A Report on the Party and its Guests
Imperialist dudgeon comes easy these days – nursing a nauseous ire over the abject crimes of the Bush administration in 2007 is not unlike finally cursing a Biblical flood in its 39th day and night. As of this week, we have only a minor but infuriatingly frank example (Bush commanding his ex-staffers to defy Congressional subpoenas) of the brand of lawless megalomania that has its lockjaw on our nation’s systems and resources, finally exposed to daylight after remaining at least partially hidden for the best part of seven presidencies. But it’s all been said, right?, many times and by waggier tongues than mine.
Not really, and Charles Ferguson’s new film No End in Sight exemplifies what’s missing from the public equation: a sense of justice, a conviction that men who lie and thereby kill, maim and destroy on a federal, governmental level should be held accountable in, at minimum, the same manner in which such a criminal would on a personal, social level. Kings and czars have had their heads on pikes for as much, and rightly so. The Hague operates on this dictum, and every nation in the world respects its process except us. Ferguson’s film, however righteous and furious accusatory toward Cheney & Co. (Bush is regarded largely as an idiot prince, a 2000 sense of things that nothing in seven years and perhaps more than 110K dead has done to obviate), ends up pulling a Nixon-era cop-out – no one’s really responsible for the dead civilians and wasted landscape, culpability isn’t discussed, so let’s just argue about Bush’s moronic mantra of "victory" and whether it’s smart or not to pull out now or later. It’s not usurious homicide that’s in question, but just hubris and incompetence. It’s 1972 all over again, echoing another costly, horrific nation-rape that began with Presidential lies, and one would’ve thought that just a few years later and for decades to come, we would’ve learned our lesson. (The Reagan administration sure did, running all of their nightmarish Central American offensives underground, a policy shift JFK didn’t need to choose and which at least Noam Chomsky credits for killing substantially fewer people than if the Reagan chieftans, Cheney and Bush I among them, had been allowed by public opinion to just invade and napalm the subcontinent into dust.)
But we haven’t learned a thing – go to yesterday’s or tomorrow’s New York Times or Washington Post or NPR or CNN, and all you’ll hear is debate about what to do next, what’s the best strategy, what’s the best timetable. These are discussions that must happen, but they’re also absolutely ubiquitous because no one wishes to or is willing to say what should be said first: that the men responsible have to hang. I mean literally, like Joachim von Ribbentrop at Nuremberg.
It’s an unsayable, I realize, and the fact that it is – that you can’t publish a word in America about prosecuting and executing, or at least imprisoning, the standing President for easily demonstrable crimes against humanity, while Manuel Noriega, for instance, still sits in a Florida prison, and unstatistic-ized millions sit in corporate-run prisons because pot was found in their pockets, and nameless, numberless nobodies sit in Gitmo awaiting the government to gather its nerve with an actual criminal charge – is all the empirical indication you need that we’re hardly living in a functional democracy, and that the Bush administration has achieved what it’s achieved by dint of the collusion of all the mainstream media, of political scientists and scholars of all levels, of you and me and every taxpayer. So, perhaps that’s the secret reason why the imperative beheading of Dick Cheney et al. is cognitia non grata – we’ve all blood on our hands, snearing at the bumper magnets on our way to dinner and more entertaining lines of thought.
Welcome to the blogosphere! I am a long time admirer of your writing and look forward to reading your thoughts here... I saw this film at Sundance and it literally ruined my year. Must see film making.
--Tom
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Thanks, Tom! You mean No End? Ruined your year, but must-see? Say what?
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Yes, No End In Sight... Sorry not to be clearer. It ruined my year because it put into perspective how this lie of a mission could have been effectively managed and the misery and suffering minimized (despite the war's illegitimacy) had there been a single shred of competence by our leaders. It ruined my year because it made me realize that my fellow citizens not only have fallen for this incompetent leadership, many of them actually admire it. We (rational people like you and I) have been so disempowered to affect change and the anti-war movement has been worthless and I certainly haven't done enough in my own life to end this masquerade. I guess the "ruined my year" comment is more a sense of shame, that powerful, ignorant, incompetent men and women have been allowed to get away with it.
Anyway, sorry to confuse.
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I certainly see your point. I'm against the death penalty for just about everyone except world leaders. (They seem pretty much attached to their own skin and could probably be deterred.) On the other hand, I'm not expecting to see it soon -- it's only the very unlikely monsters like Saddam and a Nazi or two who ever really get justice.
And certainly, there are people in our government right now who belong in prison for enabling the murder and torture of thousands in Latin America during the 1980s. One of the big reasons I'm not a fan of the Clinton Administration, though it sure looks sweet these days, is its cowardly refusal to participate in the ICC.
On the other hand, this is absolutely nothing new in modern times, awful as it is. For reasons that I think are more psychological than political, the world simply sees the act of starting a idiotic and/or rapacious war as less bad than shooting up your local post office. Even if the body count of the former is vastly higher than the latter.
The whole matter is made slippier by the fact that, on occasion, it's actually neccessary to go to war and, once you do, really bad things are going to happen. Should FDR have hung for the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden? The war itself was neccessary, but isn't killing hundreds of thousands of civilians still a crime? You could make the case but I wouldn't want to see that happen.
I haven't seen "No End in Sight", but I suspect that's why it doesn't call for the kind of justice you're talking about. It's just not part of the conversation, though I'm not saying we wouldn't live in a better world if it was.
I always liked how Charlie Chaplin put it in "Monsieur Verdoux, "numbers sanctify." Kill several, and you're a monster. Kill thousands, you're a leader.
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True enough, Bob, although the nothing-new-ness of it all is relative -- I'm forgetting where I'd read it, but it's been estimated that prior to the 20th century, war deaths were comprised of one civilian to every 100 military corpses, a ratio that has been (genocides aside) gradually reversed; today, it's 100 civilians to one soldier. FDR? Moral relativism will out: if he's not responsible, then why were the Nazis hung for blowing up dams and other war actions? At least, perhaps, we can stop pretending as a society that we have functioning moral compasses at all.
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That's an interesting statistic, though not surprising, given the technology that was in place by WWI and WWII (which is what Chaplin obviously had in mind). I'm sure if we'd had air power and major explosives in the U.S. Civil War or the Revolutionary War, for example, a lot more civilians would have died -- and perhaps we'd be a little less gung ho today as a result.
As for hanging German's for bombing dams (what we call today destroying "infrastructure."). Clearly that would have been hypocritical to do after the war as part of the Nuremburg trials. However, if you're talking about wartime sabotage, I think that was pretty much the standard punishment for saboteurs across the board -- much in the same way that spies were routinely shot on all sides. (Well, at least that's what the movies teach us.)
Admittedly, that's a some what arbitrary excuse -- a blown up dam is a blown up dam. But a lot of the way we regard morality, particularly as it relates to killing, is sort of arbitrary. NPR's "This American Life" just reran a really fascinating look at how most people respond to a moral a scenario. It's too long to go into here, but it pretty clearly shows that a lot of our assumptions about basic morality are not as logical as we'd like to think and may have as much to do with evolutionary psychology as philosophy or religion.
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Agree -- and yes, technology is probably partially responsible for the reversal of civilian-soldier kill ratios, though with technology comes exponential wealth and power and market demands, all things that have probably contributed to, have fueled, a generalized increase in collateral damage apathy. So have population densities, for that matter. But arbitrary? Isn't it just a clear-cut, Nazi-ish state of what the neo-cons called "American exceptionalism" -- if they do it, bad, if we do it, maybe regrettable but in the end OK.
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Welcome to the funhouse, Michael. I've missed the immediate gratification of your writing. On to more pressing matters:
We mustn't impeach our Great Leaders. Impeaching scumbags like Bush and Cheney (or the absolutely brilliant Justices who sit on the Supreme Court) just legitimizes the System. It legitimizes the scumbags (whether Republicans or Democrats) that don't get impeached, making them look like the good, honorable, God-fearing, flag-waving public servants they pretend to be. It says:
"Our government is good, but there are a few bad apples, as there are everywhere. Now that we've gotten rid of them, punished the wrongdoers, we've restored the people's faith in our great democracy. The United States truly is the greatest country on Earth. God bless America." Or some equally sickening bullshit cliche.
For years now, people like Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal have argued that the differences between the two major parties in the US is very slight indeed. There's only a narrow spectrum of thought within which political discourse takes place. If you step outside that spectrum, you're marginalized, demonized, ignored. So we're left with choosing this representative of private power,
a Democrat named, say, "Hillary Clinton", or that representative of private power, a Republican named, say, "Benito Guiliani". No real choice there.
Until something occurs which violently rattles the cage of this daydream nation, the sleepy souls within will be free to continue in blissful near-slumber. Life in a spectacular economy affords this "luxury".
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What we must do next is obvious -- impeach Bush and Cheney.
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Well, sure. But it won't happen -- you can see Cheney now, claiming exemption like Milosevic at the Hague. You can see the media minions, Thomas "His Head Is Flat" Friedman at point, claiming that it's a circus, an unAmerican farce, we're defaming ourselves in the eyes of the world, la di da. Why hasn't that troll (Cheney) had his seventh heart attack? Perhaps a more substantial thing that also won't happen: pull out like a responsible, insemination-avoiding man in coitus, apologize and start paying reparations to the Iraqis and Afghanis, now. If they adopt an Islamist dictatorship, oh well. If our oil prices go up, we pay them, silently. If American corporations choke on it, fuck them where they live. There's a little free-market humility for you. This isn't the real world I'm talking about, but I am talking about the real world I want, and will bitch for.
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When your country is attacked there can be no such thing as an "anti-war" movement. Protesters against America's war on terror, are not peaceniks, they are America-haters and saboteurs, and they should be treated as such. Mike Atkinson is what I call a traitor of the heart, someone who shares with Osama Bin Laden the belief that America is the Great Satan and who would aid and abet any enemy, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein -- it really doesn't matter -- before he would embrace his own country and its defense. This is the creed of the sick Fifth Column in this country, whose base is the pc university and whose intellectual gurus are Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. To call these wretched people Benedict Arnolds would be an insult to a man who did betray his country but did so, at least, in behalf of a tolerant democracy. These post-modern traitors do it in behalf of murderers and fanatics, do it in behalf of nothing more, really, than a blind, fanatical hate, which is really a self-hate.
Let us respect their right to express themselves, but let us not make the mistake of respecting them.
Progressives killed 100 million people in the 20th Century, in peacetime; the societies they constructed created poverty on unimaginable scale; their economic systems didn't work. Has any of this caused them a second thought? Or look at the current war to overthrow a monster in Iraq and give ordinary Iraqis the freedom to vote. So-called Progressives have done everything they could to save Saddam's bacon and prevent Iraqis from achieving even minimal freedoms. The same people who used to get enraged when the United States supported dictators are now attacking Bush for overthrowing one. Why? Because in their melodrama America is the global oppressor, the Great Satan, and therefore, can never do anything right. That's why onecan only understand Progressivism as a religion.
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See entry titled "Spanking the Monkey," 7/23.
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