REALITY
CHECK 2004REALITY
CHECK 2004
Here it is, well after 1 May 04, so I am quite late in wishing all you (my fellow prawns of the American Capitalist Shrimp Fleet) a very sincere Happy International Workers' Day (1 May). And no, this doesn't mark me as a raving Communist with anarchist leanings, but it does single me out as someone who has great sympathies for the plight of the average individual who is caught up in the tenacious tentacles of the corporate octopus that America's economy has spawned.
Each day I have to remind myself that despite all the politically correct lip service we devote to the myth that Americans are all 'equal', this could hardly be further from the truth. It is so readily apparent that we Americans live in a trenchantly class-divided society, that anyone who sincerely believes that that the United State is utterly devoid of class distinctions really isn't worth wasting further time with. At present those class distinctions are growing ever greater, as immense wealth continues to gravitate towards a tiny fraction of the population, with whatever 'middle class' that used to exist shrinking at a proportionate rate. Meanwhile, we are all being led Lemming-like into ignominy by an administration that has about as much social and cultural wisdom as Donald Duck
"Equal in the eyes of the law" is traditionally the only legitimate entitlement to 'equality' that Americans share, but even that is a myth, since it is a common fact that the powerful and wealthy have the money needed to 'buy' legal favor (Martha Stewart is an exception, of course, but her mistake was in institutionalising 'nice') when necessary, and the poor don't. George Orwell's analogy from his classic parable 'Animal Farm' is perfectly apt in reflecting this fact: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others..." In our case, it is the corporate animals who are most equal and the average working stiff who is least equal. Unfortunately, the average working stiff is so caught up by his inane, thoughtless, and non-reflective pursuits that he typically lacks the understanding even to perceive the seriousness of his plight. Pity, really, but let's face it, folks: the average person REALLY is pretty stupid. Sorry if I can't parrot the favored PC party line about all Americans being equal in this particular context, but that's what makes life such a frustrating and generally chaotic proposition; you can't really control the stupidity factor and therefore all the stupid people our nation contains shall continue merrily begetting stupid kids, who will continue to be led into the dead-end materialistic trap of unceasing brainless consumerism. An old joke puts it this way: One of Satan's minor henchmen one day was alarmed to note that a person on Earth had climbed the highest mountain to be found on the planet and reached out to grasp PERFECT TRUTH. Returning to Hell, he quickly reported this fact to his master. Satan listened to the report with no apparent concern and urged his devilish minion to relax. "Don't worry," said Satan. "I'll tempt him to institutionalise it."
At any rate, here we are now a year a year after the Iraq invasion and the ordure released by that unfortunate adventure simply continues to get deeper and more fragrant with each passing week. I've personally gotten to the point where I've given up arguing this wretched issue (Iraq and the administration's catastrophic dereliction of responsible action) with others, since it is so clear that the 'stupid factor' alluded to earlier seems to make most people completely incapable of using their pathetic little powers of reflection to analyse the facts for themselves. Any reasonably intelligent former Southwest Asian expat could have told anyone who cared to listen that the concept of implanting WASP American democracy in a fiercely proud and religiously extreme Arab region is laughable to the extreme. So here we are, with more and more of our kids being killed every day in that bloody theatre of operations, and no one seems to care. The families of those young soldiers who have been needlessly killed in Iraq (after the 'mission' was 'completed') bizarrely continue to wave the flag and sob on cue for the cameras about how their boy was just 'doing his duty for his country'. Sorry, folks, but I can't shed a tear for families who are so stupid as to think that having their kid blown away by a sun-crazed Islamic militant, 8000 miles from home (so that the United States will continue to have oil to fuel its plague of SUVs), is doing one's patriotic duty for America. This sort of patriotic delusion confuses 'contemporary corporate America' with the traditional 'land of the free and the brave' that was once considered to be worth dying for.
[Speaking of American 'kids' dying in Iraq, the UK's GUARDIAN had an excellent article on the phenomenon of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Of course, aside from being young, many of our soldiers come from the bottom classes of society and have become soldiers for economic reasons. This fact is attributable to some interesting circumstances. First, the US armed forces has now been restructured to draw heavily on reserve and national guard contingents to augment regular forces. Second, a great number of young individuals have joined the USA Army to gain (so they thought) economic rewards having been lured by recruitment promises of educational subsidies and bonuses. With education costs soaring ever skyward, many younger people have become members of the military thinking that it was an easy prosposition: to trade a few years in camouflage fatigues for several years of college. That was, of course, before this stupendous blunder that is the 'Iraq Adventure' began. After April of 2003, these kids suddenly found themselves getting more than they bargained for.....a shooting war in which people were actually....GASP!.....being shot at and even dying! Like a bolt from the blue, many have been rather rudely shocked to find that being a soldier means FAR more than wearing a uniform and playing soldier in safe stateside war exercises. Some of these kids were at Abu Ghraib prison, tending prisoners, when the recent interrogation brujahjah got a 'little' out of hand (for an excellent article on this subject--the folly of going to war for 'moral' causes--by English philosopher Professor John Gray, read the following excellent commentary: http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=522568&host=3&dir=75 ). At any rate, these are not young rocket scientists; they're mostly just youthful small town refugees (many of whom have never previously traveled further than the neighboring town in Wisconsin or Alabama) who are looking for personal economic improvement in the form of a 'college degree' that they have been told they 'need' to get ahead in modern America. Of course the premise that every American needs a college degree today is just as wrong-headed as the assumption that immature rural American youths intuitively know how to treat somewhat exotic 'prisoners of war' that have been placed in their charge with a modicum of respect and basic human dignity. This last point brings up a closely related subject that I have touched upon before...the dumbing down of American education, so that kids that otherwise wouldn't be able to graduate from high school can aspire to a college degree...but I'll pursue it another time. Meanwhile, please read the following GUARDIAN article and reflect upon its conclusions: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1218981,00.html .]
The point here is that, aside from the fact that most people seem to be so incredibly dumb that they can't figure these things out for themselves, the present concerns are all symptomatic signs of a larger and far more insidious disease of the mind and spirit of humanity. I refer to the fact that the quality of life America is creating for its people is anything but good for their best interests--spiritually, economically, politically, or socially. As for the oil issue, at the same time that American media doesn't miss any chance it has to ballyhoo the nation's pain over the rising cost of petroleum in the USA, automobile manufacturers continue to turn out the biggest, most wasteful, and expensive private automobiles engineers can design. As oil prices rise and fuel costs increase, there will be some predictable cutback in consumption of petroleum products and a decline in the number of larger vehicles sold, but as soon as a temporary fix has been found and applied like a Band-Aid to the problem, it's back to business as usual: commercially fueled instituionalised wastefulness. This status quo is a lamentable example of human nature being exploited for commercial gain in this country, but it is also a further sad indictment of the same 'stupid factor' referenced earlier. Pity.
Recently read several good books worth recommending. One that everyone really ought to read is titled 'House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties', by Craig Unger, ISBN 074325337X, March 2004, hardcover, 368 pages, Charles Scribner & Sons. ( http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=ZYw1xC5dLL&isbn=074325337X&itm=1 ). This book chronicles the cozy ties that the Texas oil industry has maintained over the past 20 years with the Saudi Royal Family and it is excellent in that it also explains how much of today's pestiferous 'terrorist' problem stems directly from this cozy relationship between the Al Sauds and the Bushes, the Cheneys, et al. To myself or any of my expat colleagues, this was common knowledge while we were 'in Kingdom'. This was also the reason why all America expatriates working in Saudi Arabia were indirectly advised that if they ran afoul of the Saudi laws & customs for whatever reason, they could not expect the US Embassy to come to their aid and assist them. The fact is that the American Embassy in Riyadh existed solely for the purpose of looking after American business interests in the Kingdom (this translates, of course, to oil & oil money kickbacks on a massive scale) and not for the purpose of safeguarding the welfare of Americans working for the Kingdom. We expats quickly learned that if the religious police (Mattawa'an) chose to arrest us for any whim, we could very well count on rotting away in the unbelievably filthy prisons the Kingdom maintained (you ate there only if you had money or if you had friends to bring you food--very much like Mexican prisons) and we also became aware of the fact that the Embassy did not want to take any steps that would irritate their Saudi hosts. This American diplomatic 'policy' makes an interesting contrast to the extremely supportive response that was characteristic of relatively poor and powerless nations such as the Philippines, whenever one of their nationals was arrested or imprisoned (which was quite frequently). The information contained in this book will come as a mild surprise to many Americans whose understanding of the world extends approximately to their backyard fence (that's about 90% of the entire population, folks), but believe me, you didn't have to work in Saudi Arabia for 10 years to come to these insights! Interestingly, after reading this first book, but before reading the second book (listed below), one might think that Dick Cheney was the Devil himself;' what a surprise then, to find that instead of there being only one Master of Hell, Hell is actually run by a Texas oil oligarchy!
The second book of recent note is 'The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet', by James Mann, Viking Penguin Publishers, ISBN 0670032999, 448 pages, hardcover, March 2004. ( http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=ZYw1xC5dLL&isbn=0670032999&itm=1 ). This is an almost scholarly and balanced look at the key players in George W. Bush's cabinet (Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Armitage, Powell, and Rice) and it is a very interesting look at the respective pasts of each of these influential individuals that helps explain how so many otherwise extremely well versed, well educated, and intelligent people could go so far astray in their views and outlooks on the United States' proper role in world politics. The single most interesting point made is that each of them has been playing an active role in shaping US affairs since well into Tricky Dickie's regime, but the second most intriguing revelation is that they remain today antediluvian recidivist 'Cold War' strategic planners--largely unable to reflexively reshape and reformulate their philosophies to cope with today's tectonic geophysical shift in the world political scene. I was particularly interested in Condoleeza Rice's background, since there's no question she is a sharp cookie (a Ms. Doctor)--alas, in the final accounting, she appears to be only Dubya's 'Brown Sugar with a PhD'. While Mann makes Cheney appear in his book to be a bit more human than I would give him credit for, Mann effectively paints Cheney as the Bush Administration's Martin Bormann. Powell, on the other hand (a figure for whom I have formerly maintained the utmost respect), is seen as somewhat less the scholarly hero many have pictured him as, whose admirably cautious attitudes are more closely shaped by the unhappy experience of Vietnam than any vestige of inherent wisdom. All in all, I would highly recommend this book--if for no other reason than to put a slightly more human face on these seeming ogres of egregious neoconservative excess (whom many disparage out of hand). Notice I didn't say that reading this book has changed my prior opinions about any of them, or the catastrophic foreign policy decisions they have collectively forged in the name of misguided neoconservative zeal; I have merely been allowed to see that they are after all only seriously deluded human beings and not the mindless monsters they otherwise would appear to be.
Be well citizens and try NOT....repeat NOT....to lose all faith in humanity, despite the preponderance of fresh steaming heaps of daily evidence that forcibly argues all of humanity and the entire planet it populates is doomed, doomed, doomed! .............Oh yes....and Happy belated May Day!
Cheers, Doc Boink (Power to the Petunias!) May 2004
----------------------------------------------------------------------------