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Lately, while attempting to keep current on world affairs, I have
been astounded by the total all-media bombardment and the relentless
local, regional, national, and now international obsession with
the Terri Schiavo case. It seems that no matter which channel I
watch, which paper I pick up, which radio station I choose, I can’t
escape someone speaking in extremely passionate terms about the
very contentious reports running the gamut from the specific scientific
facts of her medical status into the nebulous territory of faith
and family dynamics dovetailing into the liturgy of her case’s
subsequent and unprecedented legal gymnastics.
Am I the only one who finds it absolutely incredible that the supposedly
viciously trampled “rights” of one white woman who has
been in a vegetative state for over fifteen years is compelling
enough of an issue for the U.S. Congress to hastily convene themselves
in order to pass a special law just for her and to inspire the President
of the Free World to hustle himself back from Crawford Ranch in
the middle of the night to sign it into special personal law? Am
I the only person whose stomach turns violently at the continuously
looped footage of a once vibrant and active lady morphed into a
ghostly mere shadow of herself staring Tragic Madonna blank and
glassy into cameras shoved in her face while she repeatedly moans
incomprehensible utterances?
Am I the only person who has become increasingly more enraged that
the obvious Rovian “talking point” in this entire circus
revolves around the oft-quoted, “when we err, we must err
on the side of life” catchy lynchpin turn-of-phrase? I have
heard a version of sentiment parroted by everyone from our President
and Mr. DeLay, down to Mr. Randall Terry and his ever ready Operation
Rescue protesting army of the faithful Joe & Mary Christians
tirelessly “pro-life” picketing outside the Hospice
in Pinellas. I call this phrase Rovian in that he is the acknowledged
architect of this particular virulent strain of obfuscating rhetoric
and the reigning world champion of the dangerous game: “Political
Opposite Meaning Day” played with such rousing repeated success
with a snoozing nation too apathetic to know or care about the difference.
For example, a Rovian title for a proposed piece of legislation
like the “Healthy Forests” Act makes one feel trapped
in a Kafka maze or down Alice’s rabbit hole when one discovers
that this lovely title deliberately obfuscates the horrid reality
that the actual laws proposed in the actual literal words underneath
this lovely title = more clear-cutting, less-environmental protection,
in essence where the Healthy Forest Legislation does actually nothing
to help a Forest to be healthy. One worse, it actually writes into
law practices that do not allow the Forest to BE healthy. Double,
Triple, Quadruple worse than that, the consequences of the conditions
it creates actually makes the Forest UN-HEALTHY.
This inverted meaning handle is a nifty time-saving tool for constructing
“meaning” in a political culture and climate where complex
and complicated subjects are almost always reduced to the lowest
common denominator banalities and the 15 second sound byte. Any
righteous politicians bent on saving our forests and/or protecting
our sacred and inviolate right to make decisions about how we end
our days on Earth may find themselves crucified or bombarded with
hate mail for going on the record as being AGAINST “Healthy
Forests” and/or NOT being willing to “err the
side of Life” or god forbid accused of “aiding and abetting
the murder of Terri” via “judicial homicide”
all due to a desire to engage on the opposing side of the many issues
that are available for reasonable discourse and debate between men
and women of faith and good will.
What I find most terrifying and sickening is that if in fact we
are to examine the REALITY behind the rhetoric, we must quickly
conclude that the Disciples of Rove are most certainly not always
erring on the side of Life. Such an unprecedented number of people
were put to execution under GWB’s watch in Texas that their
Death Row became a mere formality. Almost 2,000 and counting of
our most patriotic and valiant sons, daughters, husbands, and wives
came home from Iraq and Afghanistan in flag draped caskets and their
grief-stricken and devastated families would surely have preferred
more cautious, thoughtful, exploration of every last option available
to save lives being lost in war, not to mention proof of the actual
existence of weapons of mass destruction before we erred and
declared it necessary to fight the war in the first place.
Supposedly Geneva Accord Protected prisoners of that war who were
bound, beaten, tortured, murdered and/or sexually humiliated and
pornographically photographed in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere saw no
evidence of America’s erring on the side of respect for human
life. They continue to die horrible violent deaths in Darfur yet
we neither see nor hear any frenzied impassioned pleas for the sanctity
of their lives from Mr. Terry’s faithful troops. 20 million
AIDS orphans and counting starving, displaced and dying themselves
and their plight does not move the President from his ranch.
We see no special bills for the many thousands of “regular”
non-politically connected people trapped in some hellish nightmare
of legally ambiguous and un-accepted responsibilities for their
various and sundry HMO traumas and/or Big-Pharmaceutical Price-Jacks
and fear of profit loss failures to recall that which does not help
patients, but rather, kills them. For the “regulars”
we see exactly the opposite from the Rovians: the wish
and specific, meticulously designed, architectural plan
to Congressionally mandate the limit or eradication of
these ordinary routine suffering people’s right to pursue
the compensation for their losses in our courts.
According to the Rovians: a State’s legislative and judicial
authority must be held inviolate and sacrosanct
when it comes to processing punitive legislation attempting to eradicate
a woman’s right to choose, a gay couple’s right to marry,
or upholding the decision to put a retarded juvenile to sizzle in
the electric chair, but boy howdy, those same State’s legislators,
Regular Court’s judges, their worthy Appellate Court Judges,
and even their most esteemed Supreme Court Justices cannot be trusted
to make one binding decision about one individual white lady of
interest to the agenda of the vital so called “silent army
of evangelicals” who so majestically “swung” the
election for GWB and put their beatific faith in Rove they Trust.
When these Disciples of Rove say they want to “err on the
side of life,” please believe what they mean is that they
are licking their mob-ruled chops over the savory rhetorical multi-media-saturation
meal of an innocent and silent white lady whose undeniable sufferings
and manifold sorrows may be prostituted for faux-righteous fist-shaking
fire and brimstone frothing for political gain while usurping and
parading around in the mantle of our most sacred principles turned
inside out and backwards. Please believe they wish to serve last
rites over our right to choose any number of desperately, vitally
important things in what is left of our very precious private and
personal lives.
Terri Schiavo can no longer tell us what she wishes or what she
wanted. If you are currently able: please go visit www.agingwithdignity.com
and fill out the official “Five Wishes” paperwork preparing
your legally binding statement regarding how you wish to be treated
should you find yourself trapped in Mrs. Schiavo’s shoes and
save your family from having to walk any twisted legal sorrow miles
in the Schindler’s. Finally, if you are currently able, please,
on that that is holy: go express yourself to someone in your government
about something just to let them know we are not simply
a nation asleep and drugged from too many poisonous phrases turning
us all into simple minded lambs to the slaughter and/or clueless,
too-easily-manipulated, television vegetables.
Attempting to drive home in Atlanta on a Friday afternoon, I found
myself enshnargled and trapped in a hopelessly nasty clusterfrack
of a traffic jam. Given the day and the city and the mind-boggling
mathematical calculations of the numbers of cars (occupied mostly
by one human a piece) and the finite amount of lanes available for
traveling in, this forced captivity in my gas fed transport, should
come as no surprise. There is plenty of gridlock on a Friday in
Atlanta, even without accidents or rain or some drunken driven 18
wheeler overturned somewhere at some critical crossroad. When you
add Atlanta + Friday and then you multiply that times a boiler in
the basement blown-up blazing apartment fire which effectively shuts
down a huge segment Peachtree Road in toto for a couple of hours,
the result is, well, plenty of time to pay attention to all the
things worth considering on NPR.
So I am at a dead stop, not going anywhere anytime quickly, and
I am sitting there in my car listening to the bombs exploding over
Baghdad and I am struggling to comprehend the enormously complex
calculus exponentially effecting our entire planet Earth. I find
myself guilt-stricken listening for the re-cap loop of the new "totals
of tragedy." How many of our boys and girls are coming home in soon-to-be-flag-draped
black rubber bags? How many are missing, presumed tortured, as officially
recorded prisoners of war? How many mothers are strewn somewhere
in America trying not to lose their patriotic minds after some military
brass showed up, hat-held, head-hung at the door stammering something
about their child having just flat "gone missing" and that there
is, unfortunately, "currently no information available about their
whereabouts."
I listen to the horrifying statistics, the supposedly emotionless
empirical data of this supposed "operation" for Iraqi Freedom. Our
soldiers have not showered in weeks. Supply lines are strained to
the point of soldier's hoping to receive one meal a day. The quickly
approaching April desert temperatures are rapidly rising and conditions
are becoming literally and metaphorically, unbearable for our folk
in uniform. They are running out of water. More fuel is used for
one day of our calvacade's progression than is consumed in the entire
state of Florida. Our troops are currently attempting to control
a "theater" of "hostile elements" the size of California.
There are the bone-chilling testimonials of the western men and
women in uniform who are trying to wrap their minds around the kind
of enemy that would fake a white flag waved surrender in order to
get close enough to blow themselves up in suicide "nuisance attacks".
The kind of enemy that does not shrink from wearing innocent women
and children like high quality DEA grade Teflon. You can hear the
sick wonder in their voices. Underneath all the bravado of, "we
will in fact, crush them eventually" that remains the party line
to be held, there is an undeniable inflection of uncertainty. I
swear I have begun to hear the first prickling detections of this
nameless dread that perhaps, this will not be as easy as we thought.
As one of our soldiers so eloquently summed it up: "perhaps it
is just not so easy to conquer a country."
American troops and American people are having to quickly quickly
attempt brush up on their history and remember re/learn the harsh
irrefutable truth that there is, and always has been, a grave grave
danger to be faced when attempting to fight with anyone who feels
they have nothing left to lose. I can't believe anyone in America
reading, listening or even sitting bug-eyed glued to the idiot entertainment
box "watching the war" could escape the niggling sensation that
things are beginning to slide down a slope slick soaked in gasoline.
That this entire quick "out patient procedure" we were going to
do on Iraq is turning into a liability nightmare of Messiah complex
arrogance, gross-culpable negligence and lives drowning in blood
puddles flowing out into the rivers of sorrow, heading out into
the wrathful sea of revelations...
And as I sit paralyzed in my car, isolated with my vehicle butt
farting out my individual share of noxious exhaust merging with
the 1500 pollen count I wonder: What the hell am I supposed to do
with this information? How am supposed to react? What can I possibly
do that would make anything better for anyone "over there." I wonder
how all the mothers and husbands and wives and children of all the
soldiers are surviving this daily recitation of horror and fear
for those that they love the most dearly? I wonder what I could
possibly say to the poor beleaguered, tortured, demoralized, shell-shocked,
starving Iraqi people that could possibly convince them that the
shock and awe they are currently enduring shall eventually bring
about their supposed democratic liberation?
After listening to so many reports of the irrefutable evidence
from multiple perspectives and sources about the relentless life-long
litany of the confirmed sick twisted cruelty of Saddam Hussein,
I am desperately, existentially flummoxed. There is no doubt in
my mind that Saddam Hussein has been a vile curse upon the lives
of a multiplicity of human beings. The most illuminating Saddam
Factoid I have heard is the one where he used the Ba'ath party to
come to power, disagreed with them about how things needed to go,
gathered many of these hapless unsuspecting former allies in the
hallowed halls of his supposed "government" and then had the western
media savvy to get their ruthless, methodical public execution on
video tape as a pithy little pr collateral about what happens if
you cross him with a coup. Saddam wants to let everybody, everywhere
know that he is not kidding around. He does not play "fair". He
does not care. Whatever it takes to stay in power, yo, he is willing
to do it. No tactic is too distasteful, no method too despicable.
Regular weapons, chemical weapons, rape, human shields, it makes
him no never mind so long as folks get the message that he is the
boss and you either do what he says, or die.
One of the most cherished sentiments in the American Mythos is
Mr. Henry's famous revolutionary declaration: "Give me liberty,
or give me death." As Americans we have a very hard time comprehending
that after being squeezed to suffocation by the relentless tyranny
of Saddam, Iraqis have figured out the only way to live, is to obey.
It is my belief that this is the at the crux of the question about
why at it is that the Iraqis are not treating our American media
to lovely conscience soothing snippets of joyful people kissing
American G.I.s as they make their expensively slow march towards
Baghdad. What is funny to me is how thick skulled and oblivious
the American people are to be able to, without shred of irony, actually
sound "hurt" that we have not had a warmer welcome from the people
of Iraq. "For crying out loud," we whisper petulantly to each other
at cocktail parties, "We are trying to HELP those poor people!!"
But, really, how in the world could the Iraqi people possibly trust
us? We used to be Saddam's best buddy when it was back in the good
ole days of warring with Iran. High ranking US governmental officials
have had all kinds of previous nefarious relationships with Saddamn
when he was still talking about "working with us" on "modernizing"
Iraqi Oil and periphery oil industry infrastructures. The last time
the poor people trapped in this region trusted us to help them in
the last Desert Storm, when George Sr. decided we had "had enough"
we simply pulled up our stakes, jumped in our jeeps, helicopters,
planes and ships and said; "well, you guys are on your own with
this one now, cuz, like, you know, we are not about the business
of nation building..."
I have become obsessed with the macabre notion that this entire
potential apocalypse is playing out like some kind of diabolically
demented GWB lowest common denominator RoadRunner Cartoon. The wiley
coyote is methodically unwinding his coil of a fuse thinking he
is extremely slick and invulnerable hiding behind his cliff wall
with his faithful Acme TNT pump. We all know the drill: he sniggeringly
lights the fuse, the crackle sparked flame starts snaking its way
all the way back around and then just before the thing is supposed
to go KABOOM, the sneaky quick virtually unencumbered Road Runner
zooms right past him, the TNT explodes and then hapless coyote is
not only burned to a crisp but also crushed by the weight of the
mountain top his payload has destroyed.
I am struck with the thought that perhaps I need to see if in this
age of online information I could track down some public listing
of the name of George W. Bush's AA sponsor. I feel a desperate desire
to call up whoever it is and beg him or her to please for the love
of Christ, give ole GWB a mental intervention that Baghdad, and
by extension, the entire slowly unifying Arab and Muslim world cannot
become an adrenal substitute for lines of coke snorted, cases of
cold beers guzzled or perhaps a fine bottle of Mexican Agave smuggled
over the border on to his ranch in Texas. May God grant him the
serenity to accept the things he cannot change the courage to change
those things he can and the wisdom to know the fricken difference.
Everybody knows the ridiculous rental rates being charged in this
city despite even the recent reductions forced in an economic downturn.
So since I am without a trust fund and would have to basically bankrupt
myself in order to afford to live alone, I have made the compromise
to have roommates. My situation has a twist though, in that my roommates
are a married.
I get a lot of questions about my situation, like: "don't you
feel like you are intruding?" and/or "doesn't it make you feel lonely?"
and sometimes even, "what are you, like, turning Mormon now?" I
don't mind these questions and would not recommend single living
with marrieds for everyone. I am extremely lucky in that my married
couple are two of the kindest people I know and they have one of
the most solid enviable relationships I have ever been exposed to.
They have their days like everyone else, but for the most part,
they are happy working together as a team. They are fully committed
to the idea that they have now become bonded as a pair and may no
longer think about things in terms of being individual elements
allowed to interact as they will without concern for another. It
is this mental evolution that has had me searching the inside of
my skin, wondering if I am ever going to find myself engaged in
that sacred alchemy.
I have been finding recently that I may not even know how to function
within the context of a bonded pair. It's like sweeping into any
number of clubs secure that you are on the list, and then all of
a sudden, having to wonder about wrangling for +1 everywhere. Dealing
then with the new debate about whether or not you should still go
into the club if you cannot bring your +1 with you. Then searching
your soul about whether or not you would even want a +1 in certain
scenarios, even if you could get the listmakers to give it to you.
It used to be that I would moan like everyone else about how a good
man is so hard to find and oh woe is me, but lately I have been
wondering if all the woe is in fact, because of me.
The thing is, I operate very much as single organism. I am very
blessed to have a very vast web of beloveds in this city and many
others and I have been graced with membership in many different
tribes of peoples who are stupendously beautifully bewildering in
their diversity. I love the lesbian divas in the Park Slope of Brooklyn,
my Ducati riding brothers in San Francisco, my soul peoples in Philly,
the art aficionados in London, and the trannies in New Orleans with
all the same enthusiasm. Love to me is like a fruit basket. Cherry
love is not blueberry, blueberry not mango, mango not pineapple,
pineapple not orange, etc ad infinitum. Even if someone woke me
up in the middle of the night with a gun to my head and demanded
I choose just ONE fruit, for the all-time, the number one, better
than every other fruit in the basket pick, I might just end up with
my brains drenching the pillow because I was simply unable to make
such a mental commitment.
I was recently provided the feedback that it is very hard to contemplate
making a pair bond with someone who is so actively involved in multiple
tribal councils. That pair bonding means meeting the needs of your
mate must be more important than meeting the needs of your tribe
and that the very essence of your commitment will require serious
compromises. It was argued that it was hard enough for a single
person to renegotiate how her pair bonding was going to effect just
one friendship network and that it got extremely complicated the
more networks that same single person had previously developed.
The renegotiation process gets exponentially more complicated the
longer the person has been a single organism as the longer patterns
and habits have existed, the more disruptive and difficult they
seem to alter.
It goes without saying that there are manifold enticements leading
one towards forming a primary bond. Lord knows I have spent a fortune
in the last decade buying crystal wedding vases and pieces of china
for old boyfriends to tastefully decorate their happy honeymoon
houses. Banks will trust you with more money if there is another
person who promises to pull the debt plow if you suddenly get sick
or poor. Elegant dinner parties always prefer an amusing couple
to an odd unattached duck billed playtupus socially striking the
unlucky gong of thirteen. The IRS rewards the teams of married ladies
and gentleman with relief from the heavy burden of the single tax
bracket. But I have begun to wonder recently if all these perks
actually compensate for the loss of the ability to pursue your personal
happiness on your own isolated individual terms and the exquisite
possibilities that might only appear soaring solo or within the
gorgeous natural perfect V of tribal flight.
So I have been meditating recently that the issue as we grow older
is not so much how to find a good woman or man, but discovering
what we are each prepared to alter, compromise or forsake altogether
in order to keep them. I have been wondering what kind of love it
would take in order for me to be willing to make those kinds of
radical changes and if in fact a love exists that would make those
alterations and evolutions not feel like sacrifices that just make
you bitter. I wonder if I have traveled so far afield that I can
no longer even locate due North with which to guide my interior
compass and I wonder with my level of cross-pollination what kind
of wacky flower I expect to be able to bloom in my secret garden.
My only comfort is that I have been surprised recently to discover
that there are many more single people living in this situation
than I thought. Perhaps we should found another tribe comprised
of all the "single living with marrieds." We could gather each evening
like the twilight dog walkers who manage to meet each dimming day
near the soccer field in Grant Park. We could each bring a picture
of our couple to show and tell, casually and naturally sniff eachothers
behind and then just chase eachother around till we're exhausted.
Then, at least, when we went back home, we'd all be too tired to
think about the complexities manifest in our single situations and
we would sleep more soundly in our solitudes.
On Tuesday night (10.15.02)I had the opportunity to attend a truly
mind-bending and soul-uplifting lecture by an architect named . This lecture was held in conjunction with
an exhibit currently running at the Atlanta International Museum
which seeks to present the guiding principles of Ecology, Economy
and Equity as they are manifest in the design and architecture of
the myriad of miraculous projects completed by his firm William
McDonough + Partners. I can honestly say that his words have been
ringing in my ears like cathedral bells and I cannot think of the
last time I have been so powerfully effected by a public address.
Mr. McDonough asked us to imagine that each one of us was a current
student at a School of Architecture and Design anywhere in the world,
and some professor wanted to harness our collective creative energy
in order to get our help designing a system of production that one:
puts billions of pounds of toxic materials into the air, water,
and soil every year, two: measures prosperity by activity not legacy,
three: requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people
and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly, four: produces
materials so dangerous that they will require constant vigilance
from every future generation, five: results in gigantic amounts
of waste, six: puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet,
where they can never again be retrieved and seven: erodes the diversity
of biological species and cultural practices throughout the entire
globe in a speck of all known geological time. Hopefully, if you
were such a student you would stand up immediately and call him
a sick ass evil sadist and run screaming out of there terrified
and unwilling to aid such a twisted mind with his dastardly plans
for world domination and destruction. Unfortunately for us, this
dread system has already been designed, and it is called the Industrial
Revolution.
Mr. McDonough provided another vivid analogy by comparing the Industrial
Revolution with the Titanic. This 66,000 ton sea-hoss was the largest
moving object ever created by human beings which was specifically
designed to be the most dominant ostentatious representation of
technology, prosperity, luxury and progress ever to set sail on
the waters of the Earth. We all know the story. Like mighty Goliath
the Titanic was slayed by the prick of a naturally occurring ice-berg
and the supposedly unsinkable, unstoppable, perfectly designed behemoth
sunk tragically to the bottom of the sea. Our modern Industrial
world is just like The Titanic. The band plays on and on the same
tired money melody while we gobble fossil fuels, the poisonous power
of Nuclear reactors, waltzing waste into the water and thick toxic
smoke into the air. We are desperately deluded and in dangerous
denial that our brute force running roughshod of over the environment
has no consequence and is not in fact steaming towards a very rude
and unpleasant awakening.
Annoyingly loud alarm clocks are clanging: Wake up! Wake up! 16%
of Russia is uninhabitable from Nuclear "accidents"! There is 8500
square miles of "dead zone" at the mouth of the once mighty Mississippi
and the fricken Gulf of Mexico where nothing living can exist even
at the level of protozoa! There are vast dramatic, absolutely irrefutable
increases in world temperatures and desperately disturbing climate
changes forcing such dreadful realities as P.S. we are running out
of water! All this clamor is just to get the baseline attention
of the deluded or disinterested, in order to create a platform for
the proposition that we need to design another system based on different
principles in the hope of creating different outcomes for our entire
planet before it is too late.
It is in this regard that Mr. McDonough is most inspiring. Despite
all that he has seen and all that he knows, he is an optimist and
he believes that it is not too late to change our ways and begin
to help the Earth heal from the rapes of our exponential Global
Titanics. He believes the key to everything stems from two radical
questions of loving intention: "How do we love all the children
of all the species all the time?" And one further, "how much can
I give for all that I get?" He challenged all of us present in the
audience to become designers of a new revolution. A revolution which
seeks to return the systems of our planet back into harmony with
the natural world and its limitless splendor, genius and bounty
worth respecting, protecting and emulating. A revolution which seeks
to replace that which has been used, stolen or simply wiped from
the face of the planet.
He brought us back to the year 1776 when a one Thomas Jefferson
woke every morning planning sedition who was so bold to help author
our famous Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness..That to secure these
rights Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers
from the consent of the governed-that whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People
to alter or to abolish it and to institute new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such
form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
happiness..."
He challenged us to ask ourselves when it was that the diseased
oligarchy of corporate tyrants obtained the right to toxin saturate
our bodies of water? When did we give up our right to clean air?
When was it that we in the 1st world decided that the maintenance
of our luxurious lifestyle justified the rape, poison and pillage
of the rest of the world where 2 billion people have no drinkable
water and live on less than 2 dollars a day? He challenged us to
ask ourselves daily what radical act of kindness each one of us
could do each day that would accrue like grains of sand into mighty
mountains over time. He challenged us to ask ourselves if governments
owned by corporations being "less bad" was really the same as being
good and if it isn't, what are we the people prepared to do about
it.
Reading the extremely thought-provoking, eloquent and educational
text: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by Mr.
William McDonough, FAIA a trip to the Atlanta International Museum
(www.internationalmuseum.org) sometime before February 2, 2003 or
visiting www.mcdonough.com would be lovely first steps for any of
us.
You would think that as much as ole GWB loves to consult the Bible
for justification of his policy decisions, he might have run across
the cautionary Hebrew Proverb 16:18; "Pride goeth before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall." Lord knows, I can't possibly
speak as to what goes on in GWB's mind, but this proverb has been
haunting mine everytime I can bring myself to read the New York
Times, listen to National Public Radio or check the tickerwire of
CNN. From everything I read or hear it certainly seems that the
inherited hubris of Bush senior, that has been passed down now to
the Junior, is about to drag us into declaring war on Iraq leading
to a "conflict" within the Middle East the proportions of which
are truly Biblical.
I lie awake, grind my teeth and wring my hands. I ask whoever is
listening up there: "what can he possibly be thinking?" How can
we be a country that purports to be the light of liberty and freedom
in the world, a country founded upon the absolute refusal to submit
to the rule of a monarch, oligarchy or dictator, actually even consider
engaging in any military action of any kind against Iraq without
the support of the democratic organization called the United Nations
which we helped create in the first place? How in the world do we
suppose as Americans we can hold our heads up on Planet Earth while
our president and his gang of bullies plot to go storming into the
middle east to confirm every horrible, ruthless, multi-culturally
ignorant, demonic stereotype of our western imperialist wretchedness?
Especially when we are all so busy watching re-runs on television
or gorging ourselves on the last of the world's resources that we
really could care less.
Iraq, Shmack we say, motoring along from one fabu party to the
next totally and blessedly oblivious in our gas guzzling SUVs, which
of course, ironically and tragically are basically at the root of
the entire mess in the first place. The vilification of Iraq, the
rhetorical demonization of Saddam Hussein, the whole kit and kaboodle
is about OIL, and really, everybody knows this in their hearts.
It just sounds so much better to front about it being about pretty
conceptual confections like abstractions of "freedom" and "safety
for Americans." GWB's current huckster tales being snake oil sold
to congress and to the snoozing American people about how our potential
"operation" on Iraq is a necessity to save us from the threat of
weapons of mass destruction goes down as sweet as Coca-Cola and
it causes just as much systemic distress.
Never mind the fact that if we wade on into Iraq with our guns
blazing, boldly declaring to the entire planet that we are above
the league of nations and do not require their approval, aid or
sanction, we are going to set off a series of explosive reactions
that have the power to absolutely and totally obliterate what we
have previously known as our pretty decent American lives. For serious.
Let's not misunderstand here, this is literally one of those moments
in history where if we just stomp on into Iraq with our ridiculous
military pride, then we are courting a destruction the likes of
which this modern world has never seen. Our haughty spirit will
cause our fall, because what goes around shall come back around
and what goes up, must eventually come down.
Because here's the deal: times has changed since the days of Senior
Bush Daddy-O. We have already been warned, explicitly and implicitly
by every single one of our fragile allies in the Arab world that
they will not be able to support our invasion of Iraq. They will
not allow us to use their military bases, they will not allow us
the use of their airspace or overflight rights, or access to any
other facility at their disposal. The Arab league has sponsored
a rapprochement between Iraq and Kuwait at the March 2002 Arab Summit
and they are moving ever closer to the reestablishment of diplomatic
relations with Baghdad. Iraq has now repaired is relations with
every major Arab country.
Every Arab country which makes the decision to aid the United States
in any fashion with our invasion of Iraq faces a dramatic increase
in the already increasing crisis of legitimacy faced by pro-American
Arab regimes. The characterization of America as the demon of the
west and the rapist of the East by the various "extremist" organizations
within the Arab world will ring truer and truer. If in fact our
greatest fear in the Middle East is concerned about its becoming
a "breeding ground" for Anti-American potentially terrorist factions,
why in the world would we seek to invade Iraq? War in Iraq will
only cause widespread decimation, destruction of vital infrastructure,
disease and poverty which have always provided the ingredients for
the desperate roux which simmers into the stew of hatreds and hopelessness
that characterize all the suicidal political actions bubbling up
all over our world.
The only thing that has saved us so far in our dealings with the
Middle East are the centuries old separations and closely guarded
pockets of individual power which seek to remain isolated to ensure
their continued existence. An invasion of Iraq, especially an invasion
of Iraq where the United States is clearly acting "alone" and without
the support of even its own European allies may serve as the only
possible unifying catalyst with this diverse region. Can't you just
see all leaders of the Arab world sitting down and finally being
able to set aside all their previous disagreements in order to finally
just unite themselves under the brightly waving banner reading something
like "Arab Unity 2002: We ALL are sick of those Greedy American
Bullies" Does anyone else see this as one of the most terrifying
and tragic possibilities to be imagined in our modern world? Am
I the only one frightened into insomnia?
We Americans are so spoiled. We are so spoiled we have even forgotten
that we are spoiled. We shop our stuffed super-sized grocery stores,
hip hop all over the country in airplanes, numb our minds with the
absurd minutiae of popular culture, raze our forests to the ground,
cheerfully toxify our vital air and fields, pollute our rivers,
bayous, lakes and ocean outlets all in the name of convenient consumption
and instant gratification. We don't care about what we are up to
in our own country, much less a tiny country way on "over there"
somewhere populated by people whose religion and customs are strange
and foreign to us. We don't think of our situation as being connected
to theirs and as such we can't seem to work up a froth about what
happens to them.
But we as haughty spoiled Americans are going to be singing the
blues when there are lines at the gas pump again. We are going to
be weeping and wailing if this latest action of military blustery
inflated pride becomes the gasoline soaked straw which ignites a
unified Middle East to finally declare: Enough! Now it is really
ON! We are talking truly apocalyptic down to the last man woman
and child holy Jihad to smite you spoiled evil doers from the face
of the Earth. If Americans thought 9/11 was terrible beyond words,
please believe there are a zillion different new shades of horror
we haven't ever seen the likes of on our shores.
So I ask us all: Are there no more diplomatic options that remain?
Do we have any idea what kind of regime we want to replace the one
we destroy? Do the short term benefits of getting our missile rocks
off outweigh the long-term devastation for Iraq, for the Middle
East, for America, for the delicate balance of peace in the world?
Do we as Americans have any shred of revolutionary spirit left from
back in the day inspiring us to arm ourselves with knowledge about
what is truly up? Or are we just like those fat aristocrats in that
infamous Court of Versailles who would rather just greedily gobble
eats, drinks, smokes and sex while ruthlessly calculating shifting
status and torturing each other with elaborate court rituals all
while we absolutely ignore the desperate clamoring at the gates.
Until of course, like the drop slice of the guillotine, when our
repentance cries up to heaven, it comes alas alas, too late.
Wake up! Go get some information:
www.ips-dc.org, /
www.endthewar.org./
www.globalthis.org/ www.notinourname.net/www.iacenter.org www.doctorswithoutborders.org
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