I'm calling this trip "The Great Oregon Flapdoodle" in honor of Gavin and all that has gone before. I'll be taking the Amtrak "Coast Starlight" up to Portland, or "PDX" as all the cool kids say, and then enjoying the company of many PacNW Sadlys, and any helpless strangers and small animals that happen by.
How did all this come to pass? I'm not sure. I was planning a train trip to Seattle to get my head straight and just get out of the freakin valley for a while, when this opportunity arose.
Y'see, I've met a lot of people out there in Left Blogistan. And some of them are pretty special. And I've really valued the opportunity to interact without having to reveal my sadly mundane, truly banal self. But there's one. Gavin. Probably the BEST fucking writer operating on the 'tubes in complete anonymity, Gavin can do things with the english language that will make you laugh, make you jealous, make you understand and give you a righteous boner.
Gavin is the other side of the coin I occupy. Gavin is a bright, clever dancer, a fencer with words to my blunt instrument. I always felt we were finding different ways to say the same thing. And Dr. Ms. soontobemrs Marita. That's a woman to address politely, and with a respectable amount of awe.
So, whatevs. I can't pass this up. Train leaves on 5/31. Stay tuned, kiddies. This might just be messy, and madness always lurks just outside of sanity, but the Flapdoodle is ON, and the train keeps rolling all night long...
CHENEY: On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.
RADDATZ: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.
RADDATZ So? You don’t care what the American people think?
CHENEY: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.
There you have it. In perhaps the most searingly honest statement in the history of this foul regime, the architect of it's most soul-dead atrocities sums up in one succinct sound bite their overarching worldview.
Just in case you somehow still labored under the quaint notion that you lived in a representative democracy, Dick Cheney clearly disabuses you of such Pollyanna-ish thoughts. If somehow you have lived through the precipitous decline in quality of life and liberty that is the United States in the first decade of the new millennium without noticing the fundamental changes in both government and governance that have taken place, with a single word, our malignant VP slapped some clarity into your vision.
And so, this is what it has come to. Economic decline, endless war, authoritarian government and a bloated plutocracy. And when asked for a bit of concern for the cares, dreams, hopes and aspirations of the population, Dick Cheney has his "let them eat cake" moment.
Spitzers Kristin Oh you got the cash Now the media needs to hear the trash From you, Its true When eliot took off his suit and tie What did he do What did he want to try Please say. OK?
You're tattelling What's your price to tell You've got your story to sell You were just State Personnel
Babe you gotta do a news broadcast Your agents worrying your fame won't last For long. Its wrong Spitzers Kristin There's so much to know You gotta tell us if you suck or blow Come on He's just a John
Tattelling What's your price to tell You won't go straight to hell You're an angel who already fell
How bout that argument in Washington about Iraq. Man, those people fucked it all up, huh? But they're getting it right now. Right?
Fucking sick ghouls. Wake UP! Your goddam criminal invasion and occupation NO DIFFERENT than the Nazis invasion and occupation of France in 1940 and every bit as illegal, set in motion a thousand thousand movements and actions that nobody in the sad, sick, brutal bush administration ever bothered to think about.
It infuriates me when pundits and politicians in total safety sit and pontificate on how the "surge" has made things better. How we're "winning". Sorry. That's fucking obscene. And you, YOU are complicit.
Instead of a horrendous bombing every two and a half days, now there's one every six days. You wouldn't choose to live like that. But you'll choose it for the Iraqi people, because you are bloodthirsty, inured to the brutal violence your criminal leadership unleashes on the world every day. YOU ARE COMPLICIT.
The blood of a million innocent Iraqi men, women and children is on your hands. Because you allowed this "experiment' in coercive regime change. Democracy at gunpoint, damn all the consequences.
Every single Iraqi citizen would gladly go back to the time of Saddam. Does that tell you anything about your "gift"?
You have allowed your government to take a vibrant, secular society, doing ok despite living under a dictator, punished by cruel, inhuman economic sanctions, and condemn then to a world of death, disease, displacement, poverty and ignorance. No school. No hospitals. No electricity. No hope. No future. Nothing. Thanks to you.
Hey, America. Feel safe? Or under this paranoid, warmongering regime, are you scared all the time?
You are a sick, helpless, mindless embarrassment. What do you know of safety, America? Could you live in Baghdad, Diyala, Faluja,Basra? Could you live trapped between the militias, the mullahs, and the corruption? Stripped of your wealth, your possessions, your very identity, what would you do? Where would you go. I'll go ahead and answer that, America. You would DIE. Or you would choose sides in a corrupt bargain with the devil, and YOU would be the one with the handcuffs, with the electric drill, on the nighttime visits to your former neighbors. Because you could not live in the hell you have unleashed on other people, people you don't know, and refuse to care about.
Could you live in Syria or Jordan, leaving behind your possessions and history, ALL of it, and grovel for enough of a handout to keep your kids from starving?
Would you join the insurgency, having nothing left to live for, needing money more than life, having no future and no hope? And here, America, we react with anger and shock that Iraqis might support killing American soldiers. What would you have them do? You sit in your safe suburban kitchen and worry about the quality of the remodel, or will little Jessica get into university. Can you even imagine the decisions you have forced on millions of people just like you?
Just as Germany has had to come to terms with the holocaust, America, some day you will have to find a way to live with your complicity in the crime of the new century. What you have done, in the name of your own "safety", in the name of a your nameless night sweating fears, will not be forgotten. No longer can you look to China and say "you are not living up to your highest ideals". For that matter, how can you say to Iran, "you are a rogue nation with imperial desires"? You will have to learn to live in a world where you are not the "shining city on the hill", but rather just another criminal military power, with nothing to offer the world but fear and death.
So, tell me, America? Are you proud? Or are you a little sad, for all the death and horror, for the futures robbed, for the widows, for the orphans, for the terror and the madness and all the things you've taken from an entire people and can never give back? Do you feel? CAN you feel? Or is it a simple equation - we have to be safe, no matter what the cost in other lives? How do you make that calculation? If there was not enough food, would you shoot your neighbor's children? Would you and your neighbors burn the next neighborhood in order to kill them? No? How certain can you be, when you stood by and allowed this?
If you could actually allow yourself to think about what it is you are responsible for in Iraq, you would lose your mind. You could not go forward, you would have to do something. You could not allow such suffering for such a sad, sick, selfish reason, right? Sorry. Your guilt is written in your history, and in a few years your children are going to hang their heads in shame and ask "why?" Why did you allow an atrocity of this magnitude to be carried out in your name, after all your pretty words and outrage? While you cried out "remember Rwanda" and "end the suffering in Darfur" your leadership was waging a criminal occupation that has ruined millions of lives. While you dispassionately argued the political merits of "staying or going".
I can't believe we haven't risen up as a people and said "we're better than this". And put an end to it. I'll never understand how you, America, decided you're the good guy. You're the worst of the criminals. I am not a religious man, but if I was a Christian, I'd despair for your souls.
Actually, I'd rather talk about football or American Idol
I haven't posted anything in a while. Let's just say that life got in the way. So here's a few random thoughts and dispatches from the the depths of despair and pessimism. A collapsing economy, and a national political conversation in full swing that refuses to allow the participants to address the real problems, root causes, and identify genuine solutions. Hope you've got an exit plan and a decent bunker.
The American Evangelical Christianist Theocrats and the Muslim Fundamentalist Islamists want exactly the same thing. Why is no one allowed to say this? They want to rule their constituents by the laws they glean from their sacred texts, they want to cover their women, they want to discriminate against homosexuals and atheists, they want women to be subservient, they want their religion to be the dominant power. And yet, with all the obvious parallels, you never see anyone with a real role in the national conversation make the comparison, and whenever someone, a blogger or author perhaps, tries to point out the obvious similarities, he or she is accused of moral equivalence. Fascinating response, really. Like when a single payer universal health insurance program is proposed, the response is the plaintive wail "socialized medicine"! As if this is all one must say to dismiss the government's responsibility to take care of it's citizens. It's interesting that at no time do they explain why moral equivalence or socialized medicine are BAD, they just invoke the words like some kind of magic spell that will ward off evil spirits.
I'm fascinated by the clear fact, that judged strictly by his words, George Bush is far more concerned with the Iraqi people than he is the American people. He speaks firmly on their behalf, lobbies intensely for money for them, and puts everything America cares about on the line to try and make their lives a little better - at least according to him. At the same time, he vetoes money for health care for American children, and insists on limiting domestic spending in order to free up money to spend on Iraq. If you were watching from the point of view of a space alien in outer space, you would think George Bush was the president of Iraq, not America. Does anyone mention this, wonder about it, ponder it's significance? I haven't seen it.
Items produced from bits of cloth are nothing. They are bits of colored cloth. Whether they are head scarves, flags or kerchiefs, they are nothing but inanimate bits of colored cloth, imbued only with the significance we award them. They are symbols, nothing more, emblematic of beliefs and ideals, but not sacred containers FOR those beliefs and ideals. No one ever died for a flag. They might have willingly sacrificed their life for the ideas and ideals REPRESENTED by that flag. You might say the flag is a bit of shorthand, a way of summing up and representing a community, a tribe and a way of life. And yeah, sometimes that's worth dying for. A flag? A mere bit of colored cloth? Not so much.
If a woman wants to wear a head scarf, we have to be willing to allow it. We have to find a way to get past the tribal hate and fear and recognize that, as has been said so eloquently before, it is not a zero-sum game. By wearing her desired bit of cloth, she doesn't take anything from the rest of us. Indeed, by empowering her to follow her wishes, we empower us all to do the same. So much of how we view the world is driven by a tribal fear of the other, but the other is only a threat to the extent he feels threatened. By unwinding the tribal nature that might well have served humanity well forty thousand years ago, by getting past the fear and racism and sexism and hatred that drives and informs so much of how we deal with the rest of the world, we have a chance to move into a new kind of culture, and with the challenges of a global interconnected economy, peak oil and global warming, may well be the only chance humanity has for survival.
It's crazy. It's the craziness that's crazy. A kind of circular, meta-crazy that nobody seems to notice. It's like having an unwashed wino staggering around your cocktail party, vomiting on the buffet and coughing great, hacking gouts of phlegm in the punch. And the people, intelligent, elegantly dressed, merely step gingerly around the puddles and the ranting madman and pretend that it's just another cocktail party, like all the cocktail parties before.
The US is on an utterly unsustainable course, completely out of step with the 21st century world, where nations compete and partner on the basis of economic growth and increased quality of life. A global inter-connectedness fueled by digital and satellite communications and global trade not beholden to national borders, time zones, cultures or languages has created a world where what was long held to be impossible, the end of war, is not only possible, it is the only logical, obvious path. It is only America, the lone superpower in a unipolar world, that continues to cling to the outdated and discredited model of military power projection as the methodology for influencing international affairs.
This has gotten to the point of absurdity, the point where the president of the United States can insist on 200 billion dollar appropriation to sustain the military occupation of a desert nation halfway around the world and veto a 40 billion dollar bill to provide health care to American children. And that's not even the crazy. The crazy, the circular, meta madness in all this is nobody in America is outraged, at least not for the right reason. Let's put it in very simple terms. America could cut her ridiculous military spending in half, immediately, without a single ill effect. But Americans are so conditioned to a paranoid distrust, indeed a genuine fear that all manner of existential threats lurk just off our misty shores, and if we don't simply accept the necessity of a trillion dollar defense budget that includes massive expenditures on strategic weapons we will certainly be overrun, conquered and subjugated in mere weeks.
When examined dispassionately, this is obviously not the case. But to simply propose that America could fund much of it's internal needs in education, health care, infrastructure and entitlement programs by gutting the defense budget is political suicide. If we are not allowed to have the conversation, there is no hope of changing the course, and America will certainly continue her slide into irrelevance. The amazing thing is we have had the opportunity, over the last half dozen years, to see all of this clearly demonstrated. The lessons have been taught, clearly and with audiovisual support, but they have not been learned. The data provided, the wrong conclusions drawn.
First, what has the Iraq debacle taught us about the effectiveness of "hard power" in the twenty first century? Since the end of the second world war, America could always influence world affairs by projecting "soft power" around the globe. A carrier task force, the quiet rattle of the saber, the forward deployment of a bomber wing, and the world stood up and listened. Why? Because, like any good work of fiction, the threat was perfect, while the execution never is. President Bush actually used the American military against a crippled, bankrupt third world regime. And the world saw how limited military power, no matter how mighty, actually is. The vaunted American armed forces, despite unlimited financial support, could not pacify that small, impoverished nation. And now, while most nations understand that America's military has the capability of defeating their armed forces and toppling their government, America has learned a more important lesson with the world watching: That most any nation can, nonetheless make that too painful and costly an endeavor for America ever to undertake anything like it again.
Second, the other side of that coin, the world has learned that in a global economy, with instant communications and any capital no more than a dozen hours away, building and sustaining an insurgency that can bring a superpower to its knees is neither difficult nor terribly expensive. Funds, weapons and fighters flow across seas and borders, easily provided to virtual organizations that can share knowledge and expertise with sympathetic organizations all over the world. And a well-funded insurgency with popular support cannot be defeated by any military, no matter how powerful.
Building a military does not contribute to a nations wealth. Sure, it can create jobs, but that's a chimera. The money contributes nothing, builds nothing, and adds nothing to the future. And if it is then demonstrated for all to see that that horrendously expensive, inflexible military cannot even accomplish the one thing it is expected to accomplish, the imposition of your will on other nations, then there is no reason, no excuse, for building it.
America is in real trouble. The economy is built on shadows, smoke and China, the debt is over 9 trillion dollars, energy costs have gone through the roof, the dollar is in free fall. The US economy is a service economy. We don't make anything. We invent, and then have other nations build and profit from our developments. Other nations have learned to work together, live together, and prosper together. They do not fear different cultures, they do not base their worldview on paranoid fantasies of enemies seeking their destruction and domination.
A sustainable future is built on peaceful coexistence, economic trade and development, and a careful, balanced use of resources. There is no place left in the world for an angry, rogue giant with delusions of conflict and great military victories. The time has come for humans to put down their weapons and begin to think about the future. The world needs peace and cooperation, and people need governments that care about their health and well being.
But the madness is not the insane militarization of American society in the face of a future that has clearly passed her by. The madness isn't even in the fact that it is political suicide to propose peaceful coexistence as a sustainable strategy for international relations. No, the madness is that we are utterly prevented from even having the conversation. We must base our policies on fear and paranoia, and we must never question the value and efficacy of a military larger than all the rest of the nations of the world combined. And to say that money would be better used at home, to make the lives of Americans better? Treason, of course.
It's from Houseman, fer crissakes. People really should read more. Much of what you see here is opinion, but unlike many Americans, my opinions are at least loosely based on facts.
I'm calling this trip "The Great Oregon Flapdoodle" in honor of Gavin and all that has gone before. I'll be taking the Amtrak "Coast Starlight" up to Portland, or "PDX" as all the cool kids say, and then enjoying the company of many PacNW Sadlys, and any helpless strangers and small animals that happen by.
