Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
That has driven a culture mad;
What huge Imago made
A psychopathic god.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn:
Those to whom is evil done
Do evil in return.
–- W.H. Auden
It is a wild-eyed terrorist gang
They boardeth planes by four and three.
“I am off to fly to hell,” they quoth
“And who flieth now with me?”
-- Bill Purkayastha
It’s 9/11; we’re ten years down the road and up to our fucking necks in a collective politico-religious insanity.
The media, for its part, is now engaged in a giant circle-jerk; a group-orgasm over the meaning of the Twin Towers; the city of New York is going to wrap itself in the flag and shout ‘we’re the greatest!’ from the top of the Empire State building. What they don’t understand is that ten years on, most of the world simply views New York as America-Writ-Large; bragging on being The Place Where It All Began isn’t going to get them any brownie-points with most of the planet’s population – they got all the mileage they’re going to get from that event some time ago, and the rest of the country would do well to realize that, also.
The other evening, I saw an advertisement on the tube which turned my stomach. Y’see, right now (operators are standing by), you can go to justicecoin.com and buy the item in the photo to the upper right. It’s done up in either silver or gold (your choice; depending upon the limit of your last non-maxed credit-card); you’ll get a faux ‘military operations map’, detailing the publicly-provided details of the operation to Get Bin-Laden. As you can see, one side of the coin shows armed-to-the-teeth Marines, Seals, or somesuch, and the legend, “You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide”. On the other side are two quotes by Bush II and Bush III Obama; both invoking the concept of ‘justice’ (which, in this case, equals death without trial).
Before any of you get uppity about that last statement, let’s remember something: In the America which existed when your Momma and Daddy brought you home from the hospital, everyone – right down to the Nuremburg defendants and Charles Starkweather – deserved a fair trial with adequate representation. America had laws against arbitrarily killing people who hadn’t been convicted of something worthy of the death penalty – and there are plenty of us who’ve fought the concept of legalized murder (execution), tooth and nail, for as long as we’ve been alive.
Put another way, the notion of breaking international law by sending an armed body of troops across another nation’s border to kill a civilian who was living in that nation was considered not only immoral, but was against the law in America – and believe it or not, it still is.
Yes, Obama and his underlings broke not only international, but American law by killing Bin-Laden (I’m assuming that what we’ve been told is true.)
The cavalier nature of such activity is in stark contrast to who-we-were-before; in the 1970’s, we wouldn’t have tolerated such assaults on our civil liberties as the Military Commissions Act; the Patriot Act, the military’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program, or any of the other bullshit perpetrated by the Bush Administration in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
The Department of Homeland Security (a catch-all polyglot agency responsible for administrating everything from the aforementioned Acts to some other unlovely things, like detention-without-trial of suspected ‘terrorists’) owns up to exactly 33 (no; that’s not a typo – that’s thirty-three) deaths in the United States due to terrorism since 9/11.
In response, we’ve killed over two million people, the bulk of whom are in Afghanistan and Iraq – neither county which was at war with us at the time they were invaded (you can add at least 10x to that number if you’re looking for the enemies we’ve created in the process – far more than we can kill.) Then again, disproportionate response is the minor theme of this play, and we’re likely to see it again and again as things wind down.
All of this ‘git-‘r-dun’ horseshit, perpetrated by a backwoods yokel of a President who had his papers written for him at Harvard has bankrupted the country. Twenty percent of America is out of work when you add up everything; the nation’s budget surplus is now a dreadful deficit, and the only response which most Americans agreed upon in the last election was to send a majority of people to Congress who support the rantings of a quasi-theocratic bunch of hillbilly Hooterville-dwelling eejits calling themselves the “Tea Party”.
Teabaggers aside, over 60% of Americans now support the Republican party; put another way, while most, if asked, don’t like the “Tea Party” or its ideals, they’re willing to hold their noses and pull a lever to put another backwoods yokel in the White House – only this time, he believes that his Imaginary Friend founded America and that it is not only ‘exceptional’ as a result, but as long as we toe the mark as laid down in a book written by a bunch of Bronze and Iron-Age goat-herders, we’ll be ‘blessed’.
‘Blessings’ are dependent, however, upon the same course of action we’ve taken in the Middle East for some sixty years now – supporting a group of racist thugs who founded a bastard-state in what used to be Palestine.
I’ll point out that it was this action (along with a few minor ones) which led to Islamic fundamentalists taking-out the Twin Towers – our continued blind support of the regime in Jerusalem, no matter what, is the ultimate Smoking Gun. Sadly, no one has the courage to point this out in the American media, because of the massive support which the Zionists and their supporters have everywhere here in the U.S. from the press to Congress.
Yes; before you decide I should be pilloried for saying it, I’ll help you along: We did this to ourselves.
Because of this idiocy, Bin Laden and his network of operatives have won.
Their objective was to bring down the American economy by forcing us to bleed ourselves white. That was accomplished, in spades – not only is gasoline twice as expensive as it was, nearly everything else costs more, and there are no jobs with which to earn the money to pay inflated prices. The one bright spot – there are a lot of boarded-up houses which you can get for a song.
For all this, we’re not the first country which struck a medal commemorating the ‘justice’ of mass murder.
It turns out that the German Empire, in existence for a brief period from the 1870’s through 1918, did the same thing.
Back then, they’d unleashed another kind of depredation on civilians – unrestricted submarine warfare. Because they were such nice guys, they told the nations of the world with which they were at war that they’d sink any of their shipping, without warning. On May 7, 1915, the U20 under the command of a Captain Schwieger, did just that – torpedoing the British liner Lusitania.
The German Empire was one of the countries which lost the First World War. While nearly no one apart from historians and ocean-liner buffs are even aware of the German propaganda medal, it serves as both a statement and a warning – if you make enough enemies, sooner or later you’ll run out of friends.
Epilogue: America is out of friends; out of money; and out of time. We’ve destroyed our economy, and failed to recognize that humility is one of the greatest strengths of both people and governments. By all accounts, neither our people nor our government are very humble nowadays, preferring to throw a modern-day legion across the border to start teaching neo-imperial ‘lessons’ rather than making any attempt at getting along.
Newsflash: It didn’t work for Rome. It didn’t work for Germany. It’s not going to work for us, either. The empire is collapsing, and from where most of the world sits, the sooner, the better.
As to Rome, we all know what happened – they created so many enemies that they inevitably ganged-up and beat the crap out of the Romans, trashing their city and making off with everything right down to the treasury.
Germany endured a shitty ‘republic’ for a little over a decade; its main accomplishment was cranking up the printing-press and literally spinning currency out of thin air, out of which it ‘paid’ its onerous reparations. What happened afterward is another cautionary-tale; proof that when they start handing out those brown shirts and armbands in the name of national unity, recovery and self-respect, it’s worth taking a second look – because the perpetrators haven’t told you the price-tag.
With any luck, we’ll Balkanize in a more or less orderly fashion, rather than suffer the final indignity of either civil war or a takeover by the corn-pone Nazis waiting in the wings to do just that.
Objects in your mirror are closer than they appear.
(As some of you know, ten years ago a very close friend of mine lost her older sister in Tower #2 on 9/11.
Out of respect for the family, I will not mention any names. Both she and I had similar upbringings, and have remarked on more than one occasion that our respective parents would spin in their graves to know what’s being done in the name of ‘security’ here in America.
While we’re better than that, it doesn’t appear that we’re going to act like it any time soon.
It’s a grave dishonor to everyone who died – not just my friend’s sister – to do less than look the causes straight in the eye, and correct them, no matter how painful.
Just don’t hold your breath.)
