NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(November '04)
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11/07/04
Yo-yo, baby...
Just taste that air. Can't you feel the bitter snap of winter? No? Try it again. Still nothing? Here -- have some of my air. No dice, eh? Strange -- I could have sworn it was something in the air. Maybe it's something in the water.
Anyway, goddammit, now that the shroud of winter is gradually being lowered over the northern hemisphere, those of us now residing below the equatorial divide are starting to move a little more slowly in sympathy with our forebears up on the top of the world. Hey ... if not for pure geographical happenstance, we might have been the ones winterizing our cars and sealing the windows and hauling in the astrolabe. So in honor of you folks under the icy gun, I'm going to share a few letters from home. (Just imagine me sitting by the fire with a feather-shaped letter opener and a snifter of brandy, my monogrammed smoking jacket a deep wine red.) Ahem...
Dear Big Green,
When is our next album coming out? It's been five years, and still nothing. Even the local squirrels are laughing at you. What the fuck kind of a self-respecting band are you, anyway?
love,
Myrtle Ostrovsky, Scranton, PA
Well,
Myrtle...we're a "painstaking" the fuck kind of self-respecting band,
that's what. Sure it's been five years since we released 2000
Years To Christmas ... but every minute of that time has been devoted to
planning, writing, producing, and digesting what will be the most colossal work
of our careers. Oh sure, what we have now is a bunch of half recorded tracks and
empty cartons of take-out curry. One day soon, though, these seemingly
disjointed elements will coalesce into our Sergeant Pepper, our Smile,
our ....well, maybe not, but at the very least (and this is important) it will
be the best album we've put out in...six...years. Anyway, stay tuned, Myrtle --
and tell those squirrels of yours that the best is yet to come.
Here's another one:
Dear Big Green,
Why do you always insist on tagging your mechanical man Marvin with the parenthetical a.k.a. "(my personal robot assistant)" whenever you first mention him in your lousy column? Don't you think we know who he is by now? Give us credit for some intelligence, for Chrissake!
Regards,
Ken Tucky, Derby, Illinois
The
answer's quite simple, Ken. You see, we're all about internet communications
here at BigGreenHits.com
-- sophisticated internet communications. That means endless
repetition... endless repetition of certain word groupings (or "word
groupings") so that when people Google search on a common phrase like, oh,
say "Marvin (my personal robot assistant)" or a common name like
"sFshzenKlyrn", our web presence
will appear at the top of their search results page every time. Just another
magical way we have of introducing people to the wonder and the glory of Big
Green. It's part of what keeps this column so "lousy," as you put
it... and that's the way our readers like it. Am I giving Marvin a complex?
Possibly. But it's good for automatons to visit bonkers-ville every once in a
while. Keeps them alert.
On to our next letter:
Dear Big Green,
What the hell, that's the first time you've mentioned sFshzenKlyrn in I don't know how many weeks! What's up with that guitar-slinging patch of nebulosity these days, anyway? He was always my favorite member of your band. Him and Charles Kurault.
Best,
Noah Dress, Justmadeitupolis, MN
Glad
you asked, Noah! Our perennial sit-in guitarist has been busy with his day-job
lately -- forming new stars in a remote corner of the known universe. Each
litter of baby stars takes about a billion years to gestate, so the job doesn't
exactly offer what you might term instant gratification. Still, it's better than
that old "dark matter" job he used to hold down, which mainly involved
adding tremendous mass to the universe and perplexing scientists by remaining
otherwise undetectable. (Hey, somebody's got to do it.) In any case, sFshzenKlyrn
will be dropping by at the Cheney Hammer Mill very soon to start tracking some
guitar parts on that album I mentioned earlier. (You know... that real good
one we haven't done yet.) And your reference to Charles Kurault? That's...
just... strange.
Got questions? We're made of answers here at Big Green. Just write us and see. Safe as houses, I promise.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Vox
Popu-lie. As I know about a million commentators have said, quoting Mo
Udall, Democratic "also-ran" of 1976, "The people have spoken.
Goddamn 'em." I've been trying to work out whether this election amounts to
an "all of the people, some of the time" situation, or a "some of
the people, all of the time" one. Maybe it's more of an "enough of the
people, every two years or so" deal. It is tempting to think of it in terms
of that big headline in the British tabloid The Daily Mirror -- Can
59 Million People Be That Stupid? But it's
not that easy -- perhaps it's closer to the truth to say that Psycho Kirk will
always win out over Warmed-Over Spock... that's just marketing. Karl Rove
understands it quite well, and he was able to set the terms of the campaign so
that the Bush record really did not matter -- net job loss (first in 72 years),
pointless bloody war in Iraq, lies about WMD's and Al Qaeda, massive deficits,
major attacks on civil liberties and 
the
environment... none of it mattered as much as, will the homo down the road be
able to visit her gay lover in the hospital? Or walk past my daughter in a
school zone? On that contrived battleground of "moral values," Not
Kerry was able to prevail over Not
Bush.
Of course, there were the usual tactics of suppressing the Democratic base of minority voters, particularly effective in the Old Confederacy, as well as Ohio and other swing states. You know the drill -- tossing registrations that use the "wrong" weight paper or have minor errors; distributing official-looking flyers that caution people to bring proof of child support, tax, and other payments to their polling place; advisories that Republicans vote on Tuesday and Democrats on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; anonymous phone calls; etc. Crucially in Ohio, where the national race was decided on the basis of less than 140,000 votes, the wait at the polls was hours long; many thousands were forced to fill in "provisional" ballots that will probably never be counted now, though as many as 90% may be valid. And of course, there are the disproportionately high ballot spoilage rates that plague minority communities, ensuring an undercount for Democrats. Plus, now we have the "Diebold" effect, shown in one district outside Columbus to have awarded more than 3,000 extra votes to Bush. Computer voting machines that generate no paper receipt consistently delivered higher vote tallies to Bush than exit polls suggested, compared to other districts that use auditable voting systems, where exit polls were dead-on, as they typically are. Thus, the anti-Bush vote died a death of a million cuts. Or maybe four million cuts. Or maybe just 150,000 cuts.
That's
not to say Kerry is blameless -- anything but. They ran a flat-footed, reactive
campaign, driven by the same crew of cash-fed consultants and DLC strategists
who lost the last two national elections. As Alex Cockburn and others have
pointed out, they had so many political gifts handed to them this year, it
should have been a rout. But the Kerry team squandered them on an inarticulate,
perennially vague, corporate-approved line of discourse that loony right-wing
talk show host Laura Ingraham must now hilariously describe as
"socialist" -- I have to believe even conservatives are laughing at that
line. Honestly, the Democrats would need to at least sound more
progressive to win an election, or even (god forbid) make the case for full
employment and other progressive economic policies that might 
constitute
concrete moral issues to mobilize workers and the poor. Beyond that, they need a
candidate who can win fucking Ohio, damnit -- hard to do with warmed-over
Clintonomics. Finally, thanks to Kerry's vote to authorize the Iraq war, Rove
and company were able to define him as a waffler and make it stick, then take
aim at his military record and his anti-war activism, dredging up the
30-year-old malevolent Nixonian rhetoric that put MIA flags over every post
office and provided the foundation for today's culture war. Because of
Kerry's weakness as a candidate and his inability to effectively respond to
these attacks, this seriously undermined his image with voters, who were never
clear on exactly who he was to begin with. Again -- it's hard to win an election
by simply voting against someone, which is what most Kerry voters were
seeking to do...though they came very close to doing just that.
What put Dubya over the top? Sinclair's broadcast of "Stolen Honor", perhaps, or the eleventh hour appearance of Uncle Osama? Whatever it was, the Insane Clown Posse has ridden victorious into Washington DC for another four years, which they'll kick off with a major war crime (collective punishment) in Fallujah. My suggestion: Resist.
luv u,
jp
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11/14/04
Humma humma...
Hello out there in the ex-blogosphere. Joe of Big Green here once again to share with you pithy tales of bathos and intrigue, wrenched from the jaws of circumstance, branded with the shadow of our collective indifference, and delivered via express projectile -- the music-blog shot from guns. Think fast!
I
and my fellow band-makes stuck pretty close to the mill this week, trying to
work out what our next big move will be. Hey, once in a while you just have to
work this shit out between yourselves, without a lot of outside interference.
How does this work for Big Green? Quite
simple, really. We brick up all the windows in one wing of the abandoned Cheney
Hammer Mill, set up a special situation "white" board, and start
marking the sucker up with one ludicrous proposal after another ... just reeling
them off before we get a chance to think about how stupid any of them are. Then,
when the 
board is filled up, we yank out these little magnetic darts and start
tossing them at the white board. As the darts progressively block out one
scribbled letter after another, a message starts to emerge from the chaos.
Here's what we came up with after about an hour of this:
as kl xrnofbig hum (sqx)
To render this comprehensible to human-types such as ourselves, we then call in Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who is equipped with a universal translation device. He feeds the seemingly meaningless jumble of random characters into his central processor unit and goes to work. Lights flash on his abdomen, and Marvin emits a series of bleeping and buzzing sounds, followed by a reasonable facsimile of Mel Blanc's sputtering jalopy coming to a stop. A melodramatic wisp of black smoke drifts skyward from one earhole, as if somewhere deep inside his labyrinthine robotic brain, tiny electronic cardinals have just decided on a new pope. Finally, he hooks himself up to an old-fashioned stock ticker and prints off a long slip of paper for us to tear off and examine. Here is the answer we've been waiting for:
btl got hum (sqx)
Seldom
has a virtual band been given a clearer set of marching orders. As soon as we
were able to confirm this astounding translation, I got on the phone to Mitch
Macaphee and asked him to prepare for a string of showcase appearances around
the holidays -- a mini-tour, as it were, of the larger satellites in our own
solar system: Callisto, Titan, and...well...all those other moons, including our
own (a.k.a. "the moon"). This time, instead of entrusting our fate to
some wayward root vegetable from way down in Dixie, we will book our own way,
set our own schedule, and mismanage our own affairs. And with the ample seed
money provided by Marvin's recent "withdrawal" from the local merchant
bank, we won't need any corporate sponsors this time out. (Though an area
cheesemaker has asked us to plug his paneer in return for a hundred weight of
fresh curd to sustain us on our journey. Seems fair, and as the marketeers might
say, there are significant "synergies" between cheeses and moons.) See
-- this is why we have a system for decision making, rather than leaving
it to the fates. There's no way in hell we would have come up with Big
Green's BTL GOT HUM
Tour 2004 without it.
While
I worked the phones, lining up venues and insulting club owners, Matt and John
began the somewhat arduous task of weighing everything we plan to bring along
with us on our trip. This is essential, since we'll be pressing our
imitation Jupiter 2 spacecraft into service -- you 60s TV fans know what
happened when extra weight was added to the Space Family Robinson's far-out
split-level saucer. Our payload must be calculated to within a fraction of an
ounce... that includes Matt's squash and melon collection. Everything goes on
the scale -- no exceptions. No more unplanned extragalactic sojourns for me.
This time we travel by the book. (Now if I can just remember where I left
the book...)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Pity
The Nation. My mind was irresistibly drawn this week to one of the major
issues that the November 2nd election has no bearing on -- the ongoing criminal
war in Iraq, launched by our government on transparently false pretenses,
sustained on mortgaged billions, fought by men and women with few options in
life other than military service; a war that may be easily ignored by the
majority of SUV-driving, tax-cut loving Americans, but one that has moved into a
particularly deadly phase for Iraqis, whose mounting casualties attest to the
plausibility of the recent Johns Hopkins study claiming over 100,000 dead over
the past eighteen months. As I write, our military is destroying what's left of
the city of Fallujah in pursuit of an elusive insurgency that will only be
strengthened by this kind of 
slash-and-burn
tactic. We've rained 500-lb bombs on Fallujah's urban neighborhoods, engaging in
collective punishment of its remaining citizens as we seek to eliminate the
terrorist mastermind of our latest obsession, a man who our commanders concede
is no longer in the city...and may, in fact, have never been there.
So we witness war crimes within war crimes: the wanton destruction of ambulances and emergency medical facilities within a high-tech Carthage-like siege within an illegal war, all flagrant violations of that quaint UN Charter to which we remain a legally-binding signatory. Essential to establishing a democracy? Don't make me laugh. The only "democracy" our government wants in Iraq is the kind that delivers a guaranteed outcome; one fully to Washington's liking. There is no justification for this brutal attack, which will only help to undermine Iraq's chances for a peaceful and unified future. The Pentagon (motto: We don't do body counts) claims to have killed more than 1,600 "insurgents" in Fallujah over the past five days. Rumsfeld (motto: Still on the job... somehow) would have us believe that they're all people who "cut off heads", though the distinction between decapitating people with knives and dismembering them with "smart" bombs or 50-mm cannon shells escapes me. The total human cost of this operation promises to be extremely high.
It
is cold comfort to recall that John Kerry was just as determined to pursue
tactics such as these as is Dubya. He shamefully scolded Bush at one of the
debates for not finishing the job last April, when U.S. troops were withdrawn
from Fallujah after killing about 600 civilians. We were destined to be stuck
with this war regardless of who carried Ohio two weeks ago, 
just
as our lopsided policy towards Israel was bound to continue. Yasser Arafat's
death this week has Likudniks on both sides of the ocean rubbing their
blood-stained hands together in anticipation, I'm sure, of some kind of
fratricidal Palestinian civil conflict. Of course, now they have no one
individual to punish as a living effigy of the Palestinian nation -- when they
called Arafat a terrorist, irrelevant, etc., they were addressing all
Palestinians. One can only hope that the Palestinian National Initiative and its
allies will gain strength in the months ahead as a clear-headed, determined
force for justice and independence -- something the Iraqis need right now, as
well.
Sit Down, John. As I'm sure you know, John Ashcroft, the DoJ's Phantom of the Opera, will be heading home to Missouri to devote himself more fully to his career in musical comedy and, as Jon Steward suggested, spend more time rounding up and questioning his family. He leaves a big hole. (Cheney.)
luv u,
jp
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11/21/04
Welcommen...
Read the first phrase. Now repeat after me. Gizz pratz voc tuh mol. Good. And again. Gizz pratz voc tuh mol. Very good. Turn to page nine in your exercise book. Use the phrase in this conversation. When would it be the appropriate thing to say? When sharing mockik (a Titanic dish consisting of beans) or when warning of impending meteor showers? Enter your answer in the space provided....
Oh,
damnit ... sorry. Caught me in the middle of my language training session.
Berlitz Interplanetary has been kind enough to lend us a hand with our tour
preparations for the BTL Got Hum Tour
-- a holiday jaunt through the moons of our very own solar system...this one
here. We of Big Green are making our own
arrangements for once, necessitating some additional communications skills -- a
vital prerequisite for any interplanetary business 
negotiations.
I'm currently studying Titanic (the native tongue on Saturn's largest moon,
Titan) and will probably acquire a smattering of at least half a dozen non-terran languages prior to our departure. To this end, we've converted one of
the assembly rooms of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (the place where we live
at) into a makeshift language lab circa 1975, with the metal headphones, the
scratchy instructional record, and the whole bit. I'm on lesson 4 of the Titanic
"quick-speakin', fun-cussin' language program;" Matt's on lesson 6.
I'm not sure if John has started yet -- I think he comes in here just to listen
to his old Police LP's. (Right now, it's the only turntable in the
building.)
It's
actually a good thing that we've convinced Mitch Macaphee, long-time Big
Green friend and mad science advisor, to accompany us on this venture
-- he has promised to install a sophisticated language translation device in
Marvin (my personal robot assistant), so that when we're completely at a loss on
some dry alien moon, we will have someone to beckon to. The lessons are kind of
a fail-safe, frankly -- it seems only right that we should be able to shout
obscenities on stage and have at least some of the creatures in the
audience able to understand us and take offense. Anyway, Mitch has given me his
personal assurance that Marvin's new translation device will work better than
any of the other after-market 
modifications
he's installed in the automaton over the past three years. He's planning to
splice the unit into Marvin's head cavity, where there's oodles of room right
now. That way, we can just shout into his little tin ear and the translation
will emit from his mouth/speaker. Pretty cool, no?
Even
more exciting (if that can be imagined) is what Mitch plans to do to our replica
Jupiter 2 class interstellar space vee-hickle. The schematic diagram our mad
scientist friend faxed over to me last night set forth a bold plan for the
makeover of the ship's lower deck -- he envisions a wet bar where the geology
lab is now, plus some kind of plush sectional sofa with blue slip covers.
Shocking red swag curtains drape across the aft viewing port to complete the
look. (Personally, I think old Mitch has been spending a little bit too much of
his time at those cushy academic conferences over on the continent... and maybe
watching a bit too much HGTV in his cheesy hotel rooms.) The plan also calls for
a small terrarium-like secure 
box
for the man-sized tuber to ride in, equipped with irrigation taps, fertilizer
supply, and a carousel DVD player with theater sound system. Not too
shabby.
Of course, I'm hoping that, in the coming weeks, Mitch will come up with some... well... more practical innovations for our space vehicle -- navigational aids, fuel consumption software upgrades, etc. I'm also hoping to hear from our other faithful touring companion, Trevor James Constable, who has added so much to our entourage on past tours. But enough of this idle chatter -- my automatic language proctor is cueing me. Back to the books. Hem o mok horan... Welcome.... Hem o mok horan ...Welcome. Very good. Page 12. Repeat after me...
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Two
In The Head. Quite a purge going on at Bush, Inc., eh? The White House
division has reshuffled the deck, promoting those who've proven most loyal to
the prevailing lunacy. No, folks... Condi Rice will not get the axe for her
miserable failure leading up to 9/11 or for the satanic "yellowcake"
verse inserted into the president's 2003 state of the union address -- she's
getting promoted, rising to the level of her incompetence as every loyal
commissar should. (Though it may be argued that Secretary of State is a kind of
internal exile in the Bush Administration, given their plain distrust of
diplomacy.) In Alberto Gonzalez, Dubya has chosen an Attorney General that's
fully pre-qualified for his role as dismantler of our constitutional rights, as
well as other "quaint" legal instruments enshrined in international
law. All in all, Bush is surrounding himself with those most closely identified
with his "inner circle", so that ne'er a dissenting voice will 
be
heard in the land. (Recall junior's response to the "town hall" debate
question about naming three errors he had made as president -- the only thing he
could think of was some unwise appointments... unnamed former members of the
administration who, no doubt, had committed the sin of pointing out his
errors.)
The purge is ripping through the CIA, where those disloyal to the administration are being cashiered, reportedly on Cheney's order. See the logic at work here? If it weren't for these disagreeable people who pointed it out, there wouldn't have been any bad intelligence. Very similar logic applies in Fallujah, where the hospital (i.e. a source of bad news during last April's pogrom) was the first target and the Red Crescent has been kept out to, well, to keep civilian casualties at a minimum. It reminds me of that passage in Catch-22, when Yossarian moves the front line on the map of Italy so that Bologna would be captured by the allies. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that this administration would deliberately confuse cause and effect to their own advantage, since their feckless rule is based on a platform of contempt for the constraints of basic science and other "quaint" relics of the Enlightenment. For a government that doesn't affect to give a rat's ass what anybody else thinks, they certainly seem obsessed with containing bad news of any kind.
There's no paradox here -- it's quite simple. They don't want to pay the price for anything they do. In fact, that's the essence of their political philosophy and much of the reason for their electoral success. As long as they can keep a majority of Americans from feeling any real pain over their Iraq war, they won't be impeded. This seems like as good a place as any to introduce my amazing 2-step plan for bringing the troops back home from Iraq (I call it, "Two in the head for peace"):
Step
One: Raise Taxes, so that people making, say, $50K or more are paying for
this war. Bush talks a good game about what he calls "pay-go," but
he's the undisputed borrower-in-chief, especially when it comes to funding his
splendid little Iraq catastrophe. I say, any war "worth fighting" is
worth paying for... right now, with additional levies, not money borrowed from
the Bank of China.
Step Two: Draft People. Once again, any war "worth fighting" is, well, worth fighting yourself, and not simply left to people who choose the military because they've got nowhere else to find work. All those folks who have other plans and other priorities, like college, careers, and the like? Uncle Sam needs you... in Iraq.
Do these two things, and then ask all Americans -- is this war really a good idea? Because I don't think you can get a genuinely honest answer until people are faced with sacrificing their own money and their own physical safety. Without that, it's just another "reality" television show they can simply switch off and ignore, then feel like they're doing their patriotic duty by slapping that ribbon on the back of the old SUV. Death and taxes are two things that tend to concentrate the mind.
Two in the head for peace. Do that and, trust me, we'll be out of there in about six weeks.
luv u,
jp
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11/28/04
Hey-la.
Tote that bar, lift that...bar. Hey, what do you want from me? All we've got around here is bars. No, not the kind where you go to buy rounds of drinks while your spouse thinks you're off working somewhere. I mean, the metal kind -- ingots, pig iron, you know? What they used to make the hammers outa. What am I speaking, Swahili?
Okay,
let me back up a bit. We're here at our longtime squat, the Cheney Hammer Mill,
located south of Colombo, Sri Lanka, trying to get ourselves together for an
upcoming string of gigs in the outer solar system. Our trusted (mad) science
advisor Dr. Mitch (buzz-wow) Macaphee has only just arrived to start plugging
away at the inventive technology that will help shepherd us from moon to moon
this holiday season. Sophisticated electronic gear -- you know what I mean?
Gizmos with flashing lights and funny metallic noisemakers inside. Okay, so what
are these iron bars for? Simple. Mitch is smelting them into some kind of bullet
proof bandstand -- just a little extra protection against disgruntled,
projectile-hurling extraterrestrials. (This is serious business, trust me --
some of those fuckers have six or seven pitching arms.) He's also fashioning
personal stage shields out of titanium -- a substance that's as light as
aluminum and strong as steel. (So Mitch tells me.)
Perhaps
most important of all these innovations is the "universal translator"
Mitch has installed in Marvin (my personal robot assistant) ... a
marvelous device that will help us overcome the most seemingly insurmountable
language barrier. The contraption fits neatly inside Marvin's 
head cavity -- so
neatly, in fact, that you'd hardly know it was there, were it not for the small
prosthesis Mitch attached to the automaton's ear so that the translator could
pick up our voice commands. Once it was activated, the good doctor encouraged us
to try it out. Matt stepped forward and barked a common English phrase into
Marvin's new earpiece: "How are you?" Lights flashed about Marvin's
head and abdomen, then his mouth speaker emitted a quickie translation: "Como
esta usted?" Mitch reached over and gave a small attenuator knob a
quarter turn. "Comment ca va?" came the recorded voice from
within, like a film strip narrator from 1967. Magic!
This
was just what we needed for the BTL
GOT HUM Tour -- but we had to be certain it worked.
I tried it next. "How much for the egg-drop soup?" I shouted into
Marvin's ear-hole. "Comment ca va?" he replied. My next
question was to Mitch, and it started with "What the FUCK...." Still a
few bugs in the system, apparently. Lucky for us, we've got our perennial sit-in
guitarist sFshzenKlyrn to intervene on our
behalf. That extraterrestrial being of indeterminate shape and mass I call
friend happens to know more than 47,390 intergalactic languages, as well as a
positively infinite number of dialects. If the thing in Marvin's head does
nothing but take up space where his brain should have been, we'll have our
guitar maven from beyond the stars to fall back on. (That business of being in
several different dimensions at the same time has some distinct advantages over
our depressingly linear 
way of life down here on Earth.) What's more, sFshzenKlyrn
works cheap -- just give him a fully stocked refrigerator and he considers
himself more than amply compensated.
What about the ship? Well, Mitch has only just started to implement his bold vision of a modern, inviting living space on the lower deck (he's having a little trouble getting the right fabrics, actually) but we have managed to cajole him into realigning the solar batteries and replacing some of the burned out wiring behind the magna-panels up topside. What means this? I haven't the slightest idea... it's stuff that the Robinsons used to work on all the time, so we had Mitch take a look. If our replica J-2 split-level interplanetary space "pad" is going to chug its way along the string of a dozen or so moons on our itinerary, I want to be certain we dot every "t" and cross every "i" before lift off. If we're going to break down in deep space, let's be sure it's for a damn good reason. Like no air. Or some kind of 'splosion.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Under
The Gun. It has been observed many times (perhaps most recently and
eloquently by Jonathan Schell in The Nation) that imperial ambitions change a
society for the worse. That is certainly true of the United States. Though the
empire game is nothing new to us, this most recent cycle provides a sordid
reminder of its ill effects -- the acrimony and division, the political
scapegoating, the economic upheaval, and worse yet, the abandonment of what
remains of our collective humanity. For a nation whose most recent national
election was settled largely on the basis of something called "moral
values," we're wasting no time in showing the world how arrogant and
murderous a great power can be... and we have yet 
to hit bottom. Consider how
far we've come. Our assault on Fallujah began with an attack on the city's one
major hospital and a "precision" terror bombing of a clinic known to
the U.S. command that killed five patients -- part of a deliberate and
calculated denial of basic medical services to the people who remained in that
city after more than 150,000 people had been sent off into the desert as
refugees. The videotaped execution of a wounded insurgent, ugly as it was, seems
almost trivial in the context of this enormous act of collective punishment.
As
an American, you're not supposed to care, because this is the post-9/11 world
and it's us (good) against them (bad); therefore the old rules don't apply. Of
course, they didn't apply during the Cold War either -- yet another special case
-- when we were turning Indochina into a massive free-fire zone (same
"us," different "them"). Back then, it was positively
dangerous to speak out against the war and criticize the massive rural
pacification campaigns, the deadly terror bombing raids, the hysterical
application of American firepower that left probably 2 million dead and many
more wounded, homeless, etc. Plenty of Americans -- stateside airman George W.
Bush included -- thought we should flatten Vietnam, using the "full
force" of our military even if it meant killing everyone there. To borrow a
line from junior... If this isn't evil, then evil has no meaning. You can find
similar Nazi-like hyper nationalist sentiments today, as well -- just look at any
Yahoo discussion thread attached to news articles about the Iraq war, or listen
to five minutes of "head"-Rush Limbaugh, radio's most popular drug
fiend, whose hallucinations include that of a Fallujah populated by
"terrorist scum". Check your local op-ed page, as well. People
defending the indefensible, from bombing urban 
neighborhoods to torturing and
killing detainees to raking civilians with indiscriminate gunfire. Where does it
end?
I've said before that we've adopted the tactics of the Israeli military in their ongoing war of occupation, but that's a bit like the tail wagging the dog. There is a strong resemblance there that reflects a common imperialist attitude, which in Palestine has translated into a policy of targeting children. Like ours, their society tends to focus on individual soldiers in very visible cases, like the execution-style killing of a wounded 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl in Gaza by an Israeli officer. There's usually an inquiry, sometimes a trial... but the broader policy is never put in the dock and cross-examined -- the dehumanizing occupation that makes these individual acts of violence inevitable. When that U.S. soldier shot a wounded Iraqi man in a Fallujah mosque, that was us pulling the trigger. When our right-wing ideologues defend the shooting, comparing it favorably with beheadings perpetrated by nameless, stateless fanatics, they're really just denying their own (and our) responsibility. We put the kid out there. Unlike him, who has no say, we could stop this if we wanted to. Until we do, we're just using him as a human shield, protecting ourselves from the truth about this stupid bloody war.
luv u,
jp
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