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| Okay, I'll Say It |
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| Bush's speech was terrifying - he plays us for idiots, and he's apparently right |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, May 26, 2004. At the end of both their last terms in office, Presidents Johnson and Nixon dared give no speech nor visit any public place that wasn’t on a military base. There, they could count on people applauding on cue, no protestors, nothing to destroy the visual image of a hardpressed yet heroic President doing his job and being loved for it. I imagine if they’d thought about it, Bush’s handlers would not have chosen the Army War College as the ideal place to have made his speech Monday night. It was so obviously a friendly audience, made more so by the importation of congressional friends, that such an obvious sign of weakness worked against the President, whose rhetorical gifts are tender and logic thin, given what he considers good evidence, good people, and the word ‘good’ in general. It’s like he enjoys telling a bedtime story: mean things conquered and everything is going to be okay because Daddy is here and will take care of everything. Just trust him. Daddy drinks. Well, he used to. But he still thinks like a drunk. What bothers me is that too many Americans want to be told a bedtime story, and this one. That we are good and others evil and no matter the horrors about, Daddy will take care of it. And so long as we can retain this fairy tale, we’ll stand for anything …..until gas prices go through the roof, nearly to what the rest of the unsubsidized world is paying, or our kids actually die in war, or until it looks like being an American doesn’t generate the awe and wonder with others we think it should. He wants us to congratulate ourselves as he congratulates himself for this war we’re fighting. We’re handing over the reins at the end of June to Iraqi people and institutions unknown, but we’ll keep the military there indefinitely, and it is unlikely the Iraqis will have a free hand at their Treasury either. Ergo, it is not a sovereign country, but a pretend nation like our Indian reservations, which were created when Indians not elected by their people signed over property to the United States that was not theirs to give. Meanwhile, our military is in tough shape. They haven’t supplied everyone with flack jackets who need them, they have tons of tanks and humvees that need major overhauls, they have a lot of delayed maintenance to do, and they’re not only taking troops out of Europe, which isn’t a big deal, but out of Korea, which potentially is, to feed Iraq. And they’ve reinstituted an involuntary draft by not honoring the promises made to the soldiers and keeping them on active duty, which means we’re a step away from fielding conscripts. And we don’t have the gonads to tax ourselves for it. After offending most of the world we now really need a military for our actual defense, not revenge action epics like in Iraq. We are letting the Iraqi militias keep their weapons because we aren’t actually able to take them without deaths we can’t afford. That’s a big stand down from our previous bombast. And we have to deal with the scandals of the prisons run by…well, maybe the military, maybe the CIA, maybe Halliburton. Who knows? But the sexual and violent torture – and it is torture – that we administered to those mostly utterly innocent men, women, and children says far more about us than Bush’s stultifying and untrue platitudes. It was only a compass heading away from some boot camp, some fraternity, some street gang initiations. And if the pictures hadn’t been inexplicably made public, the investigations would have remained buried, along with our guilt and the civil rights lost to the Ashcroft Act, and the Statue of Liberty begins to look to the world like a dominatrix rather than a beacon of hope for a better life. In less than four years we’ve lost our fortune (the nation is in record debt), our friends, and we’re about to lose a war by a bad peace our country club tough guys strutted about only recently. And just like others previous, America can now fail not because a President lied to us but because too many insist our Presidents lie to us, because we don’t want to be bothered about what is done in our name. Look what we call ‘reality’ these days. Look how easily we signed away our rights because of easily identified lies and because it inflated our sense of selves.…Time brings forth all hidden things, and buries that which once did shine. The firm resolve falters, the sacred oath is shattered; And let none say, “It cannot happen here.” |
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