Inversions

Inversions

For the Love of Mars (or, The Mistorian)

I

Mr. Bush has become so adept at misinterpreting the present that it was only a matter of time before he would make a fun house mirror out of the past. For each championship game in professional sports, t-shirts and hats are printed naming each team as the champion so that the actual winners will have their attire immediately after the decisive game.

The merchandise bearing the name of the loser is either shipped off to third world countries or destroyed. Well, it strikes me that Mr. Bush lives in that world, that nether-realm of alternate histories that can be swiftly disproven with the most rudimentary inquisitions. The world where Bill Buckner fielded that ground ball cleanly, where the Buffalo Bills won four consecutive Super Bowls, and where the United States did not fail in Vietnam, but rather quit when victory was in sight.

Mr. Bush's recent speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars (are there any living veterans of domestic wars?), one of the few venues in which he is still welcome, perhaps because his actions have assured the VFW that they will have no shortage of membership, and therefore influence, in the foreseeable future, is a study in alternate history, a sort of choose-your-own adventure reading of the past where, if you skip ahead a few pages, you can gloss over a couple of million charred corpses here and there.

II

Before the re-writing, however, we have this quote, which crystallizes the insincerity of the president's "faith", his contempt for history, his pornographic celebration of violence, and his all-around sociopathy: "We have the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known--the men and women of the United States Armed Forces".

The greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known. The words "greatest" and "ever" preclude any room for argument, so we must first take note of what an absolute statement this is. So, this spiritual midget who named Jesus as his favorite "political philosopher" does not believe that the New Testament is a greater liberating force than American arms. If this is so, why did the 40-year old gin sock not join the military to cure his addiction? Why did he opt for Jesus instead?

The greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known is not, according to George W. Bush, the New Testament, the printing press, the Enlightenment, capitalism, the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, or representative democracy. No, the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known is the United States' ability to kill people. Fantastic.

I know a lot of adjectives, but sociopathic is clearly the best one for this sentiment. The audacity of this man has no bounds. If he does not really believe in Christ's message, does he at least rate the United States system of government as providing more liberation that the United States arsenal? No, he does not.

He represents a dominant paradigm that strangles this country. This paradigm holds that, as nice and flowery as our system of government is, it is secured only by our willingness and ability to visit swift and faceless death to any corner of the earth. Because, you see, if Saddam Hussein had actually had any doomsday weaponry, he surely would have blown up the factory where we make freedom of expression and the right to a speedy trial.

III

Now, to his reading of history, which can only make sense to a man who pays lip service to the cross, who swore to defend the Constitution, but who clearly bows to one master only: the gun.

"The communists in Korea and Vietnam were driven by a merciless vision for the proper ordering of humanity. They killed Americans because we stood in the way of their attempt to force their ideology on others."

Well, in my reading of the past, the communists in Korea and Vietnam, both nations arbitrarily cut in two by the West and the Soviets following World War II, were driven by a merciless vision for the proper ordering of their own countries. What audacity! They killed Americans because we stood in the way of their attempt to force their ideology on themselves.

In Mr. Bush's reading of history, Koreans invaded Korea to impose a merciless version on others. Who are these "others"? What "others" were the Vietnamese trying to force their ideology upon? The only "other" in either equation was the United States, who intervened in civil wars in each of these countries and directly killed at least 4 million civilians to prevent these countries from acheiving their merciless vision of self-determination.

To hear Mr. Bush tell it, Koreans had no right to tell other Koreans how to live, and Vietnamese had no right to tell other Vietnamese how to live, but the United States enjoyed a manifest right to kill by the millions in the interest of telling Koreans and Vietnamese how to live. The Koreans and Vietnamese, however, did not have the right to resist the American military.

According to Mr. Bush, anyone who would resist the American killing machine, which, as a matter of historical record, killed indiscriminately in Korea and Vietnam, was resisting only because the Americans "stood in the way" of their merciless designs.

The same pattern plays itself out in Iraq: intervene in another nation's affairs, stir the inevitable resentment that such intervention brings, and then use the resistance as evidence that those resisting are manifestly evil. The audacity of resistance thus serves as our excuse to continue the killing, as "others" are trying to foil our benevolent plan.

Who was the "other" in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq? Mr. Bush would tell you that the "other" was large segments of the indigenous population. In other words, the "other" are the people who actually live there. I would tell you the "other" was the country that sent its armies 7,000 miles to intervene.

IV

In Mr. Bush's world, after the liberals and the media sold us out and we withdrew from Vietnam, "the price of American withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens". This is textbook truth, at the undying expense of the whole truth. The whole truth is that the price of American intervention was paid by millions of innocents.

The American intervention in Vietnam, as noted above, killed millions of civilians. The American bombing and brief invasion of Cambodia destabilized the neutral regime there and allowed for the Khmer Rouge's rise. In Mr. Bush's reading, nobody died until the United States left Indochina. In Mr. Bush's view, the Khmer Rouge arose in a vacuum and would never have committed genocide if the United States was still in Vietnam.

First of all, it was the merciless Vietnamese who stopped the Cambodian genocide after the United States withdrew. Did the United States send aid to these countries it had ravaged for a decade? Sent reparations? Medecine? Food? No. The United States killed and killed and killed and then took its ball and went home. And everyone who was killed in the hell that the United States had created only died because the United States was not allowed to stay and kill indefinately.

And what is the implication of Mr. Bush's reading? It can only be that the United States should have stayed in Indochina indefinately, which means Mr. Bush should have kept not showing up for the Air National Guard indefinately. Staying and spending and killing for a few more years would have solved the problem, apparently. Stopping the killing, however, and allowing Indochina to sort out the devastation on its own terms was a cataclysmic defeat for the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.

V

But wait! "There was another price to out withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle--those who came to our soil and killed thousands of innocents in September the 11th, 2001".

And here we have it: The 9/11 attacks were carried out because the United States withdrew from Vietnam. Arab Salafists killed thousands of innocents in New York in 2001 because the American military did not kill millions of more Vietnamese Buddhists in their homes in 1975. Huh. And Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy because John F. Kennedy did not order nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If the Salafists were rational, they would be scared of a country that could kill millions of people and then just leave them flat as if it bore no moral responsibility to help them reconstruct their wretched lives. The Salafists, of course, have never been acused of being rational.

In Bush World, if other Americans of his age had just continued to kill and die in Vietnam, Osama bin Laden would never have dared attack the United States. Why did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor? Because the Union did not kill every citizen of the Confederacy?

VI

When arguments such as these are made, we owe it to ourselves to ask a question: what is the (usually unspoken) implication of the statement? The unspoken implication of Mr. Bush's argument is that American violence is the ultimate redemptive and liberating force on earth and that resistance to killing can only be met with more killing if liberation is to take hold. That our enemies our emboldened when we only kill 2 or 3 million peasants rather than, say, 6 or 7 million peasants.

And ask yourself, what is the logical endpoint of this inference? Without hyperbole, it is this: America can only be safe, and the world can only be liberated, when America proves willing to kill everyone on earth who would resist any component of American designs for their own countries. To do any less is to invite attack. When American loses its appetite for killing, human liberation becomes impossible.

I Fought the Law, and We Both Lost

I recently attended the Christian Trial Lawyer Convention and, suffice it to say, it was long on trial lawyers and short on Christianity. I was genuinely curious as to how the members of this association would square their practice with Christianity and looked forward to a stimulating discussion of how their faith informed their professional conduct.

The conference began with a prayer of the inocuous and self-centered variety which dominates American "faith" today. But after imploring Jesus to bless the cars and planes carrying the yet-to-arrive attendees, there were precisely zero references to religion of any sort for the rest of the conference.

It seemed to me that these lawyers were using Christianity as a justification for their actions rather than as an influence on their decision making. In other words, they live in Bush World, where Christ is a militaristic and, apparently, frivilously litigious figure who can legitmize any crime, any venality, any measure of greed, as long as the offenders utter the name of the Nazarene in the comission of their acts.

And who would Jesus sue? Well, one could make the case that suing pharmaceutical companies that play fast and loose with testing their drugs for deadly side-effects is totally justifiable. (By the way, it would be justifiable even if one had not accepted Jesus as their personal savior, but that's a whole other argument.) But what about ambulance chasing?

One of the speakers, a world-renowned expert on jury selection, told us that one prospective juror had told her, "people like you are the reason insurance rates are so high. I think you're scum". Amid the polite chuckle, I found myself wanting to scream out, "I'm with that juror! All any of you do is wait for someone to have one of the worst days of their lives and then swoop in to try to profit from their anguish!" I didn't, though; it wouldn't have been Christian of me.

I found out after returning from the convention that this woman, who wore a prominent cross during the convention, is Jewish. So, her total contempt for her audience extends from simpleton jurors (these are the kind of lawyers whose biggest nightmare would be a jury of educated people) all the way up to her colleagues, who proved all to earnest to listen to the woman with the garish makeup and the gleaming crucifix. It seemed clear that this person was very good at knowing her audience, but an utter failure at knowing herself.

Aside from all this manipulative and cynical drivel, which in the aggregate made it very clear to me that none of this had anything to do with Christianity, or the law, or, God forbid, justice, there was another very troubling component, and that was the presence of sitting judges, three of whom spoke before the group.

First of all, their mere prescence was completely inappropriate. Even someone who has never set foot inside a law school, such as myself, can see this. Or, perhaps I see it so clearly only because I have never set foot in a law school. It reminded me of my days as a Teamster, when our union officers would go out golfing or drinking with company management. How on earth could it be treated as appropraite for sitting judges, the theoretical paragons of neutrality, to socialize and exchange notes with the very lawyers who practice in their courts? Well, they're all Christians, so not only are they incapable of greed and selfishness, they are also manifestly incorruptible.

What was even worse, however, was one of the judge's statements. "Some days I'm in a law mood", he said, "and some days I'm in a justice mood. If you're looking for one and get the other, come back another day". Again, the polite smattering of laughter gave me an uneasy feeling as this judge essentially wiped his ass with the constitution in a room full of lawyers.

The ultimate, and ultimately unattainable, goal of a constitutional government is to ensure that the law coincides as closely as possible with justice. With men being imperfect, and with justice being undefinable, this of course can never happen, but the pursuit of as close a corelation as possible between law and broad notions of justice is the engine that, in theory, drives our legal system.

Legislators make the laws. As they represent the people, we can hope that they represent the peoples' overarching sense of an approximation of justice. Judges apply the law. They do not apply their own personal interpretation of justice. The reason, of course, is that some people, even judges, have some pretty unjust ideas about justice. For this judge to openly admit that he occasionally is "in a justice mood" is horrifying. It would be like an Army general saying that he is sometimes "in a murder mood". And the audience laughed.

The "come back another day" line, of course, was met with more laughter, and is really about as neatly crystallized example of sociopathic detachment as you'll see. Come back another day? Come back another day, as if you have not waited years for your day in court. Come back another day, as if today was not one of the most important days in your life. I wonder if people who get the death penalty are assuaged when they are told to come back another day.

I learned alot at the Christian Trial Lawyer Convention. The words "Christian", "Christ", "religion", "faith", "law", "justice", "mercy", and "duty" were not uttered. Apparently the opening prayer was enough to preemptively atone for an ammoral appraisal of how to more effectively convince people that the Nazarene would condone their extortions.

Just a Closer Walk with Thee

At the latest debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, an average citizen was afforded the chance to ask the candidates a question, in what was an increasingly common example of the infantilization of politics masquerading as the "democratization" of the same. What could be more democratic, after all, than allowing everyday Americans to demand answers to the toughest questions from their would-be representatives on live TV?

Well, the question profered by this man who, it pains me to say, is a very average American, illustrated the depth of the lobotimization of leadership that this country is subjecting itself to. This earnest citizen wished to know from each candidate whether "the power of prayer could have lessened the impact of Hurrican Katrina."

And each one of the candidates, these would-be statesmen, these sometime-scholars, stood there and answered that question as if it they had been asked how they planned to balance the budget or end the war in Iraq. What does it say about our country that anyone hoping to be president must act as if they believe in an all-powerful and personal God, and that many of them undoubtedly actually do believe in such a megalomaniacal farce?

One candidate after another solemnly intones that he can not possibly know the purpose behind God's "design". This abdication of logic holds that the hurricane was part of a "design" that is far too complex for any man to interpret. So, there is a God who loves and forgives each of us individually while simultaneously executing designs that kill thousands of us in waves of wind and water.

There is nothing complex about this design. It is simply sociopathic. A God that "blesses the United States of America" and is constantly asked to "continue" to do the same was somehow out to lunch on September 11, 2001. When one woman was pulled from the rubble after the collapses, it was, of course a "miracle", although God deemed 3,000 others unworthy of such intervention, even though he loved them all equally and had created them all in his image.

While God continues "to bless the United States of America" on one hand, he allows our army to be bled to a draw by dark-haired men in sandals on the other. Again. Within that defeated army, we have chaplains, paid by the government to reassure dying Christian men that they are going to an invisible place in the sky as a reward for having broken every one of Christ's teachings in their final months.

While we all waited for word from the trapped coal miners in Utah, signs went up urging, of course, that we "pray for a miracle". The implication here must be that the all powerful God was pre-occupied with some other pressing matter when the mine was allowed to collapse but that if we asked him with enough zeal, he may intervene to reverse his oversight.

I have written before on this blog that I am a man of faith, but the kind of mentality that most Americans have about God has much more to do with themselves that with God. Theirs is the mind-crushing solipsism that holds that God is so interested in each and every one of us that he can and does intervene in our lives. On the global stage, this pattern is repeated, with God favoring specific nations and causes.

For potential leaders of the world to be asked a question about prayer diverting hurricanes, and to respond to that question seriously and soberly should horrify us. Why? Because there is no difference at all between that question and these: "Senator Clinton, do you believe that you could move objects with your mind if you concentrated hard enough?" "Senator Obama, can a man walk on water?" "Senator Edwards, what is the most important lesson to be gleaned from The Lord of the Rings?"

These are questions based on superstition, metaphor, and fable. That is all. And that is all that faith in a biblical and personal God can ever be. If such spectres are how you get through life, then God bless you. I mean that. But they can not be treated as legitimate subjects of "debate" for the people entrusted to run the planet.

We all know, for example, that if any presidential candidate said that they did not believe in a personal God, their campaign would be over. Think about that. We require people to believe in patently false stories and clearly imaginary actors and totally unprovable ideas, all with an extensive history of blood and enforced ignorance behind them, as a precondition for being trusted with awesome temporal power.

The "Holy Books" are not providential. They are provincial. They are the fifth-hand accounts of illiterate nomads in the backwaters of desert empires thousands of years ago. To believe that these men, who held slaves, murdered children, raped women, and exterminated neighboring tribes in the name of God, have a monopoly on moral precepts is literally insane.

It made sense to interpret a violent storm as wrath from God in the days before meteorology. To do so now is to needlessly and masachistically shackle ourselves to a brutal and unreasoning past which we so pride ourselves as having eclipsed. Not one candidate on the stage refered to the hurricane as a natural process born of jet streams, pressurized air, or water temperatures. All simply punted, bowing in impotence and ignorance before "God's design".

What does it say about us and our society and our "modernity" that the God of the Old Testament, that jealous, genocidal, and sadistic thug, still holds such sway over the levers of America's power?

The Edge

Us and Them (And the Ever-Thining Line)

What makes us "us"? It is human nature to focus on differences, however overwhelmingly trivial those differences may be in the broader scheme of things. This is how the human mind orders the universe, and it is born of practicality rather than ingorance or bigotry. For example, how do I distinguish my father from any other man I may meet? Well, I know what my father looks like, and every other man looks....different. If my mind was not preconditioned to focus on differences, my universe would consist of a monochromatic mass without depth, color, or contrast.

This is the purely physical and pracitcal manifestation of "difference". We practice another variation of this tendency as well. This second manifestation allows us to use broad strokes to classify whole cultures and civilization as being "different" from us. Again, this is a necessary impulse, but it can quickly lead to delusion.

I have no time for moral relativism. I have no time for those who compare George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, or Jerry Falwell to Osama bin Laden. While I would not care to have a beer with any of these men, they are not equally venal. There is no moral equivalence between Bush's decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and Hitler's decision to exterminate European Jewry. There is no moral equivalence between Falwell's blaming 9/11 on gays and bin Laden's ordering 9/11 in the first place.

If there were moral equalities between these men, there would be no point in sacrificing anything in the interest of destroying them, and rest assured, the world is better off because Hitler was defeated. And if we could ever find bin Laden, that would be a good thing too.

There is, however, an inherent danger in this drawing of the lines. Americans are uniquely predisposed to assume that they are not just better, but the best, with little if any room for critique or improvement. Americans find it easier than any other people on Earth to say with total assurance, "I live in the greatest country on Earth". When you are blindly convinced that you are morally superior to your enemies, as well as your allies, for that matter, you run the risk of no longer vigilantly guarding that superiority.

How was it that indiscriminate arrest and torture became a matter of policy for the United States in Iraq? Well, if we are better than everyone else, and if we would never use such tactics, then we can actually use them while simultaneously denying that we are doing so. I wrote in an earlier blog about an American soldier in Iraq who tortured detainees, 90% of whom he deemed innocent of any wrongdoing, by forcing them to crouch outside over night depriving them of the luxury of walking without pain for the rest of their lives. He convinced himself that we wasn't torturing these men by saying to himself, as he tortured these men, "I'm an American, and Americans don't torture". But, we do.

All that being said, there is still a real distinction between us and our enemy. Our enemy, we maintain, has no respect for the sanctity of life. We, by inference, value human life more than they do. I agree with this assertion in general, but I believe that Americans are far too willing to blindly buy into this idea without really examining the things that their country is willing to do.

In "The War of Ideas", Walid Phares tries to elucidate these differences. While he does an elegant job of articulating our enemy's worldview, he pays no heed to the rather thick tongue in the rather thin cheek of his assertions.

"The Jihadists have awarded themselves full discretion over the life and death of every person on Earth"

Fair enough. True jihadists do invest themselves with the right to kill whoever they choose. But here's the more salient fact; the United States has not only arrogated to itself the exact same discretion, it has mobilized its wealth and talent to give physical capability to that discretion. The United States, not the jihadists, holds 30,000 hydrogen bombs, which would kill every living thing on Earth before half of them were used. There aren't enough planes and buildings for the jihadists to accomplish 1% of that.

Now, we may argue that if jihadists had the destructive capacity of the United States, they would not hesitate to instigate a global holocaust. Perhaps. But that does not change the fact that their "full discretion over the life and death of every person on Earth" is theoretical, while ours is very, very real. We are the ones who have actualized this psychotic urge. We are the ones who could literally kill every person on Earth at a moment's notice. If that was all you knew about the United States, would the United States not warrant attack, or at least resistance?

"If a suicide bomber or jihadi isn't convinced that Allah has ordered him...that person has no reason to kill"

How many Americans feel that "Allah has ordered" them to kill? And yet, do we not kill in prodigious numbers? Do we not slaughter ourselves in the tens of thousands every year on the streets of our cities? Do we not slaughter Muslims in the tens of thousands in the interest of "peace" or "liberation"? Who has ordered us to kill? Not Allah. Perhaps our inate sense of superiority gives the order.

When Americans kill overseas, they insist that they kill for peace, and that each and every one of the tens upon tens of thousands of civilians that are killed are individual "regrettable accidents" because, God knows, we would never "target civilians". The above quote insinuates that Muslims would not kill if were not for Allah, and that if Muslims did not kill, the United States would not be forced to kill in response. But who were we "responding" to when we invaded Iraq? What person in that devastated land had come to kill us on Allah's orders?

"The international community, after centuries of bloody wars and revolutions, has reached the global consensus that countries, civilizations, and cultures should not have aims of world dominance"

In truth, vast segments of the world have accepted this idea, and the world is the better for it. The strongest, however, have not accepted this, and laws are only strong if the strong follow the laws. Has the United States renounced the "aims of world dominance"? No. In fact, if you read the National Security Strategy of 2002 and 2006, published by the very government of the United States, we are very unabashed about our goal of guarding against the emergence of any potential rival and the permanent securing of "full-spectrum dominance". But, again, we're not really trying to take over the world, because we're Americans, and Americans don't do that kind of thing. Everyone knows that.

Hitler was trying to "take over the world" when he took over central and western Europe. We, on the other hand, are not trying to take over the world, despite the fact that we have military garrisons in well over 100 nations.

"After Hitler, Mussolini, Japan's imperialism, and Soviet Communism, open declarations of missions to subdue, occupy, or obliterate neighbors or other nations are not accepted"

Again, not accepted by who? We certainly accept these things, which many would maintain are the sole province of tyrants. If we do not accept the occupation of other nations, why have we formally occupied two nations already in this young century? We tell Iraq's neighbors that foreigners must not meddle in Iraq's affairs with apparent lack of irony, but how much more foreign are we to Iraq than the Turks and the Persians, and are we ourselves not "meddling" in Iraq, to put it delicately?

Orwell once said of nationalists that they do not believe in bad actions, only bad actors. And, since the United States is a good actor, its actions must inevitably be the same. Invading and occupying a foreign nation is not a bad action, but when bad actors such as Hitler or Hussein do it, it is wrong. We know it is not an inherently bad action, because when we do it, it is a good thing. Invasion becomes liberation. War becomes peace.

Torture is not a bad action, but when bad actors like Saddam Hussein partake in it, it is worth starting a war over. When we carry out the same action, it is not torture at all, but rather enhanced interogation. This enhanced interogation is carried out in the interest of peace, because the men with nightsticks in their anuses surely would be slaughtering Americans in their beds if they were not otherwise disposed. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, tortured purely innocent people for his own enjoyment.

I'm not saying the United States is morally equivalent to Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, or Josef Stalin. I am saying that there is such a thing as a wrong action. Some actions are wrong regardless of the protestations of virtue by the actor. And the United States is as capable of being a bad actor as anyone else. Evil begins when we convince ourselves that we are incapable of committing it.