fully recognize the inconsistency of speaking about foreign policy and morality in the same breath, still America is the world's first great empire that pretends to adhere to principles of democracy and concern for human rights. There is some reason at least to hope that the mold of history in these matters might one day be broken.
Well, the simple fact is, that with virtually every breath Mr. Bush has worked against these important principles. His idiotic, undefined War against Terror has created needless destruction and privations, threatening itself to become a kind of global terror. That and his cavalier attitude towards international treaties have set a frightening precedent and basis for relationships with the rest of the world.
Israel's Sharon is free to crush Palestinians' hopes, crushing a good many of their people along the way. Russia's Putin, in return for toning down his criticisms of American policy, has been given carte blanche to continue state-terror in Chechnya, the bulldozing of Jenin on a vaster scale. And Turkey, in return for its support of a future attack against Iraq, appears to have received the same carte blanche for its campaign against the Kurds, a people who have suffered under Iraq, Iran, and Turkey and who were treated atrociously by that tireless worker for peace, Henry Kissinger.
Oh, and then there's the new alliance, complete with an exchange of bounty for information and cooperation, with a military man in Pakistan. And the "we'll bomb, you fight" pact with cutthroat warlords of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Of course, they are looking for someone to fill the same role in Iraq, but it's going to be tough with the record of flip-flops and betrayals the U.S. has earned amongst various groups there over the years.
I am reminded of the old joke, "What do you get when you cross a canary with a gorilla?" "I don't know, but when it sings, you had better listen."
Perhaps better than any image I can come up with, this joke describes Mr. Bush as Emperor. A weak, narrow, uninformed man married to a colossal, imperial military machine. And you had better listen.
DARK TALES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH: THE ROLE OF PROPAGANDA IN THE WAR ON TERROR
January 6, 2002
DARK TALES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH
The most effective propaganda theme during the Afghan phase of the War on Terror was the status of women under the Taliban. Almost as if by magic, when the B-52s were ready to make those Afghan heathens understand what red-blooded Christians really mean by hell, articles and broadcast commentaries sprang up like mushrooms after a humid spell to enlighten us on the plight of women in Afghanistan. The subject seems to have been of rather marginal interest before saddling up the B-52s with their thirty-ton loads of high explosive and shrapnel.
Wars always have their propaganda, but it is often not very subtle. In the first world war, the Germans bayoneted babies, and nearly a century later, in a rework of the same false story, the Iraqis tore babies from respirators. But if you want to study the techniques of effective propaganda, you could hardly do better than the War on Terror.
For many, the word propaganda raises an image of ham-fisted Soviet commissars
insisting that black is white. But effective propaganda is far more subtle than that. And who should understand better the dark art of planting suggestions than the most practiced people on the planet at advertising and marketing?
The most effective propaganda theme during the Afghan phase of the War on Terror was the status of women under the Taliban. Almost as if by magic, when the B-52s were ready to make those Afghan heathens understand what red-blooded Christians really mean by hell, articles and broadcast commentaries sprang up like mushrooms after a humid spell to enlighten us on the plight of women in Afghanistan. The subject seems to have been of rather marginal interest before saddling up the B-52s with their thirty-ton loads of high explosive and shrapnel.
Now, please don't misunderstand, women were treated hideously under the Taliban. But women were treated horribly anywhere during the fourteenth century, and that is approximately the phase of development in which the average Afghan lives. Women fared little better under some of the thugs in the Northern Alliance when they ruled previously.
And women do not exactly thrive under the absolutism of Saudi Arabia, a country whose important financial support of the Taliban has been more or less expunged from the record by America's informal-but-effective Ministry of Truth. Women are not treated well in Pakistan either, a vital supporter of the Taliban now redeemed by a cornucopia of bribes.
Wherever economies are poor and backward and wherever religious fundamentalism plays a significant role, women are not treated as full human beings. My goodness, just think of all those old Virginia planters, Thomas Jefferson among them, using their young female slaves for sex.
An interesting sidelight to the Jefferson-Hemmings story, one that gives you a good raw whiff of life under American slavery, is that Sally was the half sister of Jefferson's dead wife, and she resembled her closely. The existence of half-brothers and sisters by slave women was an ordinary fact of Southern plantation culture, but it was not one discussed at Sunday dinner after church.
The American notion that you can just sweep political players off the board and change the basic patterns of a society has no basis in history. It is wishful thinking at best. Advanced societies evolve over long periods of economic growth in which large numbers of people gain the influence that comes with economic resources. This is the way democracy and modern attitudes towards human values develop. This is the story of civilization since the dawn of the modern era about five hundred years ago.
The record of political revolutions when societies were not ripe for their results is one of utter failure. After the American Civil War - a truer political revolution in many respects than the original American Revolution - blacks were fitted into a new, more sophisticated form of bondage for another century. As late as the 1930s in the American South, lynchings were an occasion for family picnics. Only long-term, solid economic growth bringing an end to rural stagnation made it possible to change the status of America's blacks.
Now America has just about achieved its limited purpose in Afghanistan. America is not about to try occupying the place as the Russians tried doing, nor does it seem likely that truly generous financial assistance will be given to these very poor people once our dirty work is done. No, that kind of generosity is saved by the State Department for places we need to bribe.
Does anyone believe that the status of Afghan women will change greatly after the first photo-op schools for girls, with a few hundred token students, have been adequately featured in our press? Or that we will ever hear much about anything in Afghanistan once we have destroyed what we came to destroy?
I hope I am wrong, but history doesn't support optimism here. Afghanistan - like Haiti, following a more elaborate, showboat intervention - will recede from our view and sink back more or less to the same early state of economic and social development that characterized it before.
The point of the propaganda effort on women's rights was that the subject should be on people's minds when it counted, when our bombs were blowing the limbs off peasants. Aroused concern in America over those rights blunted potential criticism by middle-class women to the bombing. It made the sensibilities of soccer moms safe for Bush. And, like all the best propaganda, it started with truth.
Another line of propaganda in Afghanistan, less subtle and less truthful, has been that familiar refrain, "weapons of mass destruction." This phrase, so overused in the case of Iraq, is beginning to sound a bit tinny and hollow, but it proved still serviceable for Afghanistan. Although coming as it does from the only nation that ever totally incinerated two cities full of civilians, it is remarkable that the speakers have not choked on the words.
One cannot help recalling Secretary of Defense Cohen at a pulpit in the Pentagon a few years ago, preaching to us about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. In his best, earnest vacuum-cleaner salesman's style, he held up a bag of sugar to illustrate how small a quantity of some nasty things could destroy American society.
The truth is that there is only one weapon of mass destruction, and that weapon is a nuclear or thermonuclear device. Biological agents, while all advanced countries have experimented heavily with them, are not effective weapons of mass destruction.
The actions of our own armed forces support this assertion. The Pentagon never saw a weapon it didn't like, so long as it does a good job of killing people - and that is the very reason it strongly opposes the international treaty against land-mines. But the Pentagon is not uncomfortable with existing international regimes concerning biological warfare.
Sophisticated delivery systems are essential to any success with these weapons - we saw with the anthrax scare that crude distribution methods render biological agents to be anything but weapons of mass destruction. Even with such delivery systems, weather and other factors make using these weapons full of uncertainty.
Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War did not use his supply of biological and chemical weapons. American and Israeli nuclear weapons provided a complete check against his paltry arsenal. The calculation is easy enough to make: inflict some highly uncertain and limited damage on your enemy in exchange for the certainty of being obliterated. Even a man often called mad was unwilling to take those odds.
Now, anyone with a fully-functioning brain knows that a true terrorist would relish having a nuclear weapon. I am sure Timothy McVeigh dreamed dreams of possessing such power. And the boys who were to die slaughtering their fellow students at Columbine High School undoubtedly enjoyed such fantasies. But what has that to do with reality? Reports of pieces of paper with such dreams found in Al Quaida caves are meaningless, except to scare people by combining the words nuclear and bomb and Al Quaida in the same statement.
The only kind of bomb involving nuclear material that an organization like Al Quaida would be remotely capable of making is a conventional bomb wrapped in radioactive material. Such a bomb would leave an area littered with radioactive debris, but it is not a particularly effective weapon. Discussing it in the same breath with a device capable of a nuclear explosion is confusing and dishonest.
Nuclear weapons still represent a massive technological and financial undertaking, far beyond the resources of an Al Quaida, and Washington's experts know this. Even Iraq, with all its oil wealth and the kind of government that can direct resources without answering to anyone, working very hard to develop a nuclear weapon, remained at least a few years from getting it.
DARK TALES FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH
The most effective propaganda theme during the Afghan phase of the War on Terror was the status of women under the Taliban. Almost as if by magic, when the B-52s were ready to make those Afghan heathens understand what red-blooded Christians really mean by hell, articles and broadcast commentaries sprang up like mushrooms after a humid spell to enlighten us on the plight of women in Afghanistan. The subject seems to have been of rather marginal interest before saddling up the B-52s with their thirty-ton loads of high explosive and shrapnel.
Wars always have their propaganda, but it is often not very subtle. In the first world war, the Germans bayoneted babies, and nearly a century later, in a rework of the same false story, the Iraqis tore babies from respirators. But if you want to study the techniques of effective propaganda, you could hardly do better than the War on Terror.
For many, the word propaganda raises an image of ham-fisted Soviet commissars
insisting that black is white. But effective propaganda is far more subtle than that. And who should understand better the dark art of planting suggestions than the most practiced people on the planet at advertising and marketing?
The most effective propaganda theme during the Afghan phase of the War on Terror was the status of women under the Taliban. Almost as if by magic, when the B-52s were ready to make those Afghan heathens understand what red-blooded Christians really mean by hell, articles and broadcast commentaries sprang up like mushrooms after a humid spell to enlighten us on the plight of women in Afghanistan. The subject seems to have been of rather marginal interest before saddling up the B-52s with their thirty-ton loads of high explosive and shrapnel.
Now, please don't misunderstand, women were treated hideously under the Taliban. But women were treated horribly anywhere during the fourteenth century, and that is approximately the phase of development in which the average Afghan lives. Women fared little better under some of the thugs in the Northern Alliance when they ruled previously.
And women do not exactly thrive under the absolutism of Saudi Arabia, a country whose important financial support of the Taliban has been more or less expunged from the record by America's informal-but-effective Ministry of Truth. Women are not treated well in Pakistan either, a vital supporter of the Taliban now redeemed by a cornucopia of bribes.
Wherever economies are poor and backward and wherever religious fundamentalism plays a significant role, women are not treated as full human beings. My goodness, just think of all those old Virginia planters, Thomas Jefferson among them, using their young female slaves for sex.
An interesting sidelight to the Jefferson-Hemmings story, one that gives you a good raw whiff of life under American slavery, is that Sally was the half sister of Jefferson's dead wife, and she resembled her closely. The existence of half-brothers and sisters by slave women was an ordinary fact of Southern plantation culture, but it was not one discussed at Sunday dinner after church.
The American notion that you can just sweep political players off the board and change the basic patterns of a society has no basis in history. It is wishful thinking at best. Advanced societies evolve over long periods of economic growth in which large numbers of people gain the influence that comes with economic resources. This is the way democracy and modern attitudes towards human values develop. This is the story of civilization since the dawn of the modern era about five hundred years ago.
The record of political revolutions when societies were not ripe for their results is one of utter failure. After the American Civil War - a truer political revolution in many respects than the original American Revolution - blacks were fitted into a new, more sophisticated form of bondage for another century. As late as the 1930s in the American South, lynchings were an occasion for family picnics. Only long-term, solid economic growth bringing an end to rural stagnation made it possible to change the status of America's blacks.
Now America has just about achieved its limited purpose in Afghanistan. America is not about to try occupying the place as the Russians tried doing, nor does it seem likely that truly generous financial assistance will be given to these very poor people once our dirty work is done. No, that kind of generosity is saved by the State Department for places we need to bribe.
Does anyone believe that the status of Afghan women will change greatly after the first photo-op schools for girls, with a few hundred token students, have been adequately featured in our press? Or that we will ever hear much about anything in Afghanistan once we have destroyed what we came to destroy?
I hope I am wrong, but history doesn't support optimism here. Afghanistan - like Haiti, following a more elaborate, showboat intervention - will recede from our view and sink back more or less to the same early state of economic and social development that characterized it before.
The point of the propaganda effort on women's rights was that the subject should be on people's minds when it counted, when our bombs were blowing the limbs off peasants. Aroused concern in America over those rights blunted potential criticism by middle-class women to the bombing. It made the sensibilities of soccer moms safe for Bush. And, like all the best propaganda, it started with truth.
Another line of propaganda in Afghanistan, less subtle and less truthful, has been that familiar refrain, "weapons of mass destruction." This phrase, so overused in the case of Iraq, is beginning to sound a bit tinny and hollow, but it proved still serviceable for Afghanistan. Although coming as it does from the only nation that ever totally incinerated two cities full of civilians, it is remarkable that the speakers have not choked on the words.
One cannot help recalling Secretary of Defense Cohen at a pulpit in the Pentagon a few years ago, preaching to us about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. In his best, earnest vacuum-cleaner salesman's style, he held up a bag of sugar to illustrate how small a quantity of some nasty things could destroy American society.
The truth is that there is only one weapon of mass destruction, and that weapon is a nuclear or thermonuclear device. Biological agents, while all advanced countries have experimented heavily with them, are not effective weapons of mass destruction.
The actions of our own armed forces support this assertion. The Pentagon never saw a weapon it didn't like, so long as it does a good job of killing people - and that is the very reason it strongly opposes the international treaty against land-mines. But the Pentagon is not uncomfortable with existing international regimes concerning biological warfare.
Sophisticated delivery systems are essential to any success with these weapons - we saw with the anthrax scare that crude distribution methods render biological agents to be anything but weapons of mass destruction. Even with such delivery systems, weather and other factors make using these weapons full of uncertainty.
Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War did not use his supply of biological and chemical weapons. American and Israeli nuclear weapons provided a complete check against his paltry arsenal. The calculation is easy enough to make: inflict some highly uncertain and limited damage on your enemy in exchange for the certainty of being obliterated. Even a man often called mad was unwilling to take those odds.
Now, anyone with a fully-functioning brain knows that a true terrorist would relish having a nuclear weapon. I am sure Timothy McVeigh dreamed dreams of possessing such power. And the boys who were to die slaughtering their fellow students at Columbine High School undoubtedly enjoyed such fantasies. But what has that to do with reality? Reports of pieces of paper with such dreams found in Al Quaida caves are meaningless, except to scare people by combining the words nuclear and bomb and Al Quaida in the same statement.
The only kind of bomb involving nuclear material that an organization like Al Quaida would be remotely capable of making is a conventional bomb wrapped in radioactive material. Such a bomb would leave an area littered with radioactive debris, but it is not a particularly effective weapon. Discussing it in the same breath with a device capable of a nuclear explosion is confusing and dishonest.
Nuclear weapons still represent a massive technological and financial undertaking, far beyond the resources of an Al Quaida, and Washington's experts know this. Even Iraq, with all its oil wealth and the kind of government that can direct resources without answering to anyone, working very hard to develop a nuclear weapon, remained at least a few years from getting it.
A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT: AN IDIOT CALLED BUSH
July 4, 2002
A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT
Full of sound and fury signifying nothing
It's almost as though American policy in Afghanistan had followed the script for a Hollywood summer blockbuster. A potboiler-epic aimed at pleasing affluent, pimply teenage boys, dreaming dreams of power and adventure, its script mixing generous helpings of Cecil B. deMille, Steven Spielberg, explosive special effects, bad dialogue, and a lack of intelligible plot.
That may not be an exaggeration. Only reflect that America's second-last, dangerously hare-brained president, Mr. Nixon, used to watch the movie Patton over and over again, hoping to derive inspiration in dealing with the catastrophe he himself created.
Unfortunately, this isn't a movie. Real lives and real villages are being torn apart by a slightly-earlier generation of pimply American boys at the controls of some of the world's most hellish weapons. Boys like that eager fellow, reportedly nick-named "Psycho" by some of his comrades, who ignored procedures to get "a kill," his target being a group of Canadian soldiers carrying out known exercises.
(Canadians, by the way, will be grateful that the county's modest contribution to insanity in the mountains will end soon. America brow-beat its allies into playing supporting roles, hoping to give vengeance the color of a genuine international cause. It was easier this time than it was for Vietnam owing to people's initial, instinctive sympathy for those killed September 11. But one remembers the story of how Lyndon Johnson grabbed Prime Minister Lester Pearson, winner of the Nobel peace prize, by the lapels and tried intimidating him into contributing troops for Vietnam. Thank God, Pearson stood his ground against the Texas thug.)
In December of last year, U.S. planes mistakenly attacked a convoy of tribal elders, killing 65 people. There were reports that this ugly incident had an even uglier origin: Americans had been deliberately tricked by one of the cut-throat factions now ruling the country into eliminating some political opposition. Since then there have been many lethal attacks on the wrong people.
Now we have the report of a wedding party in southern Afghanistan blown to bits. The government in Afghanistan reports 40 killed, including the bride and groom, and 100 injured, by some trigger-happy fly-boy undoubtedly trying to clutch Psycho's fallen laurels. (Actually this was the second wedding party attacked, the first was in eastern Afghanistan in May with 10 killed.)
I suppose we can be grateful the Pentagon much earlier gave up its disgusting stunt of dropping food-ration packets along with 500-pond bombs. Imagine bags of freeze-dried rice dropped on the bodies of the bride and groom?
Does anyone understand why American planes are still bombing Afghanistan? Oh, yes, I forgot, to destroy any elusive al Qaeda who might still be clambering the rocky slopes in sandals threatening New York. And it makes such good sense to do this with bombs from the air where you cannot distinguish a cleric from a warrior, a rifle from a hoe. Perhaps al Qaeda members are supposed to wear transponders for easy identification?
Recent stories from Britain reveal the utter contempt in which American tactics are held by senior officials there - information suppressed until now by the heavy hand of Prime Minister Tony Blair who seems keen to play dwarf armor-polisher to America's idiot-prince. The tactics in question include American special forces in Pakistan and border areas of Afghanistan conducting searches for hidden al Qaeda by breaking into village homes with weapons blazing away, completely oblivious to the fact that this is not a part of the world where arrogant, insulting behavior is easily forgiven.
Can you imagine what a hellish storm of vengeance and terror Northern Ireland would have reaped had British troops behaved that way? In more than a quarter century of civil unrest in Northern Ireland, bad as it was, fewer people died on all sides than the number in Afghanistan killed by Americans during just a few months. You might think Americans had some valuable lessons to learn from Britain's long, demanding experience in Northern Ireland, but the kind of Americans in Bush's crowd already know everything, possessing wisdom magically sprung from the head of Zeus.
Not that you'd know it from America's limp press, but it does appear that the country's special forces, whose every member has more expensive outfits and fancy equipment than the deluxe jet-set, celebrity edition of Barbie comes with, have pretty much come up short in every significant operation so far.
Except, of course, for the massacre at Mazar-I-Sharif. Scots film maker Jamie Doran has shown parliamentarians in Europe the first portion of his documentary on the disappearance of about three thousand prisoners after their surrender. The film has terrible things to say of American participation. Hundreds of Taleban prisoners were driven in vans out into the desert by order of a local American commander, and those not suffocated by the heat were shot dead by General Dostrum's troops while Americans casually watched.
A secret report released to the New York Times indicates that even American authorities know what a failure the war has been. It has only succeeded in dispersing anti-American terrorists throughout the Muslim world.
The actual membership of al Qaeda was always very small, far smaller than any Chicago street gang, and never bore any relation to the addled claims of Mr. Bush. They might have been dealt with handily by a set intelligent policies and diplomatic moves rather than a mindless crusade costing tens of billions of dollars.
The recent, much-publicized loya jirga, a grand council of delegates from all over Afghanistan, did little more than set up a temporary figurehead government, a kind of national fig leaf for the nakedness of the war lords who now rule most of the country. Astute readers will rightly ask how delegates could possibly have been chosen in any representative fashion from regions governed by war lords, places that are no-go areas for foreign troops.
At least now the way is clear for America, in its usual end-of-bombing fashion, to hightail it out after a decent interval. Ari Fleischer will blubber claims of having brought democracy to Afghanistan. Who knows, maybe Billy Graham will join in with prayers of thanksgiving before a joint session of Congress for all the swarthy heathens killed? Only the keen political sensibilities of George Orwell could have fully appreciated America's second wave of destruction in Afghanistan being celebrated as an achievement.
All these developments - Afghanistan left in turmoil, war lords in control, stupid tactics creating many more angry young men seeking vengeance, the dispersal of anti-American leaders - together with the ugly new line on the Palestinians that the weak Mr. Bush has been cornered into accepting, promise little peace or security for anyone. It's almost as though Ariel Sharon had been named special advisor to the president, and a stunning appointment it is: a man who has spent his life killing innocent people as an envoy for peace.
I reflect back to the Pentagon general who announced not so very long ago, as the forces of the Northern Alliance bravely swept across a landscape first cleared by American carpet-bombing, that this promised to be one of the most effective military actions in history. Here was a case of "pride goeth before the fall" if ever there was.
Of course, you must take account of the fact that he spoke from the perspective of half a century of costly, unprincipled, and often inept American colonial military action - the murderous shame of Vietnam, the pointless destruction in Cambodia, the almost-laughable theater of the absurd in Somalia, the marines providing live targets in Lebanon, the Army's School of the Americas training the creatures of dictators in the fine points of torture and killing, the destruction of an Iranian civilian airliner with three-hundred souls aboard (an act which also deserves rarely-given credit for the reprisal destruction of the Pan-Am Lockerbie flight), the sinking of a Japanese civilian ship, the vicious fly-boy pranks that hurled an Italian gondola full of people down a mountain, the numerous rapes and assaults by troops in Okinawa.
The general's breast swelled with the proud reflection that Americans had been so stunningly-successful where the Russians had miserably failed. Of course, he ignored the fact that Russia attempted something quite different to what America has attempted. He also ignored the fact that the Russians worked against a vast secret war waged by the CIA, whose activities in Afghanistan are what made September 11 possible. But most of all, he arrogantly ignored the fact that the play in Afghanistan has not gone beyond the first scene of the first act.
______________________________
A final note of irony: How sound is government now in Afghanistan?
In early July, just after this piece was written, the Minister for Public Works, Abdul Qadir, who also served as one of three vice-presidents, was assassinated in Kabul. Last April in Jalalabad, there was an attempt to assassinate Mohammad Fahim, Interim Defense Minister. In February, Abdul Rahman, Civil Aviation Minister, was assassinated at the airport in Kabul, other ministers being implicated in his death. Readers should note that Kabul, where two of these assassinations occurred is the most secure part of the country.
Despite their over-advertised nastiness, this is exactly the anarchy the Taleban ended before American bombing ended the Taleban. So far as we know, the Taleban had nothing to do with September 11, and they were willing to extradite Osama bin Laden and others upon America's producing evidence of their guilt, a universally-accepted practice in legal extradition. But this was not acceptable to Mr. Bush, and, apart from its many other costly failures, his crusade in Afghanistan has not produced bin Laden.
A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT
Full of sound and fury signifying nothing
It's almost as though American policy in Afghanistan had followed the script for a Hollywood summer blockbuster. A potboiler-epic aimed at pleasing affluent, pimply teenage boys, dreaming dreams of power and adventure, its script mixing generous helpings of Cecil B. deMille, Steven Spielberg, explosive special effects, bad dialogue, and a lack of intelligible plot.
That may not be an exaggeration. Only reflect that America's second-last, dangerously hare-brained president, Mr. Nixon, used to watch the movie Patton over and over again, hoping to derive inspiration in dealing with the catastrophe he himself created.
Unfortunately, this isn't a movie. Real lives and real villages are being torn apart by a slightly-earlier generation of pimply American boys at the controls of some of the world's most hellish weapons. Boys like that eager fellow, reportedly nick-named "Psycho" by some of his comrades, who ignored procedures to get "a kill," his target being a group of Canadian soldiers carrying out known exercises.
(Canadians, by the way, will be grateful that the county's modest contribution to insanity in the mountains will end soon. America brow-beat its allies into playing supporting roles, hoping to give vengeance the color of a genuine international cause. It was easier this time than it was for Vietnam owing to people's initial, instinctive sympathy for those killed September 11. But one remembers the story of how Lyndon Johnson grabbed Prime Minister Lester Pearson, winner of the Nobel peace prize, by the lapels and tried intimidating him into contributing troops for Vietnam. Thank God, Pearson stood his ground against the Texas thug.)
In December of last year, U.S. planes mistakenly attacked a convoy of tribal elders, killing 65 people. There were reports that this ugly incident had an even uglier origin: Americans had been deliberately tricked by one of the cut-throat factions now ruling the country into eliminating some political opposition. Since then there have been many lethal attacks on the wrong people.
Now we have the report of a wedding party in southern Afghanistan blown to bits. The government in Afghanistan reports 40 killed, including the bride and groom, and 100 injured, by some trigger-happy fly-boy undoubtedly trying to clutch Psycho's fallen laurels. (Actually this was the second wedding party attacked, the first was in eastern Afghanistan in May with 10 killed.)
I suppose we can be grateful the Pentagon much earlier gave up its disgusting stunt of dropping food-ration packets along with 500-pond bombs. Imagine bags of freeze-dried rice dropped on the bodies of the bride and groom?
Does anyone understand why American planes are still bombing Afghanistan? Oh, yes, I forgot, to destroy any elusive al Qaeda who might still be clambering the rocky slopes in sandals threatening New York. And it makes such good sense to do this with bombs from the air where you cannot distinguish a cleric from a warrior, a rifle from a hoe. Perhaps al Qaeda members are supposed to wear transponders for easy identification?
Recent stories from Britain reveal the utter contempt in which American tactics are held by senior officials there - information suppressed until now by the heavy hand of Prime Minister Tony Blair who seems keen to play dwarf armor-polisher to America's idiot-prince. The tactics in question include American special forces in Pakistan and border areas of Afghanistan conducting searches for hidden al Qaeda by breaking into village homes with weapons blazing away, completely oblivious to the fact that this is not a part of the world where arrogant, insulting behavior is easily forgiven.
Can you imagine what a hellish storm of vengeance and terror Northern Ireland would have reaped had British troops behaved that way? In more than a quarter century of civil unrest in Northern Ireland, bad as it was, fewer people died on all sides than the number in Afghanistan killed by Americans during just a few months. You might think Americans had some valuable lessons to learn from Britain's long, demanding experience in Northern Ireland, but the kind of Americans in Bush's crowd already know everything, possessing wisdom magically sprung from the head of Zeus.
Not that you'd know it from America's limp press, but it does appear that the country's special forces, whose every member has more expensive outfits and fancy equipment than the deluxe jet-set, celebrity edition of Barbie comes with, have pretty much come up short in every significant operation so far.
Except, of course, for the massacre at Mazar-I-Sharif. Scots film maker Jamie Doran has shown parliamentarians in Europe the first portion of his documentary on the disappearance of about three thousand prisoners after their surrender. The film has terrible things to say of American participation. Hundreds of Taleban prisoners were driven in vans out into the desert by order of a local American commander, and those not suffocated by the heat were shot dead by General Dostrum's troops while Americans casually watched.
A secret report released to the New York Times indicates that even American authorities know what a failure the war has been. It has only succeeded in dispersing anti-American terrorists throughout the Muslim world.
The actual membership of al Qaeda was always very small, far smaller than any Chicago street gang, and never bore any relation to the addled claims of Mr. Bush. They might have been dealt with handily by a set intelligent policies and diplomatic moves rather than a mindless crusade costing tens of billions of dollars.
The recent, much-publicized loya jirga, a grand council of delegates from all over Afghanistan, did little more than set up a temporary figurehead government, a kind of national fig leaf for the nakedness of the war lords who now rule most of the country. Astute readers will rightly ask how delegates could possibly have been chosen in any representative fashion from regions governed by war lords, places that are no-go areas for foreign troops.
At least now the way is clear for America, in its usual end-of-bombing fashion, to hightail it out after a decent interval. Ari Fleischer will blubber claims of having brought democracy to Afghanistan. Who knows, maybe Billy Graham will join in with prayers of thanksgiving before a joint session of Congress for all the swarthy heathens killed? Only the keen political sensibilities of George Orwell could have fully appreciated America's second wave of destruction in Afghanistan being celebrated as an achievement.
All these developments - Afghanistan left in turmoil, war lords in control, stupid tactics creating many more angry young men seeking vengeance, the dispersal of anti-American leaders - together with the ugly new line on the Palestinians that the weak Mr. Bush has been cornered into accepting, promise little peace or security for anyone. It's almost as though Ariel Sharon had been named special advisor to the president, and a stunning appointment it is: a man who has spent his life killing innocent people as an envoy for peace.
I reflect back to the Pentagon general who announced not so very long ago, as the forces of the Northern Alliance bravely swept across a landscape first cleared by American carpet-bombing, that this promised to be one of the most effective military actions in history. Here was a case of "pride goeth before the fall" if ever there was.
Of course, you must take account of the fact that he spoke from the perspective of half a century of costly, unprincipled, and often inept American colonial military action - the murderous shame of Vietnam, the pointless destruction in Cambodia, the almost-laughable theater of the absurd in Somalia, the marines providing live targets in Lebanon, the Army's School of the Americas training the creatures of dictators in the fine points of torture and killing, the destruction of an Iranian civilian airliner with three-hundred souls aboard (an act which also deserves rarely-given credit for the reprisal destruction of the Pan-Am Lockerbie flight), the sinking of a Japanese civilian ship, the vicious fly-boy pranks that hurled an Italian gondola full of people down a mountain, the numerous rapes and assaults by troops in Okinawa.
The general's breast swelled with the proud reflection that Americans had been so stunningly-successful where the Russians had miserably failed. Of course, he ignored the fact that Russia attempted something quite different to what America has attempted. He also ignored the fact that the Russians worked against a vast secret war waged by the CIA, whose activities in Afghanistan are what made September 11 possible. But most of all, he arrogantly ignored the fact that the play in Afghanistan has not gone beyond the first scene of the first act.
______________________________
A final note of irony: How sound is government now in Afghanistan?
In early July, just after this piece was written, the Minister for Public Works, Abdul Qadir, who also served as one of three vice-presidents, was assassinated in Kabul. Last April in Jalalabad, there was an attempt to assassinate Mohammad Fahim, Interim Defense Minister. In February, Abdul Rahman, Civil Aviation Minister, was assassinated at the airport in Kabul, other ministers being implicated in his death. Readers should note that Kabul, where two of these assassinations occurred is the most secure part of the country.
Despite their over-advertised nastiness, this is exactly the anarchy the Taleban ended before American bombing ended the Taleban. So far as we know, the Taleban had nothing to do with September 11, and they were willing to extradite Osama bin Laden and others upon America's producing evidence of their guilt, a universally-accepted practice in legal extradition. But this was not acceptable to Mr. Bush, and, apart from its many other costly failures, his crusade in Afghanistan has not produced bin Laden.
THE FIRST VICTIM IN THE WAR AGAINST TERROR
December 18, 2001
THE FIRST VICTIM IN THE WAR AGAINST TERROR
Mr. Bush's actions in Afghanistan have made it almost impossible for him to resist the bloody-minded Mr. Sharon. After all, Bush's approach to terror originating out of Afghanistan is the Israeli model: you destroy things and kill people even if their only connection with an attack is shared geography.
The absurdity of the policy is made clear by analogy. Imagine the American government bombing the city of Buffalo, New York, because that is where Timothy McVeigh grew up. Or bulldozing the homes of his relatives.
It takes a good deal of time to realize the full impact of any large and sudden change in foreign policy, and this is especially true of the kind of sudden, violent interventions often undertaken by the United States since the end of World War ll.
In the case of Mr. Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, it took the best part of a decade for results to unfold: a beautiful, peaceful country was reduced to despair and savagery by bombing, a coup, invasions, and a politically-motivated holocaust.
The men responsible for destabilizing Cambodia in the name of expedient policy were not only ten thousand miles removed from the misery they created, they were soon gone from office, busying themselves with memoirs justifying their deeds to others also ten thousand miles removed. In all cases, the stench never quite reached their nostrils.
The most important antecedent of the War against Terror was another expedient, violent policy - the recruitment, training, and supply of Islamic fighters for a proxy war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Once America's immediate goal had been met in that war - that is, inflicting maximum damage on the Soviet Union - the mess created in achieving it was of no interest. Just as was the case in Cambodia. And just as was the case in many lesser American interventions from Chile to El Salvador.
Part of the behavior exhibited in these examples is a direct extension from American domestic life - enjoy your beer and toss the can for someone else to pick up. Only in foreign affairs, it's other people's lives being tossed.
The impact of intervention in Afghanistan during the 1980s has only been realized more than a decade after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Afghan people have experienced more than a decade of anarchy, tribal warfare, and the Taliban's coming to power as a result (Despite the Taliban's obvious shortcomings as a government, they came to power to end the violence that Americans, after arming everyone to the teeth, couldn't be bothered about, and they did succeed at least in cleaning up America's carelessly tossed trash).
The War against Terror itself will have many unforeseen results. This very fact was one of the soundest arguments against proceeding in the fashion that Mr. Bush has done, without ever attempting to use diplomacy or international institutions to bring to justice those responsible for terrible acts. Now, with the fairly rapid collapse of the Taliban, the Bush people are having a difficult time controlling a tendency to smirk, but the savage work of B-52s does seem an odd thing to smirk about.
The first clearly discernable victims of carpet-bombing Afghanistan and overthrowing its government (other than dead and starving Afghan peasants, streams of refugees, murdered prisoners of war, and a new bunch of thugs in power - none of which appear to be of great concern to Americans or their government) are the Palestinians.
Mr. Bush's actions in Afghanistan have made it almost impossible for him to resist the bloody-minded Mr. Sharon. After all, Bush's approach to terror originating out of Afghanistan is the Israeli model: you destroy things and kill people even if their only connection with an attack is shared geography.
The absurdity of the policy is made clear by analogy. Imagine the American government bombing the city of Buffalo, New York, because that is where Timothy McVeigh grew up. Or bulldozing the homes of his relatives.
The futility of the policy is obvious from Israel's decades-long experiment on unwilling subjects. She has succeeded only in raising new generations of bitter enemies - groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, more fanatical than the PLO, are in large part creatures of Israeli policy.
Despite extremely harsh practices, Israel has never succeeded in silencing such opposition groups in territories she herself occupied. Despite a lifetime's experience in brutality, Mr. Sharon is not able to stop desperate young men from committing kamikaze acts in the heart of Israel. Yet we have Mr. Sharon's demand that Mr. Arafat, with his pitiful resources and unstable political environment, do so as a pre-condition even for talking. At the same time, Mr. Sharon labels Mr. Arafat "irrelevant," proceeds with a policy of serial assassination in the West Bank, and blows up the tiny bit of infrastructure that gives Arafat's government any sense of authority.
This is plainly irrational, yet Mr. Bush is in no position to say so. Mr. Sharon has very pointedly made the comparison between the two situations, Bush bombing Afghanistan and Sharon bombing the West Bank and Gaza. Of course, there are many differences in the two situations, starting with the fact that the Palestinians live under conditions that most Americans would never tolerate without making full use of Second-Amendment rights. But the differences are too complex to explain to a broad political audience, while the gross parallels are obvious to everyone - facts which work in Mr. Sharon's favor.
In the long term, Mr. Sharon's approach is hopeless, but hopeless policies can do a lot of damage in the meantime. The Palestinians are not going to disappear or become, as so many of Israel's leaders have wished them to be, absorbed by Jordan. Israel with her policy of settlements in the West Bank has always talked of having "facts on the ground," but there are no more convincing facts on the ground than a few million people with a high birth rate.
And a few million people living with no hope, right next to a few million people who regard them darkly only as something to contain while themselves living in considerable comfort, is by definition a volatile and dangerous situation. Israel controls this situation, just as South Africa did in very similar circumstances (even more so, since the Palestinians are a minority rather than a great majority). It seems almost sarcasm to write or speak, as most of our press does, of two "partners" in a "peace process" and how one of them, the Palestinians, has utterly failed its responsibilities.
A viable Palestinian state with generous Israeli assistance for its economic success is the only intelligible concept of peace. But it seems impossible that the statesmanship required can ever come from a man with as much blood on his hands as Mr. Sharon, or from his nemesis, the Nixonesque Mr. Netanyahu who waits grinning darkly in the wings. And it seems equally impossible that Mr. Bush, purring with satisfaction over the immediate results of his nasty work in Afghanistan, can rise to what is required of an American president with any pretensions to genuine leadership in the world.
THE FIRST VICTIM IN THE WAR AGAINST TERROR
Mr. Bush's actions in Afghanistan have made it almost impossible for him to resist the bloody-minded Mr. Sharon. After all, Bush's approach to terror originating out of Afghanistan is the Israeli model: you destroy things and kill people even if their only connection with an attack is shared geography.
The absurdity of the policy is made clear by analogy. Imagine the American government bombing the city of Buffalo, New York, because that is where Timothy McVeigh grew up. Or bulldozing the homes of his relatives.
It takes a good deal of time to realize the full impact of any large and sudden change in foreign policy, and this is especially true of the kind of sudden, violent interventions often undertaken by the United States since the end of World War ll.
In the case of Mr. Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, it took the best part of a decade for results to unfold: a beautiful, peaceful country was reduced to despair and savagery by bombing, a coup, invasions, and a politically-motivated holocaust.
The men responsible for destabilizing Cambodia in the name of expedient policy were not only ten thousand miles removed from the misery they created, they were soon gone from office, busying themselves with memoirs justifying their deeds to others also ten thousand miles removed. In all cases, the stench never quite reached their nostrils.
The most important antecedent of the War against Terror was another expedient, violent policy - the recruitment, training, and supply of Islamic fighters for a proxy war against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Once America's immediate goal had been met in that war - that is, inflicting maximum damage on the Soviet Union - the mess created in achieving it was of no interest. Just as was the case in Cambodia. And just as was the case in many lesser American interventions from Chile to El Salvador.
Part of the behavior exhibited in these examples is a direct extension from American domestic life - enjoy your beer and toss the can for someone else to pick up. Only in foreign affairs, it's other people's lives being tossed.
The impact of intervention in Afghanistan during the 1980s has only been realized more than a decade after the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Afghan people have experienced more than a decade of anarchy, tribal warfare, and the Taliban's coming to power as a result (Despite the Taliban's obvious shortcomings as a government, they came to power to end the violence that Americans, after arming everyone to the teeth, couldn't be bothered about, and they did succeed at least in cleaning up America's carelessly tossed trash).
The War against Terror itself will have many unforeseen results. This very fact was one of the soundest arguments against proceeding in the fashion that Mr. Bush has done, without ever attempting to use diplomacy or international institutions to bring to justice those responsible for terrible acts. Now, with the fairly rapid collapse of the Taliban, the Bush people are having a difficult time controlling a tendency to smirk, but the savage work of B-52s does seem an odd thing to smirk about.
The first clearly discernable victims of carpet-bombing Afghanistan and overthrowing its government (other than dead and starving Afghan peasants, streams of refugees, murdered prisoners of war, and a new bunch of thugs in power - none of which appear to be of great concern to Americans or their government) are the Palestinians.
Mr. Bush's actions in Afghanistan have made it almost impossible for him to resist the bloody-minded Mr. Sharon. After all, Bush's approach to terror originating out of Afghanistan is the Israeli model: you destroy things and kill people even if their only connection with an attack is shared geography.
The absurdity of the policy is made clear by analogy. Imagine the American government bombing the city of Buffalo, New York, because that is where Timothy McVeigh grew up. Or bulldozing the homes of his relatives.
The futility of the policy is obvious from Israel's decades-long experiment on unwilling subjects. She has succeeded only in raising new generations of bitter enemies - groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad, more fanatical than the PLO, are in large part creatures of Israeli policy.
Despite extremely harsh practices, Israel has never succeeded in silencing such opposition groups in territories she herself occupied. Despite a lifetime's experience in brutality, Mr. Sharon is not able to stop desperate young men from committing kamikaze acts in the heart of Israel. Yet we have Mr. Sharon's demand that Mr. Arafat, with his pitiful resources and unstable political environment, do so as a pre-condition even for talking. At the same time, Mr. Sharon labels Mr. Arafat "irrelevant," proceeds with a policy of serial assassination in the West Bank, and blows up the tiny bit of infrastructure that gives Arafat's government any sense of authority.
This is plainly irrational, yet Mr. Bush is in no position to say so. Mr. Sharon has very pointedly made the comparison between the two situations, Bush bombing Afghanistan and Sharon bombing the West Bank and Gaza. Of course, there are many differences in the two situations, starting with the fact that the Palestinians live under conditions that most Americans would never tolerate without making full use of Second-Amendment rights. But the differences are too complex to explain to a broad political audience, while the gross parallels are obvious to everyone - facts which work in Mr. Sharon's favor.
In the long term, Mr. Sharon's approach is hopeless, but hopeless policies can do a lot of damage in the meantime. The Palestinians are not going to disappear or become, as so many of Israel's leaders have wished them to be, absorbed by Jordan. Israel with her policy of settlements in the West Bank has always talked of having "facts on the ground," but there are no more convincing facts on the ground than a few million people with a high birth rate.
And a few million people living with no hope, right next to a few million people who regard them darkly only as something to contain while themselves living in considerable comfort, is by definition a volatile and dangerous situation. Israel controls this situation, just as South Africa did in very similar circumstances (even more so, since the Palestinians are a minority rather than a great majority). It seems almost sarcasm to write or speak, as most of our press does, of two "partners" in a "peace process" and how one of them, the Palestinians, has utterly failed its responsibilities.
A viable Palestinian state with generous Israeli assistance for its economic success is the only intelligible concept of peace. But it seems impossible that the statesmanship required can ever come from a man with as much blood on his hands as Mr. Sharon, or from his nemesis, the Nixonesque Mr. Netanyahu who waits grinning darkly in the wings. And it seems equally impossible that Mr. Bush, purring with satisfaction over the immediate results of his nasty work in Afghanistan, can rise to what is required of an American president with any pretensions to genuine leadership in the world.
INSPIRATION FROM THE TOP: OBSERVATIONS OF BUSH ADDRESSING THE NATION IN THE WAR AGAINST TERROR
December 23, 2001
INSPIRATION FROM THE TOP
Observations on the President Addressing the Nation in the War against Terror.
For some sentences the president manages to keep a carefully-coached cadence, but too often his words take on the urgency of a nervous teen-ager trying to speed through a recitation without missing a line. You almost expect to hear him to say, "Whew, Miss Jones, I did it!" at the end of tough passages. He arouses the same kind of anxiety you feel about watching a kid wobble down the street on a bicycle for the first time - eliciting the indulgence of viewers brought up on The Little Engine That Could and winning the same kind of unearned praise that a cute child receives for a charmingly bad performance in a school pageant.
Millions of Americans settle into their couches with bowls of popcorn, bags of potato chips, and diet cola. They enjoy the color pictures on the evening news report of bombs exploding in Afghanistan. Pictures of explosions are always popular in America, no matter what their meaning or origin.
True, news pictures are less impressive than Hollywood special effects, and you generally don't get to see any blood or bodies - that would be unsuitable for a family show - but these pictures have their own thrilling quality, much like those grainy pictures of violent arrests or sting operations photographed with pin-hole cameras that are so popular. They offer the satisfaction of peeping into the face of horror, into the anguish of others from the complete safety of your living room.
The television pictures do bring a satisfying sense of justice being done, of having witnessed America's retribution on the godless, or at least on those unlucky enough to have embraced the wrong god. Satisfaction lingers into the evening while families munch their way through the next couple of hours before the big event: The president is going to address the nation.
"Boy, he'll tell us what we need to know!" flashes through minds as the scene from the Oval Office suddenly snaps on. An objective observer, perhaps a de Tocqueville-like visitor from another planet, might wonder at such thoughts, for here is a provincial politician, a flop at business but with impeccable contacts, who bragged about never reading the international section of the newspaper just before his election to national office. But an objective observer might not be aware that except for enjoying explosions on the evening news, most Americans share the president's level of interest when it comes to foreign affairs.
The boyish-faced president, his hair suitably graying enough to suggest the heavy burden of office, with a perfectly-knotted, thick silk tie and an obviously expensive suit whose shoulders look a little over-padded, seems just slightly uncomfortable at his desk, like a home-town actor playing his first big role in the amateur-theater group, but it is a look generally interpreted as humility or decency rather than ineptitude or fear.
If he were a better actor, a few gulps to tug at his Adam's apple and a suggestive bit of moisture at the corners of his eyes might evoke images of Jimmy Stewart speaking on behalf of the little man. But Jimmy Stewart through the lens of Frank Capra is as outdated in America as the stirring tones of Franklin Roosevelt re-assuring people with ideas like fear itself being the only fear they need have. And, as for the little man, well, that's just not a topic of discussion any more, suggesting, as it does, the existence of class in America.
Heavens! America long ago abolished class by declaring everyone a consumer. No bleeding-heart garbage about class and society, no boring stuff about citizenship and responsibilities - just a nation of open mouths with differing abilities to fill them. Inspiring.
Indeed, ideas themselves are pretty much outdated in a place totally immersed in the shallow fantasies of advertising, self-help books, television series, and vacations in Disneyland - the only exceptions being ideas about how to make lots of money.
And besides, this president is a man who actually works for the likes of Claude Rains' and Raymond Massey's most memorably villainous characters. Nothing he says, nothing he does, is not first carefully scrutinized and sniffed by teams of mole-like eyes and noses. He went through a few hundred million dollars of their money getting elected, and he's not about to let them down now.
As always, he is surrounded by flags, beautifully-sewn flags, as thickly textured and elegantly draped as the president's custom-made clothes, undoubtedly provided fresh from a supportive manufacturer hoping to receive the much-coveted White House letter on elegant stationery suitable for framing and showroom display. In fact, it is known that this president goes nowhere without two fresh, four-hundred square foot flags, one just for backup. Rumor has it that the labels, "Made in China," are carefully snipped before shipment.
The excessive use of flags and patriotic slogans has always been suggestive of the tyrant's temperament, even when soft words are used (after all, Hitler, who never went anywhere without scores of monster flags, made one of the most effective speeches about peace ever heard). But this man could not possibly be confused with a tyrant. First off, he's just too gawky and ordinary.
Yes, there is an underlying sense of meanness that pokes through his words, here or there, like elbows protruding from the frayed fabric of a comfortable jacket, especially when he talks about death-row inmates or terrorists dying. His harsh, almost adolescent sense of humor, displayed on a number of occasions during the campaign, betrays something fairly mean in his make-up. Maybe, Mama Bush wasn't all that warm and loving after all.
But for the most part, the look and sound are what Americans like to call family: it's kind of a code word for a set of qualities that might be summed as three-car-garage Christian.
There is something in his character much like the hamburger oases that dot the American landscape, so beloved by suburban families on shopping safaris in air-conditioned Jeeps - safe-and-cheerful way stations replicated beyond counting across a continent, offering the assurance today in Wichita of exactly what you had last year in Greensboro. Of course, these are the very qualities for which he had his pockets stuffed with cash to play leader of a party actually run by people whose faces won't bear much direct exposure without revealing the hard lines and ugly attitudes of lives spent in predatory behavior.
And when you have nothing to say, flags help a lot. It is almost impossible for any crowd to boo when flags are present in a country whose Congress has passed an anti-flag-burning amendment to the Constitution 437 times. Only the ponderously slow, complex, and costly provisions of an 18th century constitution have prevented this glorious measure from taking its rightful place with freedom of speech.
This president is Disney's version of Fred McMurray giving calm, fatherly advice about joining Neighborhood Watch or coaching Little League as a helpful public response to terrorists crashing airliners into skyscrapers.
This is Fred McMurray without the cigarettes and booze of his early film-noir career. There is an aura in his tone and looks of redemption, of having moved on from drunken midnight pranks and naked table-dancing to bowing in prayer and dispensing the Lord's justice as Governor of Texas. Some might say his manner of dispensing justice in Texas, or in Afghanistan for that matter, reflects the self-hatred characteristic of alcoholic personalities.
And redemption is a favorite with Americans who just never tire of the tales of country-and-western singers who hit bottom and live to strum and strut with a wireless mike once again. Only celebrity beats redemption in the admiration of America. And anyone, anyone, who gets to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put his benignly smiling face on television, no matter how wooly and slurred his words, no matter how banal his thoughts, no matter how unexceptional his achievements, is a celebrity in America.
For some sentences the president manages to keep a carefully-coached cadence, but too often his words take on the urgency of a nervous teen-ager trying to speed through a recitation without missing a line. You almost expect to hear him to say, "Whew, Miss Jones, I did it!" at the end of tough passages. He arouses the same kind of anxiety you feel about watching a kid wobble down the street on a bicycle for the first time - eliciting the indulgence of viewers brought up on The Little Engine That Could and winning the same kind of unearned praise that a cute child receives for a charmingly bad performance in a school pageant.
It is very important for politicians in class-less America, even when they come from wealthy, privileged families and hold offices in which they serve almost exclusively the interests of other wealthy, privileged families, to assume a tone of ordinariness, with no high-falutin' airs. And this president excels at doing so. He is the best since Richard Nixon talking about his wife's cloth coat.
His accent is a disconcerting blend of slightly ineffectual, preppy kid who never did his own homework and the corn-husk intonations of the land of armadillos, rattlesnakes, stolen elections, and Confederate battle flags on pick-up trucks - a place that has blessed the country with a vastly-disproportionate share of its more lunatic politicians.
And tent-preachers - yes, there is the unmistakable cadence, however subdued for a national audience, of innumerable, heads-bowed invitations under the sweltery fabric of tents filled with damp white shirts stuck to the backs of folding chairs and mosquitoes droning between the notes of electric organs.
It is difficult to reconcile this man in this office with the Founding Fathers' vision of the nation. What an immense distance for a people to have traveled in just two centuries under the influence of a feverish consumerism, of a selfish, grasping, child-centered culture in which the children are the adults, of entitlements with no sense of responsibility or citizenship, of unspoken imperialistic attitudes that color all foreign policy under the guise of freedom, and of the influence of a section of the country that supposedly lost the Civil War but now dominates the nation's political culture and imbues it with stagnant, backwater values.
INSPIRATION FROM THE TOP
Observations on the President Addressing the Nation in the War against Terror.
For some sentences the president manages to keep a carefully-coached cadence, but too often his words take on the urgency of a nervous teen-ager trying to speed through a recitation without missing a line. You almost expect to hear him to say, "Whew, Miss Jones, I did it!" at the end of tough passages. He arouses the same kind of anxiety you feel about watching a kid wobble down the street on a bicycle for the first time - eliciting the indulgence of viewers brought up on The Little Engine That Could and winning the same kind of unearned praise that a cute child receives for a charmingly bad performance in a school pageant.
Millions of Americans settle into their couches with bowls of popcorn, bags of potato chips, and diet cola. They enjoy the color pictures on the evening news report of bombs exploding in Afghanistan. Pictures of explosions are always popular in America, no matter what their meaning or origin.
True, news pictures are less impressive than Hollywood special effects, and you generally don't get to see any blood or bodies - that would be unsuitable for a family show - but these pictures have their own thrilling quality, much like those grainy pictures of violent arrests or sting operations photographed with pin-hole cameras that are so popular. They offer the satisfaction of peeping into the face of horror, into the anguish of others from the complete safety of your living room.
The television pictures do bring a satisfying sense of justice being done, of having witnessed America's retribution on the godless, or at least on those unlucky enough to have embraced the wrong god. Satisfaction lingers into the evening while families munch their way through the next couple of hours before the big event: The president is going to address the nation.
"Boy, he'll tell us what we need to know!" flashes through minds as the scene from the Oval Office suddenly snaps on. An objective observer, perhaps a de Tocqueville-like visitor from another planet, might wonder at such thoughts, for here is a provincial politician, a flop at business but with impeccable contacts, who bragged about never reading the international section of the newspaper just before his election to national office. But an objective observer might not be aware that except for enjoying explosions on the evening news, most Americans share the president's level of interest when it comes to foreign affairs.
The boyish-faced president, his hair suitably graying enough to suggest the heavy burden of office, with a perfectly-knotted, thick silk tie and an obviously expensive suit whose shoulders look a little over-padded, seems just slightly uncomfortable at his desk, like a home-town actor playing his first big role in the amateur-theater group, but it is a look generally interpreted as humility or decency rather than ineptitude or fear.
If he were a better actor, a few gulps to tug at his Adam's apple and a suggestive bit of moisture at the corners of his eyes might evoke images of Jimmy Stewart speaking on behalf of the little man. But Jimmy Stewart through the lens of Frank Capra is as outdated in America as the stirring tones of Franklin Roosevelt re-assuring people with ideas like fear itself being the only fear they need have. And, as for the little man, well, that's just not a topic of discussion any more, suggesting, as it does, the existence of class in America.
Heavens! America long ago abolished class by declaring everyone a consumer. No bleeding-heart garbage about class and society, no boring stuff about citizenship and responsibilities - just a nation of open mouths with differing abilities to fill them. Inspiring.
Indeed, ideas themselves are pretty much outdated in a place totally immersed in the shallow fantasies of advertising, self-help books, television series, and vacations in Disneyland - the only exceptions being ideas about how to make lots of money.
And besides, this president is a man who actually works for the likes of Claude Rains' and Raymond Massey's most memorably villainous characters. Nothing he says, nothing he does, is not first carefully scrutinized and sniffed by teams of mole-like eyes and noses. He went through a few hundred million dollars of their money getting elected, and he's not about to let them down now.
As always, he is surrounded by flags, beautifully-sewn flags, as thickly textured and elegantly draped as the president's custom-made clothes, undoubtedly provided fresh from a supportive manufacturer hoping to receive the much-coveted White House letter on elegant stationery suitable for framing and showroom display. In fact, it is known that this president goes nowhere without two fresh, four-hundred square foot flags, one just for backup. Rumor has it that the labels, "Made in China," are carefully snipped before shipment.
The excessive use of flags and patriotic slogans has always been suggestive of the tyrant's temperament, even when soft words are used (after all, Hitler, who never went anywhere without scores of monster flags, made one of the most effective speeches about peace ever heard). But this man could not possibly be confused with a tyrant. First off, he's just too gawky and ordinary.
Yes, there is an underlying sense of meanness that pokes through his words, here or there, like elbows protruding from the frayed fabric of a comfortable jacket, especially when he talks about death-row inmates or terrorists dying. His harsh, almost adolescent sense of humor, displayed on a number of occasions during the campaign, betrays something fairly mean in his make-up. Maybe, Mama Bush wasn't all that warm and loving after all.
But for the most part, the look and sound are what Americans like to call family: it's kind of a code word for a set of qualities that might be summed as three-car-garage Christian.
There is something in his character much like the hamburger oases that dot the American landscape, so beloved by suburban families on shopping safaris in air-conditioned Jeeps - safe-and-cheerful way stations replicated beyond counting across a continent, offering the assurance today in Wichita of exactly what you had last year in Greensboro. Of course, these are the very qualities for which he had his pockets stuffed with cash to play leader of a party actually run by people whose faces won't bear much direct exposure without revealing the hard lines and ugly attitudes of lives spent in predatory behavior.
And when you have nothing to say, flags help a lot. It is almost impossible for any crowd to boo when flags are present in a country whose Congress has passed an anti-flag-burning amendment to the Constitution 437 times. Only the ponderously slow, complex, and costly provisions of an 18th century constitution have prevented this glorious measure from taking its rightful place with freedom of speech.
This president is Disney's version of Fred McMurray giving calm, fatherly advice about joining Neighborhood Watch or coaching Little League as a helpful public response to terrorists crashing airliners into skyscrapers.
This is Fred McMurray without the cigarettes and booze of his early film-noir career. There is an aura in his tone and looks of redemption, of having moved on from drunken midnight pranks and naked table-dancing to bowing in prayer and dispensing the Lord's justice as Governor of Texas. Some might say his manner of dispensing justice in Texas, or in Afghanistan for that matter, reflects the self-hatred characteristic of alcoholic personalities.
And redemption is a favorite with Americans who just never tire of the tales of country-and-western singers who hit bottom and live to strum and strut with a wireless mike once again. Only celebrity beats redemption in the admiration of America. And anyone, anyone, who gets to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put his benignly smiling face on television, no matter how wooly and slurred his words, no matter how banal his thoughts, no matter how unexceptional his achievements, is a celebrity in America.
For some sentences the president manages to keep a carefully-coached cadence, but too often his words take on the urgency of a nervous teen-ager trying to speed through a recitation without missing a line. You almost expect to hear him to say, "Whew, Miss Jones, I did it!" at the end of tough passages. He arouses the same kind of anxiety you feel about watching a kid wobble down the street on a bicycle for the first time - eliciting the indulgence of viewers brought up on The Little Engine That Could and winning the same kind of unearned praise that a cute child receives for a charmingly bad performance in a school pageant.
It is very important for politicians in class-less America, even when they come from wealthy, privileged families and hold offices in which they serve almost exclusively the interests of other wealthy, privileged families, to assume a tone of ordinariness, with no high-falutin' airs. And this president excels at doing so. He is the best since Richard Nixon talking about his wife's cloth coat.
His accent is a disconcerting blend of slightly ineffectual, preppy kid who never did his own homework and the corn-husk intonations of the land of armadillos, rattlesnakes, stolen elections, and Confederate battle flags on pick-up trucks - a place that has blessed the country with a vastly-disproportionate share of its more lunatic politicians.
And tent-preachers - yes, there is the unmistakable cadence, however subdued for a national audience, of innumerable, heads-bowed invitations under the sweltery fabric of tents filled with damp white shirts stuck to the backs of folding chairs and mosquitoes droning between the notes of electric organs.
It is difficult to reconcile this man in this office with the Founding Fathers' vision of the nation. What an immense distance for a people to have traveled in just two centuries under the influence of a feverish consumerism, of a selfish, grasping, child-centered culture in which the children are the adults, of entitlements with no sense of responsibility or citizenship, of unspoken imperialistic attitudes that color all foreign policy under the guise of freedom, and of the influence of a section of the country that supposedly lost the Civil War but now dominates the nation's political culture and imbues it with stagnant, backwater values.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
THE IRAQ WAR'S TRASHIEST PIECE OF PROPAGANDA: THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL'S MARGARET WENTE DOES BAGHDAD
April 14, 2003
THE IRAQ WAR'S TRASHIEST PIECE OF PROPAGANDA
Her prize column came with a large photograph of a happy-faced Iraqi boy walking with a small group of heavily-armed American soldiers, one of them near the boy smiling generously. The striking impression was of a photograph taken in Italy near the end of World War Two, although the glossy technical quality better resembled modern advertising than war footage. Many ragged children at that time were photographed smiling at American "GIs" or "Joes." Some of them had just received a stick of gum or a bit of chocolate, some were orphans identifying with the new god-like men in town, and all of them were undoubtedly glad to see an end to the dreadful sights and sounds of killing.
There are scores of candidates for the distinction of trashiest war propaganda in a mainstream publication, and readers outside Canada may not recognize my nominee's name, but I am confident readers will recognize the merit of Margaret Wente's column in the Toronto Globe and Mail, April 10). I've excluded CNN and Thomas Friedman from consideration since trash propaganda on the Middle East is virtually all they do.
Ms. Wente, who normally writes earnestly on such matters as the angst of parents whose child has stubbed a toe on faulty play ground equipment in the city of Toronto, occasionally lends her deep understanding of human nature to Middle Eastern affairs. Some regard these forays as akin to having the late Irma Bombeck write on world affairs, but they are wrong, because Ms. Wente is not funny, not even slightly amusing, just earnest and overflowing with peculiarly-selective concerns.
Her prize column came with a large photograph of a happy-faced Iraqi boy walking with a small group of heavily-armed American soldiers, one of them near the boy smiling generously. The striking impression was of a photograph taken in Italy near the end of World War Two, although the glossy technical quality better resembled modern advertising than war footage. Many ragged children at that time were photographed smiling at American "GIs" or "Joes." Some of them had just received a stick of gum or a bit of chocolate, some were orphans identifying with the new god-like men in town, and all of them were undoubtedly glad to see an end to the dreadful sights and sounds of killing.
At first, I thought the editor should, instead, have featured one of hundreds of searing photographs from the Internet documenting children who will never smile or walk again, children whose faces resemble clotted candle wax or with limbs like smashed twigs, the work of American bombing. But as I read Ms. Wente's cheery, glossy take on horror, I knew the editor had indeed used the perfect picture.
Ms. Wente brushed aside concerns the beaming photo might raise by assuring us that less people had been killed in twenty-one days of war than Hussein killed every year. Statements of this nature do serve a purpose: they immediately signal a writer's true intent. There is no way Ms. Wente could know accurately how many Iraqis died when she wrote those words (she addresses herself only to civilians - the poor conscript soldiers killed while opposing an invasion of their home apparently counting for nothing), nor could she know how many will yet die in an unfinished war that has induced chaos in the cities, and there is certainly no way she could know how many people Hussein killed each year.
Ms. Wente celebrates the joys of Hussein's "prison for children" being liberated. We have no way of knowing what she is talking about since the obscure institution seems to have appeared out of nowhere, but we must accept that some children were imprisoned for refusing to join Ba'ath party organizations. This of course is not improbable in a dictatorship, but for all we know the children she refers to were delinquents and the so-called prison a boot camp, something very popular with their American liberators.
Ms. Wente doesn't let the image of a prison for children go unembellished. She adds that children were "tortured and killed" while the men who "kept the whips and keys" were lavishly rewarded. Wow, in just a few words, she has the children rendered as youthful resisters and freedom-fighters and their keepers as whip-totting Gestapo agents.
Somehow, during a quick stopover in Baghdad, Ms. Wente learned the complete history of this mysterious institution and apparently managed to locate and scrutinize its books for expenditures on payroll and leather accessories. I dislike being pushed into such cynicism, but one has to ask what child ever born would accept whipping, torture, and death rather than simply joining a party's politicized equivalent of boy scouts?
Of course, her effort at Nancy Drew and the Nazi Dungeon of Evil is intended to minimize the impact of the hundreds of dead and mutilated Iraqi children many of us are all too familiar with. The American authorities did their very best to keep us from seeing these images of what war is really about, but thanks to the Internet and heroic reporters for organizations like al-Jazeerah, the truth is branded into memory.
Well, children's dungeons or not, there are few thoughtful people who aren't glad that Saddam Hussein is gone, but that is not the same thing as saying they are glad with the way it was done: in defiance of the concerns of most of the world's people; in defiance of a majority of the UN Security Council; and in contempt for the heroic work of UN weapons inspectors - all while setting an example in international affairs that we will certainly live to regret. The satisfaction at his departure also is not the same thing as the immense, long-term problems created by the government of a people whose attention span to problems not filling their television screens with smoke and fireballs is measured in nanoseconds.
Ms. Wente is one of those who see the United States as the brave and noble loner - Kirk Douglas in "Lonely Are the Brave," Sylvester Styllone in "Rambo," or Gary Cooper in "High Noon" - standing away from the ugly mob's opinion (in this case, consisting of virtually the entire planet) to do what he has somehow mystically been given to know, deep-down, is the right thing to do. She shares this view with the President of the United States, a man who appears never to have read a serious book.
So, why should we be surprised when Ms. Wente includes such a B-movie line as "Freedom does not come cheap, I know that," placed in the mouth of an Iraqi? Now, I suppose it is possible that an Iraqi, exposed to the antics of CNN and glib hacks from outfits like the Heritage Foundation, actually repeated this pathetic bromide, but why would a journalist quote it?
Ms. Wente sprinkles her description of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue with suggestive words like, "For all the jubilation in the streets…The people cheered and danced…On the fringes of the ecstatic crowd…." Photographs of the statue-toppling, just the day before Ms. Wente's glowing column, had been broadcast all over the world and clearly signified Hussein's loss of power.
Now, it turns out, from an aerial or high-rise photograph of the square at the time, published on several Internet sites, that almost the entire square was empty. There was a tiny group of people and a far greater density of military vehicles than people. This panoramic view offers a remarkably different perspective to the published close-ups of people around the statue and a remarkably different perspective to Ms. Wente's jubilation in the streets, cheering and dancing, and ecstatic crowds. The numbers of people in the square appear to have been so small as to make the words almost silly.
The pictures broadcast of the statue being toppled were not technically untrue, they simply lacked perspective. The old adage from statistics that, with one hand in ice water and the other in boiling water, you are on average warm, applies to news coverage. In fact, here it appears the distortion was far greater than talking about the meaningless average of two extremes because there appears to have been no balance in the extremes to which the people of Iraq were exposed. These were photographs of a few happy moments by a small number of people in a vast trail of tears.
It is ridiculous to focus on one aspect of a huge and complex situation and declare yourself satisfied with the result. This is a good deal like celebrating the fact that some dollar bills are fluttering around for the taking after a deadly, massive highway crash involving an armored car.
My judgment of the overall tone in Iraq is supported by reports of Iraqis telling American troops "Thanks, but now go home." Many Iraqis, fearfully miserable before the bombing even began, have been pleading unsuccessfully with the American troops for help. Other reports tell of many Iraqis simply miserable, not gleeful, sitting and weeping. After all, their country has been ravaged by bombs, the hospitals overflow with piteous cases, thousands have been killed, anarchy in the cities has meant the looting of museums and hospitals, they swallow the indignity of defeat and occupation, and they face a terribly uncertain future with possible civil wars and the break-up of their country. When you throw in the fact that genuine, stable democracy is a very remote possibility for a country with no history of it and a devastated economy, there just isn't a whole lot to celebrate, even though a genuine tyrant has been overthrown.
Well, after a good lot of her bubbly-earnest touch, Ms. Wente gets around to quoting an expert on the Middle East, and who else should that be but Mr. Bernard Lewis, the man regularly trotted out by everyone who wants to make an informed-sounding negative point about the region? Anyone who has read Mr. Lewis or listened to one of his lectures will know that he is just the kind of expert lawyers look for to support a weak case in an appalling murder trial.
Ms. Wente uses Mr. Lewis the way a ventriloquist uses a dummy, to say things without seeming to move her own lips. One of the gems we are offered from "the great scholar of Islamic history" (This kind of introduction always effectively tells the reader, "Go ahead, just try disagreeing with someone like that!") is that nothing about "Ba'athism" (an awkward neologism referring to the principles of Hussein's Ba'ath party) is native to Islam, that Ba'athism is in fact an imported fascist ideology from Europe.
Well, after first wondering why Mr. Lewis, just introduced as peerless scholar of the Middle East is used to comment on fascism from Europe - you have to wonder why you'd even need to call upon any scholar to support so utterly obvious and banal a statement.
The fact is that almost nothing about the politics and organization of the Middle East today is native to the Middle East, and that applies even more completely to Israel and its institutions than it does to the Arab states. It all consists of uniforms, flags, posters, slogans, brand names, ideas, and institutions imported from Europe or America.
This is what you find anywhere in the world after a long period of colonialism. It was certainly true of the early United States after it separated from England, with the President typically being addressed then as "Excellency," carrying a sword as a symbol of office, and the country adopting, wholesale, concepts and phrases from English law and government tradition. In fact, Americans, for many decades, used to burn the Pope in effigy on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes day.
Ms. Wente's other profound insight from Mr. Lewis is the observation that there are two fears in the Middle East about Iraq's future: one is that democracy won't work; and the other is that it will. That sounds terribly clever for a few seconds, international affairs delivered by the late Oscar Levant. The truth is that it is just about as helpful as a quip from Oscar Levant to our genuine understanding. So why would you quote it? Only if you either do not understand what you are saying or if you are making a cheap propaganda point.
Mr. Lewis is intensely biased in favor of Israel, and he is very much in demand these days as a speaker against the world backlash created by Israel's bloody excesses. You'd be hard put finding a critical statement from Mr. Lewis on Israel, its policies, or its institutions, but you will find a huge amount of unflattering observations about Arab societies. Ironically, many of the observations he makes have relatively little to do with Arabic studies per se, and more to do with areas of scholarship such as economic development or the history political institutions, but perhaps Mr. Lewis is a much greater and wide-ranging scholar than I am aware.
Societies that are poor and underdeveloped are just that, poor and underdeveloped. Their particular cultural history may arguably have had a role or not in their arriving at that state, but it is the state of poverty and underdevelopment that retards democracy and the flowering of human rights in every culture on the planet. It is not a people's history, otherwise the Renaissance would never have happened, and there would be millions of Europeans eating gruel and flagellating themselves in monasteries.
People adapt to change, often surprisingly readily, especially when it is clear there is a positive future, but the magic of economic growth has not come to many portions of the Middle East yet. I truly wish I could see America bringing billions of dollars in investment, aid, and technical assistance rather than cluster bombs, but I don't. And the same for Israel, which always seems to have billions for armaments but does almost nothing to raise the level of its impoverished neighbors.
Democracy and concern for human rights, as I've written before, flow naturally out of healthy economic growth and a rapidly expanding middle class who do not see their interests served by a single leader or small aristocratic group. This is the story of Western civilization since the Renaissance. No bombs or revolutions are required, just the remarkable power of economic growth to dissolve away ancient traditions and organizations and bring new ways of looking at things. The experience has been universally demonstrated from the death of scholasticism in Europe to the receding backwaters of the American South.
The other time I recall noting Ms. Wente had departed from her fluffy subject matter in Toronto, she had joined the chorus of morally-obtuse columnists at the height of the suicide bombings in Israel to suggest that Palestinian parents must be deficient. Now, in her anxiety over a Baghdad institution for 150 children, she has overlooked Israel's gulag of more than three million Palestinians, an overwhelmingly youthful population. I reflect on the hopelessness that causes such children to kill themselves and others instead of enjoying the sunshine of youth, but I doubt Ms. Wente, so selective in her earnest concerns, will examine that any time soon.
Ms. Wente's piece is at:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20030410.uwent0410/BNStor
THE IRAQ WAR'S TRASHIEST PIECE OF PROPAGANDA
Her prize column came with a large photograph of a happy-faced Iraqi boy walking with a small group of heavily-armed American soldiers, one of them near the boy smiling generously. The striking impression was of a photograph taken in Italy near the end of World War Two, although the glossy technical quality better resembled modern advertising than war footage. Many ragged children at that time were photographed smiling at American "GIs" or "Joes." Some of them had just received a stick of gum or a bit of chocolate, some were orphans identifying with the new god-like men in town, and all of them were undoubtedly glad to see an end to the dreadful sights and sounds of killing.
There are scores of candidates for the distinction of trashiest war propaganda in a mainstream publication, and readers outside Canada may not recognize my nominee's name, but I am confident readers will recognize the merit of Margaret Wente's column in the Toronto Globe and Mail, April 10). I've excluded CNN and Thomas Friedman from consideration since trash propaganda on the Middle East is virtually all they do.
Ms. Wente, who normally writes earnestly on such matters as the angst of parents whose child has stubbed a toe on faulty play ground equipment in the city of Toronto, occasionally lends her deep understanding of human nature to Middle Eastern affairs. Some regard these forays as akin to having the late Irma Bombeck write on world affairs, but they are wrong, because Ms. Wente is not funny, not even slightly amusing, just earnest and overflowing with peculiarly-selective concerns.
Her prize column came with a large photograph of a happy-faced Iraqi boy walking with a small group of heavily-armed American soldiers, one of them near the boy smiling generously. The striking impression was of a photograph taken in Italy near the end of World War Two, although the glossy technical quality better resembled modern advertising than war footage. Many ragged children at that time were photographed smiling at American "GIs" or "Joes." Some of them had just received a stick of gum or a bit of chocolate, some were orphans identifying with the new god-like men in town, and all of them were undoubtedly glad to see an end to the dreadful sights and sounds of killing.
At first, I thought the editor should, instead, have featured one of hundreds of searing photographs from the Internet documenting children who will never smile or walk again, children whose faces resemble clotted candle wax or with limbs like smashed twigs, the work of American bombing. But as I read Ms. Wente's cheery, glossy take on horror, I knew the editor had indeed used the perfect picture.
Ms. Wente brushed aside concerns the beaming photo might raise by assuring us that less people had been killed in twenty-one days of war than Hussein killed every year. Statements of this nature do serve a purpose: they immediately signal a writer's true intent. There is no way Ms. Wente could know accurately how many Iraqis died when she wrote those words (she addresses herself only to civilians - the poor conscript soldiers killed while opposing an invasion of their home apparently counting for nothing), nor could she know how many will yet die in an unfinished war that has induced chaos in the cities, and there is certainly no way she could know how many people Hussein killed each year.
Ms. Wente celebrates the joys of Hussein's "prison for children" being liberated. We have no way of knowing what she is talking about since the obscure institution seems to have appeared out of nowhere, but we must accept that some children were imprisoned for refusing to join Ba'ath party organizations. This of course is not improbable in a dictatorship, but for all we know the children she refers to were delinquents and the so-called prison a boot camp, something very popular with their American liberators.
Ms. Wente doesn't let the image of a prison for children go unembellished. She adds that children were "tortured and killed" while the men who "kept the whips and keys" were lavishly rewarded. Wow, in just a few words, she has the children rendered as youthful resisters and freedom-fighters and their keepers as whip-totting Gestapo agents.
Somehow, during a quick stopover in Baghdad, Ms. Wente learned the complete history of this mysterious institution and apparently managed to locate and scrutinize its books for expenditures on payroll and leather accessories. I dislike being pushed into such cynicism, but one has to ask what child ever born would accept whipping, torture, and death rather than simply joining a party's politicized equivalent of boy scouts?
Of course, her effort at Nancy Drew and the Nazi Dungeon of Evil is intended to minimize the impact of the hundreds of dead and mutilated Iraqi children many of us are all too familiar with. The American authorities did their very best to keep us from seeing these images of what war is really about, but thanks to the Internet and heroic reporters for organizations like al-Jazeerah, the truth is branded into memory.
Well, children's dungeons or not, there are few thoughtful people who aren't glad that Saddam Hussein is gone, but that is not the same thing as saying they are glad with the way it was done: in defiance of the concerns of most of the world's people; in defiance of a majority of the UN Security Council; and in contempt for the heroic work of UN weapons inspectors - all while setting an example in international affairs that we will certainly live to regret. The satisfaction at his departure also is not the same thing as the immense, long-term problems created by the government of a people whose attention span to problems not filling their television screens with smoke and fireballs is measured in nanoseconds.
Ms. Wente is one of those who see the United States as the brave and noble loner - Kirk Douglas in "Lonely Are the Brave," Sylvester Styllone in "Rambo," or Gary Cooper in "High Noon" - standing away from the ugly mob's opinion (in this case, consisting of virtually the entire planet) to do what he has somehow mystically been given to know, deep-down, is the right thing to do. She shares this view with the President of the United States, a man who appears never to have read a serious book.
So, why should we be surprised when Ms. Wente includes such a B-movie line as "Freedom does not come cheap, I know that," placed in the mouth of an Iraqi? Now, I suppose it is possible that an Iraqi, exposed to the antics of CNN and glib hacks from outfits like the Heritage Foundation, actually repeated this pathetic bromide, but why would a journalist quote it?
Ms. Wente sprinkles her description of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue with suggestive words like, "For all the jubilation in the streets…The people cheered and danced…On the fringes of the ecstatic crowd…." Photographs of the statue-toppling, just the day before Ms. Wente's glowing column, had been broadcast all over the world and clearly signified Hussein's loss of power.
Now, it turns out, from an aerial or high-rise photograph of the square at the time, published on several Internet sites, that almost the entire square was empty. There was a tiny group of people and a far greater density of military vehicles than people. This panoramic view offers a remarkably different perspective to the published close-ups of people around the statue and a remarkably different perspective to Ms. Wente's jubilation in the streets, cheering and dancing, and ecstatic crowds. The numbers of people in the square appear to have been so small as to make the words almost silly.
The pictures broadcast of the statue being toppled were not technically untrue, they simply lacked perspective. The old adage from statistics that, with one hand in ice water and the other in boiling water, you are on average warm, applies to news coverage. In fact, here it appears the distortion was far greater than talking about the meaningless average of two extremes because there appears to have been no balance in the extremes to which the people of Iraq were exposed. These were photographs of a few happy moments by a small number of people in a vast trail of tears.
It is ridiculous to focus on one aspect of a huge and complex situation and declare yourself satisfied with the result. This is a good deal like celebrating the fact that some dollar bills are fluttering around for the taking after a deadly, massive highway crash involving an armored car.
My judgment of the overall tone in Iraq is supported by reports of Iraqis telling American troops "Thanks, but now go home." Many Iraqis, fearfully miserable before the bombing even began, have been pleading unsuccessfully with the American troops for help. Other reports tell of many Iraqis simply miserable, not gleeful, sitting and weeping. After all, their country has been ravaged by bombs, the hospitals overflow with piteous cases, thousands have been killed, anarchy in the cities has meant the looting of museums and hospitals, they swallow the indignity of defeat and occupation, and they face a terribly uncertain future with possible civil wars and the break-up of their country. When you throw in the fact that genuine, stable democracy is a very remote possibility for a country with no history of it and a devastated economy, there just isn't a whole lot to celebrate, even though a genuine tyrant has been overthrown.
Well, after a good lot of her bubbly-earnest touch, Ms. Wente gets around to quoting an expert on the Middle East, and who else should that be but Mr. Bernard Lewis, the man regularly trotted out by everyone who wants to make an informed-sounding negative point about the region? Anyone who has read Mr. Lewis or listened to one of his lectures will know that he is just the kind of expert lawyers look for to support a weak case in an appalling murder trial.
Ms. Wente uses Mr. Lewis the way a ventriloquist uses a dummy, to say things without seeming to move her own lips. One of the gems we are offered from "the great scholar of Islamic history" (This kind of introduction always effectively tells the reader, "Go ahead, just try disagreeing with someone like that!") is that nothing about "Ba'athism" (an awkward neologism referring to the principles of Hussein's Ba'ath party) is native to Islam, that Ba'athism is in fact an imported fascist ideology from Europe.
Well, after first wondering why Mr. Lewis, just introduced as peerless scholar of the Middle East is used to comment on fascism from Europe - you have to wonder why you'd even need to call upon any scholar to support so utterly obvious and banal a statement.
The fact is that almost nothing about the politics and organization of the Middle East today is native to the Middle East, and that applies even more completely to Israel and its institutions than it does to the Arab states. It all consists of uniforms, flags, posters, slogans, brand names, ideas, and institutions imported from Europe or America.
This is what you find anywhere in the world after a long period of colonialism. It was certainly true of the early United States after it separated from England, with the President typically being addressed then as "Excellency," carrying a sword as a symbol of office, and the country adopting, wholesale, concepts and phrases from English law and government tradition. In fact, Americans, for many decades, used to burn the Pope in effigy on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes day.
Ms. Wente's other profound insight from Mr. Lewis is the observation that there are two fears in the Middle East about Iraq's future: one is that democracy won't work; and the other is that it will. That sounds terribly clever for a few seconds, international affairs delivered by the late Oscar Levant. The truth is that it is just about as helpful as a quip from Oscar Levant to our genuine understanding. So why would you quote it? Only if you either do not understand what you are saying or if you are making a cheap propaganda point.
Mr. Lewis is intensely biased in favor of Israel, and he is very much in demand these days as a speaker against the world backlash created by Israel's bloody excesses. You'd be hard put finding a critical statement from Mr. Lewis on Israel, its policies, or its institutions, but you will find a huge amount of unflattering observations about Arab societies. Ironically, many of the observations he makes have relatively little to do with Arabic studies per se, and more to do with areas of scholarship such as economic development or the history political institutions, but perhaps Mr. Lewis is a much greater and wide-ranging scholar than I am aware.
Societies that are poor and underdeveloped are just that, poor and underdeveloped. Their particular cultural history may arguably have had a role or not in their arriving at that state, but it is the state of poverty and underdevelopment that retards democracy and the flowering of human rights in every culture on the planet. It is not a people's history, otherwise the Renaissance would never have happened, and there would be millions of Europeans eating gruel and flagellating themselves in monasteries.
People adapt to change, often surprisingly readily, especially when it is clear there is a positive future, but the magic of economic growth has not come to many portions of the Middle East yet. I truly wish I could see America bringing billions of dollars in investment, aid, and technical assistance rather than cluster bombs, but I don't. And the same for Israel, which always seems to have billions for armaments but does almost nothing to raise the level of its impoverished neighbors.
Democracy and concern for human rights, as I've written before, flow naturally out of healthy economic growth and a rapidly expanding middle class who do not see their interests served by a single leader or small aristocratic group. This is the story of Western civilization since the Renaissance. No bombs or revolutions are required, just the remarkable power of economic growth to dissolve away ancient traditions and organizations and bring new ways of looking at things. The experience has been universally demonstrated from the death of scholasticism in Europe to the receding backwaters of the American South.
The other time I recall noting Ms. Wente had departed from her fluffy subject matter in Toronto, she had joined the chorus of morally-obtuse columnists at the height of the suicide bombings in Israel to suggest that Palestinian parents must be deficient. Now, in her anxiety over a Baghdad institution for 150 children, she has overlooked Israel's gulag of more than three million Palestinians, an overwhelmingly youthful population. I reflect on the hopelessness that causes such children to kill themselves and others instead of enjoying the sunshine of youth, but I doubt Ms. Wente, so selective in her earnest concerns, will examine that any time soon.
Ms. Wente's piece is at:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/
RTGAM.20030410.uwent0410/BNStor
MONDO CANE: CNN, THE PLANET MONGOL, AND DEAD DOGS
August 22, 2002
MONDO CANE
Just how does anyone think those clean-cut, pressed-shirt boys at the Pentagon managed to build a hellish arsenal of poison gases, putrid chemicals, engineered disease germs and viruses, plus nuclear and thermonuclear weapons? Why, the number of Americans killed by air and groundwater contamination alone from nuclear-weapons processing facilities likely equals the toll for a small war.
I have to confess I don't watch television. And if I did, CNN would not be a stop on the dial.
The subject of this story was raised by a friend. Details were obtained on the Internet where more information is to be had with a half hour's effort than from a week in front of a television.
CNN has broadcast some videotape, supposedly from a secret al-Qaeda library in Afghanistan. Of course, like so many things touching Afghanistan, the use of the word library ever-so-slightly stretches the truth.
Journalists who have actually visited some of the caves in Afghanistan, said by the Pentagon to be the mountain redoubts of al Qaeda and the Taleban, have stressed how primitive and small they actually are. But from the American mainstream press and Pentagon press releases, you'd think Flash Gordon had discovered a stunning underground city on the planet Mongol. We've had secret laboratories, vast weapons caches, and now we have al Qaeda tape libraries.
Rarely emphasized in these reports are the details - the weapons caches, for example, having consisted of small piles of outdated arms, poorly stored, likely left over from the 1980s conflict with the Russians, and whose owners are unknown. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
Now we have videotapes of experiments with "possible weapons of mass destruction" consisting of three dogs dying after being administered an unknown substance at an unknown location by some unknown people. This is film we might obtain on any given day at hundreds of humane societies and city dog-pounds across North America. Truly terrifying stuff.
The tape undoubtedly provides proof positive, if any were needed, of the wisdom of America's spending tens of billions of dollars to blow up anyone in sandals and the wrong-colored headdress standing on a mountain in Afghanistan. First three dead dogs, tomorrow thermonuclear weapons. Now, on to Iraq.
One is tempted to ask why the American government didn't have CNN's remarkable staff handle all searches for al Qaeda information? Why bother with costly, inept lugs from the special forces and CIA when a couple of reporters from CNN can tuck into Afghanistan and come away with an intelligence coup?
But who ever expected truth in war? Much less in something so dimly defined as the War on Terror, whose sole accomplishment so far is the overthrow of a fairly stable, unpleasant government and its replacement with an unstable, unpleasant government that busies itself assassinating its own members and murdering prisoners of war.
I suppose, from the perspective of the kind of people who brought napalmed villages, tens of thousands of midnight throat-cuttings, and barbed-wired pacification centers to Vietnam, this may be viewed as a kind of progress.
All I can remember from having seen CNN years ago was "journalism" that consisted of reporters making life miserable for an innocent man, Richard Jewell, after the Atlanta Olympics bomb by shoving microphones at his face everywhere he went and broadcasting remarkably-informative footage of his car driving away. This network, of course, has distinguished itself since on a number of occasions, including the fiasco of the Operation Tailwind investigation.
They also specialize in that most American of television institutions, the meaningless argument show that provides loud, cheap talk from two sides in pancake make-up and blow-dried hair-dos. No scholarship, no experts worthy of the name, just glib, Washington-hugging journalists eager for an extra pay check and professional think-tankers peddling views from their latest pamphlets. Very informative.
The video tape shows us three appealing dogs, animals that might almost have been groomed by a CNN makeup expert for one of the network's pathetic argument shows. The improbability of this originating from a cave or shack in a part of the world where poverty allows few people to keep pets and where the ones they do keep often resemble hungry coyotes is not discussed. As I wrote above, these dogs are killed by an unknown substance by some unknown people in some unknown location. Sandals are seen scurrying.
It is truly unpleasant to see dogs die. There are, fortunately, a limited number of people in the world who take satisfaction in such things. But there are such people, and the viewers of CNN likely never gave a thought to the ones who have killed countless thousands of animals in U.S. Army weapons laboratories over the last five or six decades using everything from nerve gases and blister agents to botulism and radioactive isotopes.
And let's not forget the human experiments. There were the CIA's experiments with LSD and other drugs on unwitting subjects that resulted in suicides. There were the Pentagon's many experiments with the effects of atomic radiation in the 1950s, including deliberately exposing tens of thousands of "the boyz" to atomic-test blasts. There were also secret, controlled releases of radiation into the atmosphere over the United States to see how it would travel and where it might be deposited.
One might include the Americans exposed to massive amounts of Agent Orange and the hideous inoculations of unproven substances given troops in Desert Storm. How about all the thousands of depleted-uranium shells tested at proving ranges? Or are those only tested in places like Afghan villages? Did those thousands of sheep who suddenly died in Colorado near an Army chemical-weapons facility some years ago represent a unique event?
Just how does anyone think those clean-cut, pressed-shirt boys at the Pentagon managed to build a hellish arsenal of poison gases, putrid chemicals, engineered disease germs and viruses, plus nuclear and thermonuclear weapons? Why, the number of Americans killed by air and groundwater contamination alone from nuclear-weapons processing facilities likely equals the toll for a small war.
Ah, but that's our side, the good guys. What counts is that the bad guys, whoever they are on that video, killed three dogs.
The most interesting aspect of CNN's propaganda video, uncritically passed off as a startling revelation, is that it doesn't make any difference whether it is authentic or not.
As I've written before, the most effective propaganda is always based on truth. So, maybe someone somewhere in Afghanistan once did poison three dogs. This tells us precisely nothing that can be dignified as information.
But broadcasting the video will have sickened a lot of people watching the news over dinner. And that gut-form of argument without content is almost impossible to counteract. With one blow, men in sandals are reduced to dog-hating fiends, the suggestion is planted that they were doing horrifying experiments, and the implicit argument is made that only the kind of violent, stupid action taken in Afghanistan will preserve us from future horrors.
(For unfamiliar readers, Mondo Cane - "world of dogs" - was a documentary film in the early 1960s that shocked audiences with exotic scenes of human cruelty and primitive behavior.)
MONDO CANE
Just how does anyone think those clean-cut, pressed-shirt boys at the Pentagon managed to build a hellish arsenal of poison gases, putrid chemicals, engineered disease germs and viruses, plus nuclear and thermonuclear weapons? Why, the number of Americans killed by air and groundwater contamination alone from nuclear-weapons processing facilities likely equals the toll for a small war.
I have to confess I don't watch television. And if I did, CNN would not be a stop on the dial.
The subject of this story was raised by a friend. Details were obtained on the Internet where more information is to be had with a half hour's effort than from a week in front of a television.
CNN has broadcast some videotape, supposedly from a secret al-Qaeda library in Afghanistan. Of course, like so many things touching Afghanistan, the use of the word library ever-so-slightly stretches the truth.
Journalists who have actually visited some of the caves in Afghanistan, said by the Pentagon to be the mountain redoubts of al Qaeda and the Taleban, have stressed how primitive and small they actually are. But from the American mainstream press and Pentagon press releases, you'd think Flash Gordon had discovered a stunning underground city on the planet Mongol. We've had secret laboratories, vast weapons caches, and now we have al Qaeda tape libraries.
Rarely emphasized in these reports are the details - the weapons caches, for example, having consisted of small piles of outdated arms, poorly stored, likely left over from the 1980s conflict with the Russians, and whose owners are unknown. The devil, as they say, is in the details.
Now we have videotapes of experiments with "possible weapons of mass destruction" consisting of three dogs dying after being administered an unknown substance at an unknown location by some unknown people. This is film we might obtain on any given day at hundreds of humane societies and city dog-pounds across North America. Truly terrifying stuff.
The tape undoubtedly provides proof positive, if any were needed, of the wisdom of America's spending tens of billions of dollars to blow up anyone in sandals and the wrong-colored headdress standing on a mountain in Afghanistan. First three dead dogs, tomorrow thermonuclear weapons. Now, on to Iraq.
One is tempted to ask why the American government didn't have CNN's remarkable staff handle all searches for al Qaeda information? Why bother with costly, inept lugs from the special forces and CIA when a couple of reporters from CNN can tuck into Afghanistan and come away with an intelligence coup?
But who ever expected truth in war? Much less in something so dimly defined as the War on Terror, whose sole accomplishment so far is the overthrow of a fairly stable, unpleasant government and its replacement with an unstable, unpleasant government that busies itself assassinating its own members and murdering prisoners of war.
I suppose, from the perspective of the kind of people who brought napalmed villages, tens of thousands of midnight throat-cuttings, and barbed-wired pacification centers to Vietnam, this may be viewed as a kind of progress.
All I can remember from having seen CNN years ago was "journalism" that consisted of reporters making life miserable for an innocent man, Richard Jewell, after the Atlanta Olympics bomb by shoving microphones at his face everywhere he went and broadcasting remarkably-informative footage of his car driving away. This network, of course, has distinguished itself since on a number of occasions, including the fiasco of the Operation Tailwind investigation.
They also specialize in that most American of television institutions, the meaningless argument show that provides loud, cheap talk from two sides in pancake make-up and blow-dried hair-dos. No scholarship, no experts worthy of the name, just glib, Washington-hugging journalists eager for an extra pay check and professional think-tankers peddling views from their latest pamphlets. Very informative.
The video tape shows us three appealing dogs, animals that might almost have been groomed by a CNN makeup expert for one of the network's pathetic argument shows. The improbability of this originating from a cave or shack in a part of the world where poverty allows few people to keep pets and where the ones they do keep often resemble hungry coyotes is not discussed. As I wrote above, these dogs are killed by an unknown substance by some unknown people in some unknown location. Sandals are seen scurrying.
It is truly unpleasant to see dogs die. There are, fortunately, a limited number of people in the world who take satisfaction in such things. But there are such people, and the viewers of CNN likely never gave a thought to the ones who have killed countless thousands of animals in U.S. Army weapons laboratories over the last five or six decades using everything from nerve gases and blister agents to botulism and radioactive isotopes.
And let's not forget the human experiments. There were the CIA's experiments with LSD and other drugs on unwitting subjects that resulted in suicides. There were the Pentagon's many experiments with the effects of atomic radiation in the 1950s, including deliberately exposing tens of thousands of "the boyz" to atomic-test blasts. There were also secret, controlled releases of radiation into the atmosphere over the United States to see how it would travel and where it might be deposited.
One might include the Americans exposed to massive amounts of Agent Orange and the hideous inoculations of unproven substances given troops in Desert Storm. How about all the thousands of depleted-uranium shells tested at proving ranges? Or are those only tested in places like Afghan villages? Did those thousands of sheep who suddenly died in Colorado near an Army chemical-weapons facility some years ago represent a unique event?
Just how does anyone think those clean-cut, pressed-shirt boys at the Pentagon managed to build a hellish arsenal of poison gases, putrid chemicals, engineered disease germs and viruses, plus nuclear and thermonuclear weapons? Why, the number of Americans killed by air and groundwater contamination alone from nuclear-weapons processing facilities likely equals the toll for a small war.
Ah, but that's our side, the good guys. What counts is that the bad guys, whoever they are on that video, killed three dogs.
The most interesting aspect of CNN's propaganda video, uncritically passed off as a startling revelation, is that it doesn't make any difference whether it is authentic or not.
As I've written before, the most effective propaganda is always based on truth. So, maybe someone somewhere in Afghanistan once did poison three dogs. This tells us precisely nothing that can be dignified as information.
But broadcasting the video will have sickened a lot of people watching the news over dinner. And that gut-form of argument without content is almost impossible to counteract. With one blow, men in sandals are reduced to dog-hating fiends, the suggestion is planted that they were doing horrifying experiments, and the implicit argument is made that only the kind of violent, stupid action taken in Afghanistan will preserve us from future horrors.
(For unfamiliar readers, Mondo Cane - "world of dogs" - was a documentary film in the early 1960s that shocked audiences with exotic scenes of human cruelty and primitive behavior.)
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