|
Like
Richard Cheney's life and Donald Rumsfeld's life, my life is set
in motion by those poor crushed fossils under the sand of Saudi
Arabia and the sand of Iraq. The price of the fossils must stay
cheap. The boys are going to be fighting this war with my taxes,
and they're going to bring me back the prize—my own life.
Yes, I'm involved, to put it mildly.
Following the "news" each day before an enormous event
occurs, as now before (maybe) war, reminds me of an old sensation:
There was a children's game in which we were supposed to pin a
paper tail on a paper donkey, and before you made your attempt
you were blindfolded, and invisible hands spun you around and
around till you were dizzy and disoriented and didn't know where
you were. That's how I feel. President Bush is about to take a
step toward seizing control of the entire planet. People and countries
are terrified about the consequences for the human race if Bush
does what he plans to do. And yet it seems as if we, the consumers
of "news"—when we try each day to learn about this
desperately important moment we're living through—are given
a huge, overpowering pile of stories, almost all of which deal
not with the question of humanity's future, but instead with the
question of Iraq's weapons.
Bush himself is not actually frightened by the weapons held (or
not held) by this destroyed country, Iraq, nor is he actually
shocked by the probability that Iraq, like all other nations on
earth (because of the nature of nations), wants to be as well
armed as it possibly can be. But he's managed to convince the
governments of the world that, just as he will never say why he
wants to invade Iraq but will only talk about Iraq's weapons,
they must never say why they oppose the invasion, except by talking
about Iraq's weapons. Bush will say Iraq has a lot of weapons,
the opponents of war will say Iraq has few. This discussion will
go on until the troops are ready and the weather's right for war,
and at that moment Bush will declare he's "lost patience"
with the laborious pace of the discussion of weapons, and he'll
go to war.
The editors of the New York Times must know as well as
anyone else that the discussion of weapons is the public relations
branch of preparing for war, the propaganda arm of the process
of preparation. The discussion of weapons, on Bush's part, pretends
to be sincere, as all advertising does, but it is not sincere,
and so it makes sense only as part of the story of preparation.
But, each morning I find in my newspaper two separate narratives,
apparently describing unrelated developments: One (a thin little
column) says that the preparations for war are going smoothly
and the weather soon will be right for an attack, and the other
(pages and pages) says that the discussions about Iraq's weapons
are going poorly, and there's a danger that Bush may "lose
patience". The thin column describes something that's actually
happening. The pages and pages spin me around until I don't know
where I am.
|
|
In
school, we were taught various terms to characterize political
systems—"oligarchy", "autocracy", "democracy".
What is our system? No term for it exists. To call it a
democracy puts a false picture in the mind. How can you call it
a democracy when, for example, the people don't even know today
why, in 1991, the first President Bush seemed to seek out the
opportunity to attack Iraq, circumventing opportunities to avoid
war? Yes, we're allowed to vote for our leaders, but we don't
know what they're really like, because we're not allowed to know
what they do. The enormous enterprises of the government are conducted
sometimes for the benefit of some of the citizens—maybe,
even occasionally, for the benefit of all of the citizens—but
the citizens don't even know what the government is doing. Much
less why. Much less who the beneficiaries are. The citizens can
hardly be expected to comment intelligently on the government's
decisions, because the citizens don't know what's actually
going on, and they can't find out. We are lied to, manipulated
and brainwashed, and then we're brought in, at the appropriate
moment, to cheer and applaud, and we're never even told what we
were being asked to applaud. If that's "democracy",
then we're using the word in a very restricted fashion.
Sometimes, a man like Jimmy Carter may blunder into the White
House and sit down behind the desk in the Oval Office, and the
rules of the system have to be explained to him. Jimmy Carter
declared, when elected, that he would "never lie" to
the American people. This was like a new man being selected as
CEO of General Foods and announcing that, from now on, he planned
to bake every General Foods cookie himself in his own kitchen.
It didn't take long to teach Carter the ropes.
You can say that Bush and his colleagues would like to conquer
Iraq in order to possess a secure source of oil and to begin a
process of controlling the world, but that may not fully account
for the strength of their motivation, the evident fervor of their
commitment.
Why are we being so ridiculously polite? It's as if there were
some sort of gentlemen's agreement that prevents people from stating
the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated
and thrilled by the thought of war, by the thought of the incredible
power they will have over so many other people, by the thought
of the immensity of what they will do, by the scale, the massiveness
of the bombing they're planning, the violence, the killing, the
blood, the deaths, the horror.
The love of killing is inside each one of us, and we can never
be sure that it won't come out. We have to be grateful if it doesn't
come out. In fact, it is utterly wrong for me to imagine that
Bush is violent and I am not, that Bush is cruel and I am not.
I am potentially just as much of a killer as he is, and I need
the help of all the sages and poets and musicians and saints to
guide me onto a better path, and I can only hope that the circumstances
of my life will continue to be ones that help me to stay on that
path. But we can't deny that Bush and his men, for whatever reason,
are under the sway of the less peaceful side of their natures.
From the first days after the World Trade Center fell, you could
see in their faces that—however scary it might be to be holding
the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might be
for steering the ship of state in such troubled times—they
in fact were loving it. Those faces glowed. You could see that
special look that people always have when they've just been seized
by that most purposeless of all things, a sense of purpose.
This, combined with a lust for blood, makes for particularly dangerous
leaders, so totally driven by their desire for violence that they're
almost incapable of hearing anyone else's pleas for compromise
or for peace.
Why do they want this war so much? Maybe we can never fully know
the answer to that question. Why do some people want to be whipped
by a dominatrix? Why do some people want so desperately to have
sex with children that they can't prevent themselves from raping
them, even though they know that what they're doing is wrong?
Why did Hitler want to kill the Jews? Why do some people collect
coins? Why do some people collect stamps?
We can't fully understand it. But, it's clear that Bush and his
group are in the grip of something. They're very far gone. Their
narcissism and sense of omnipotence goes way beyond self-confidence,
reaching the point that they're impervious to the disgust they
provoke in others, or even oblivious to it. They've made very
clear, to the people of the world, that they value American interests
more than the world's interests and American profits more than
the world's physical health, and yet they cheerfully expect the
people of the world to accept their leadership in the matter of
Iraq. They're so unshakable in their belief that everyone will
like them that they happily summoned the world, a year ago, to
observe what they'd done to the people they'd taken as prisoners,
proudly exhibiting them on their knees in cages, under a ferocious
sun, with their faces hooded and their bodies in chains. In other
words, the only thing you can really say about them is that, like
all of those who for fifty years have sat in offices in Washington
and dreamed of killing millions of enemies with nuclear weapons
and chemical weapons and biological weapons, these people are
sick. They have an illness. And it's getting to the point where
there may be no cure.
Meanwhile, I read my New York Times, and it's all very
calm. The people who write there seem to have a need to believe
that their government—while sometimes wrong, of course—is
not utterly insane, and must at least be trusted to raise the
right questions. These writers just can't bear the thought of
being completely alienated from the center of their society, their
own government. Thus, although they themselves would have considered
a "pre-emptive" invasion of Iraq two years ago to be
absurd and crazy, they now take the idea seriously and weigh its
merits respectfully and worry gravely about the danger posed by
Iraq, even though Iraq is in no way more dangerous than it was
two years ago, and in every possible way it is less dangerous.
In fact, the dispassionate tone of the "debate" about
Iraq, in the New York Times and on every television screen,
seems psychotically remote from the reality of what will happen
if war actually occurs. We are talking about raining death down
on human beings, about thousands and thousands of howling wounded
human beings, dismembered corpses in pools of blood. Is this one
of the "lessons of Vietnam" that people have learned—that
the immorality of this unspeakable murdering must never be mentioned?
That the discussion of murder must never mention murder, and that
even the critics of murder must always criticize it because it
turns out not to be in our own best interest? Must these critics
always say that the murders would come at too high a price for
us, would be too expensive, would unbalance the budget, hurt the
economy, cause us to stint on domestic priorities; that it would
lose us our friends, that it would create new enemies? Can we
never say that this butchering of human beings is horrifying and
wrong?
Yesterday, I walked through a neighborhood of shabby apartment
buildings on shabby streets, and I ate lunch in a lousy restaurant.
The bread was a bit hard, and the lettuce was rather stiff and
resistant. But the thing was, honestly, it wasn't that bad. I
could survive some lousiness, some uncomfortableness, some decline.
Back on the street, I kept walking for a while and wondered what
would happen if we allowed some of the fossils to simply lie there
under the sand, if we decided not to try to dominate the world.
We'd have no control over what would happen. We'd let go and fall.
How far would we sink? How far? How far? Sure, it's been great,
the life of comfort and predictability. But, imagine how it would
feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing
brutality, diminishing greed. I think it might actually feel wonderful
to be alive.
|
