 United States of Duh
The veneer, our seemingly unending capacity to stay
Still Stupid After All These Years, allows our governments literally
to get away with murder
By
Daniel Patrick Welch
July 30, 2003
The Iranian
After all these years, it still amazes how
Americans can remain so disconnected from the world events in which
we play so central a role. I use the term "world events" loosely,
since the US today seems to have lost even its historically tenuous
connections with the reality of the rest of the world.
We continue
to call our baseball championships the World Series, oblivious
to how quaint and naive, at best--or arrogant and self-absorbed,
at worst--it has always seemed to the rest of the world. This has
been the hallmark of Americans' role in the world--a curious blend
of ubiquitous involvement paired with near-total ignorance.
But the lovable galumpfing innocent act has worn
thin around the world--innocents don't usually oust your elected
leaders and install
their own puppets--and its charm, if it ever had any, is no longer.
Yet the national stupidity persists, facilitated by its enablers
in the headline-addicted US press establishment,
to the detriment
of the American reputation around the world.
Consider these gems
from recent press accounts of the massacre in the Mansur district
of Baghdad: "Oh So Close," chirped half a dozen tabloids.
So close to what, exactly? Genocide? A war crimes tribunal?
No. The reference to a botched raid on a house where
Saddam "may
have been hiding" was to how close our liberators came to
catching The Beast. The press has so completely given itself over
to Pentagon propaganda that they can't even see red flags where
they should, sort of like a Bizzarro Running of the Bulls.
Before
the monotony set in, my ears perked up at the tedious repetition
of the obviously planted party line: how US forces had come within
twenty-four hours of catching Hussein's security detail, "...and
possibly even the deposed dictator himself."
Imagine my excitement! Almost! Very close! How dumb
do you have to be to infer correctly that, in the pathologically
dishonest
code of the worst administration in history, as phrase as weak
as "possibly even" should translate as "definitely
not." Almost, we have learned, only counts in horshoes and
WMDs.
Aside from Paul Simon lyrics, the other reference
unzipping itself from the archive of my subconscious was the memory
of Winston Smith,
Orwell's everyman from 1984, sitting and playing chess while listening
to broadcasts of how Big Brother would cleverly defeat the enemy.
The parallel is chilling, and makes me wonder what kind of personal
hell we are each supposed to go through before we all finally love
Big Brother.
"How stupid do they think we are?," the
question fairly screams in our minds. Apparently exactly as stupid
as we have proven to
be after all these years. Orwell's Goldstein expounded that he
who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls
the past controls the future.
Of course, 1984 was at least partly
fiction, a figment of Orwell's fertile communist imagination. We
never got to see the other side of the story Winston weaves into
a stunning triumph for Big Brother.
In this reality, at least for now, we are indeed
privy to the rest of the story. We have access to front line reports
of the massacre
that unfolded under the name of this botched raid. The Independent's
Robert Fisk takes a different line than the oft-repeated Fish Story:
Troops
Turn Botched Raid into Massacre.
"At
least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants," reports
Fisk. One civilian was brought to Yarmouk hospital "with his
brain outside of his head." Well, Emily Latilla would have
remarked before issuing her trademark "Never mind," "That's
very different!"
However, the Fish Story about "the one that got away" is
more compelling in our national, self-delusional narrative than
the truth, and far easier to digest. But nobody needs a doctor
to tell them that whether something tastes good is not the best
proof that it is safe to eat. Likewise, Americans should be careful
to trace how this poisonous story was deceptively sweetened into
a near triumph--especially when, under the icing, it reveals an
unmitigated disaster.
The veneer, our seemingly unending capacity to stay
Still Stupid After All These Years, allows our governments literally
to get
away with murder. It allows us to ignore the roots of hatred and
distrust in the region, from the CIA ouster of the elected but
unacceptably socialist government of Mohamad Mossadegh in 1953.
Equally forgotten is the US installation of the Shah's brutal regime
and tireless efforts to prop up repressive governments throughout
the Gulf, including Hussein himself. He who controls the past...
But of course, Goldstein collides with Santayana
at some inevitable point. We appear to be indeed condemned to repeat
the closed loop
of Occupation 101. The language of imperial conquest is always
the same: liberation, civilization, democratization... all hopelessly
self-aggrandizing concepts to the families of the victim "with
his brain outside of his head."
The stupidity gene has been
equally inherited by both major parties over the years, despite
the current mutation into the truly monstrous. Nonetheless, one
of the most rational calls comes from Democratic presidential candidate
Dennis Kucinich, who suggests withdrawing US troops, turning over
reconstruction (and contracting) over to the UN, and making the
Administration pay for the reconstruction its bombing made necessary.
Cheney's personal fortune should cover a chunk of
it. Sound advice that won't be followed--Simon's lyrics give way
to Pete Seeger's,
in the plaintive, almost mournful chorus to "Where Have All
the Flowers Gone?," a song he wrote in the wake of his indictment
by the Unamerican Activities Commission in 1955: "When will
we ever learn/Oh when will we ever learn?" Auhtor
Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts,
USA, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run
The
Greenhouse School.
He has appeared on radio [interview available here].
Past articles, translations are available at danielpwelch.com.
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