Well. Time to go ahead and say what I've been trying to figure out how to say for a while now. Mike was sardonic, Daniel was charicteristically succinct. Elsewhere, the tone is angry, tired, or apathetic. Mine is getting more toward fury.
I started wondering, the other day, why everything I read in American politics lately feels like being slapped across the face with a cold, wet phallus. The war, the economy, the polls, these are all symptoms of much greater malaise. It's fear.
We're up to Magenta #15 alert, which, as I understand it, means something somewhere between "pray for salvation, impending apocalypse" and "50% chance of rain." We, as a country (and it's pretty much useless to pretend that people other than us are involved. If eighty percent of the British oppose the war, can they really be said to support us?) are about to embark on an endeavor that will redefine the dual concepts of sovereignty and war for the 21st century, and the best we can come up with in response, either for or against, is some twisted angst-driven kill frenzy. The pro-war side (at least, the ones you hear from) think it's a good idea to level one in ten major buildings in Iraq, "target down" independent journalists, and kill hundreds of thousands to get at Saddam, if need be. They call the war "Saddam's choice."
And the anti-war side is worse. The vocal ones are no better than the pro-war types, except that they seem to want to launch a violent coup against the US government. I mean, is it so hard to grasp the concept that the US, as a stable, established government, might have more of a right to nuclear weapons than some asshat dictator? I thought so. Let's also go ahead and blame the current American government for every American foreign policy error, ever. Who cares if the current people in power had anything to do with Cambodia, or Guatemala, or fucking slavery for that matter. America is just as evil as Iraq or the Soviet Union, if perhaps you have a political inferiority complex.
Which leaves us with what? The people with some actual capacity to reason, on both sides of the debate, have retreated into their collective ideological bomb shelters. That's why reporters don't seem to care to pursue the fact that we still don't have any estimate concerning the cost of the war, and the one government official that floated one got hit in the ass with the White House door a week later. And why none of them feel like they can call Fleischer (or anyone else, frankly) on the specious and sometimes flatly ridiculous claims that they spew.
To change gears, there are two fundamental things that ruin American objectivity conerning the war: the first is the way we idolize the president. Fuck, we elected the man to preside over us, to run the world's most powerful country and control the world's most devastating military of all time. He can not be corrupt; we won't accept it. The idea that we elected a guy who would manipulate the public, the country, and the world for the ends of a few powerful interests is abhorrent; we won't accept it.
And oh, how we want to believe in the idea of an honest president. Fuck, how long has it been since we've had one? Camelot certainly had it's little problems, but we could forgive them because we loved Kennedy. And after all, he got killed. Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, and drew the United States into the only war that it can really be said to have lost. Nixon destroyed the American concept of an honest government in such a fundamental way that it's hard to summarize it in a sentence. Ford was a dolt; a crippled sacrificial lamb offered up by the Republican Party to lose to "I-did-not-chop-down-the-cherry-tree" Carter (whose entire presidency was cripppled by his insistence on honesty), so that they could come back and trounce him with a goofy version of Barry Goldwater four years later. Reagan presided over Iran-Contra, and funded so much death on foreign soil that's it's probably a good thing he developed alzheimers. Bush was neck deep in I-C, but managed to win anyway, only to get beaten by a shady guy from Arkansas named Clinton, who had a bad womanizing habit and a history of shady real-estate deals. And fuck, it's not like there've been alternatives! We could have elected Goldwater, or McGovern (who, while a good guy, appeared for all the world to be a misfit for jettisoning his VP candidate late in the game.) We actually elected Spiro Agnew. And then there's Bob Dole, who cashed in on possibly one of the worst presidential campaigns of all time by selling Viagra to other old bastards. Two fucking generations of Americans have had to grow up with the idea that you cannot trust the government of the country that leads the free world! If we could sell our souls for an honest government, I honestly think many Americans would.
And the second thing is our lack of information. The government issues color-coded alerts seemingly randomly, acknowledges that the coming war could lead to more terror attacks on the United States, and consistently lies to and intimidates anyone who tries to dig a substantial statement out of them. There's nothing substantial to debate, and the dialogue is thusly dominated by the people who never had anything substantial to say, anyway.
It's quite possible that I'm wrong, that there's something I can't know, and that this war will end quickly and successfully. Evidence of nuclear weapons construction will be found, and I'll have to eat most of these words.
I don't think that will be the case. I think that we'll win, that the search for WMD will be swept under the carpet of the occupation, and Halliburton subsidiaries will quietly move in on the oil and construction contracts. And worst of all, I think the American public will forget, and once again not come to terms with the idea that the kind of people we elect to high political office are fundamentally not good people. If it's ever even there, the rage over the governments' duplicity will be quickly forgotten. And I think the people with reasoned thoughts will continue to withdraw, because the dialogue being had doesn't need or want them.
Posted by slade at March 18, 2003 06:20 PM