The Handful

Five years ago today...the night they drove ol' Baghdad down.

I have a nephew that's 5. He's way cuter than Iraq. And I hope he lives in Montreal 13 years from now, if you catch my drift.

I'll write an update on the war in 5 years or so.

The Balance

There is a single balance that governs the success of human interaction, whether between lovers, brothers, or nations. It is the balance between the one and the many. In far too many fora, narcissism sits center stage, and this insidious trend has been adopted as a casus belli by both the Salafists and the Neo-cons. Ironyyyyyyyyy.


Everything is relative. To present-day Americans, the 1950's serve as the archetype of bucolic and wholesome community. It is remembered as a time of monogamy, asexual clothing, and domestic bliss. However, to Sayid Qutb, an Egyptian intellectual, that very same community reeked of materialism, lust, depravity, and instant gratification.


As liberalism failed in the United States, leading to an explosion of the very ills it claimed to aim to eradicate, the neo-cons reverted to Leo Strauss' endorsement of a popular myth. This was hardly a new idea, but it had never been so organized. When liberalism's navel gazing and reflexive guilt produced riots, the neo-cons were redeemed.


The popular myth would hold that America was besieged on all sides by hostile powers. Many of these threats were invisible or classified, but they were there. Furthermore, the threats were not driven by national or economic or political motivation, but by evil.


The neo-cons co-opted this notion of good versus evil to the point where they castigated their critics as moral relativists incapable of acknowledging right and wrong. (They were not wholly wrong in this castigation.)


The Jihadis, inspired by Qutb, perceived a similar moral decay in their societies, as conservative as those societies were from the American perspective. The jihadis, like the neo-cons, invested in a timeworn strategy of recreating an imagined golden age of unity and singularity of purpose by stoking fear of external evil forces which were consolidating as the homeland was diverted by decadence. Like the neo-cons' critique of liberalism, there is a hefty grain of truth to the jihadis' critique of kleptocratic right-wing Muslim tyrannies.


The neo-cons and the jihadis both wanted the same thing for their respective societies, but their respective societies ignored them. Until they found each other. They met in Afghanistan. They worked hand in glove there against the Soviets, and when it was all over the jihadis absurdly boasted that they had caused the collapse of the biggest empire in the history of the world, and the neo-cons absurdly boasted the same thing.


The next ten years were spent on lobbying their constituents by the neo-cons and the jihadis. The neo-cons used the Project for the New American Century. The jihadis used Kalashnikovs and car bombs. To each his own. Their constituencies, however, did not seem intrigued by their vision. And then, 9/11.


9/11 and the 18 months subsequent immeasurably inflated the power of the jihadis and the neo-cons; both were vindicated in the eyes of their people.

The balance between the one and the many enters here. The neo-cons and the jihadis each argue for unity of purpose against a satanic enemy. They castigate their societies for failing to exalt the many above the one. The problem, of course, is that neither one of them represent the many. They are both quite unpopular where they live.


So why are they both getting their way? Well, it strikes me that the two biggest threats to peace for the foreseeable future are American antipathy and Muslim antipathy. Where are the mass protests over the neo-cons' use of torture? Where are the mass protests over the jihadis' use of beheading?


America and the Muslim world are tied together and are being driven off a cliff by small factions within their societies. These deranged drivers do not represent more than a sliver of the population. Is that good news or bad news?

Waco

The April anniversaries of the King killing and the Abu Ghraib pictures remind us of watersheds in the shaping of the American psyche. There is another April event that demands our attention, however, the perpetrators of which cannot be explained away as bad apples in the vein of James Early Ray or that criminal mastermind, Lyndie England. That event is Waco.

I remember watching the news that night. I was 13, and still without the faculties to doubt the government's version of events. As I revisit the facts now, however, armed with a good decade-plus of aging, travel, love, and heartbreak, I bring a different set of eyes to Waco, and I am horrified by what I find.

The Branch Davidians were called a "cult" by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). Two parenthetical notes here. Firstly, alcohol and tobacco go together, but alcohol and firearms do not. Or should not. Secondly, who deputized the ATF to pontificate on matters theological? Utterly unsurprisingly, the media adopted the ATF's characterization of the "cult".

After the ATF had determined that the group was a cult, they claimed to have information indicating that the group (I lack the self-importance to label it a "cult") had illegal weapons, and a search warrant was obtained for the Branch Davidian's compound.

The morning of the "search warrant", the ATF contacted local and national media, tipping them off to the impending show, eager to bolster its public image after shooting dead a woman and child in Rudy Ridge, Idaho while executing a similar warrant. While the ATF took care to call the media, they began the raid without calling any ambulances. Priceless.

As video of the event shows, the ATF did not execute a knock-and-enter warrant. Instead several heavily armed men in body armor approached the compound. And they started shooting into the building, which housed dozens of men, women, and children. The shooting continued for hours. At the end, when the Davidians allowed the ATF agents to retreat across open terrain without shooting at them, four ATF agents were dead.

At this point, of course, the shit had hit the fan. Federal agents were killed, and nothing else mattered. Looking back, of course, other things did matter. Why, for example, was the ATF serving a warrant accusing a "cult" leader of "child abuse"? Why did they make no attempt to knock and enter? Why did they not announce their approach? Why did they shoot first?

The deaths of the agents erased the absurdity of the raid, the provocative nature in which it was executed, the dubious legality and premise of the entire exercise, and the revolting staging of the "show" by the ATF. And this one fact remained, although it was ignored: any American citizen has the right to use violence to defend himself against any person, including an employee of the government, if that person uses unprovoked force.

In fact, a jury acquitted all the Branch Davidians of murder, finding that the shootings of the ATF agents were justifiable homicides carried out in self defense. Indeed, the footage of wounded ATF men being allowed to retreat across open land without being fired upon belies the image of the homicidal cult. By the time these acquittals were obtained of course, most of the defendants had been roasted alive or shot or gassed to death by their own government.

After the deaths of the agents, the quintessentially American "show" began in earnest. A flood of feds and reporters swamped the area. And the siege began. A siege that included the use of flood lights and extremely loud music to cause sleep deprivation. Just warming up for Abu Ghraib, in retrospect.

During the siege, two things happened. Any person in the compound who wished to leave was allowed to do so by the "cult". Many did. Also, no life was lost by any party. Then, one day, the federal government decided that that was no longer tolerable.

And here began a sequence of events that, in many ways, said more about what kind of country we're living in than anything else that has happened in my lifetime.

Government tanks (yes, tanks) approached the compound early in the morning. From the tanks, FBI agents fired cyanide gas canisters into the buildings. Cyanide gas is a chemical weapon which can commonly cause death among the small or weak, especially when in enclosed areas. It is not tear gas.

Just say it: cyanide. Sound familiar? That's because it's used in lethal injections. Every wonder why the condemned are strapped so thoroughly to the chair? It's because cyanide causes muscle spams so intense that they can break bones. The government fired cyanide into a building full of women and children and wounded men. On TV.

Next, in a pedestrian preview of 9/11, an American tank with a steel truss attached drove directly into the building. Then it backed up. And did it again. And again. So far, the FBI has introduced chemical gas into an enclosed environment known to hold dozens of children. And it has repeatedly driven a tank into that building, slicing a steel truss through the structure. And it's barely breakfast time.

During this assault, there are also agents on the ground, protected by the tanks, firing into the buildings, which explains why nobody escaped alive during this phase of the assault. We can only assume that the armed Davidians fired back, which people tend to do when you use tanks on their women and children. Just ask the Arabs. And then, the fire.

Having introduced massive quantities of chemical gas into the structure, firing copious amounts of automatic gunfire, and destroying fuel tanks, the building caught fire. Fueled by the chemical dust left from the gas, it created an oven of toxic gas. The government, being the government, had no plans for a fire, other than to bar a local fire engine from approaching, for fear of the lives of the fire fighters.

And speaking of lives, 80 people died that day, more than half of them women and children. Shot and burned alive by their own government for the audacity of questioning their authority in actual, rather than academic, terms. These people though that the 1st and 4th amendments applied to them. They thought wrong. Especially the toddlers. But you know how naive children can be.

After the fire burned itself out, the crime scene was razed and evidence was destroyed wholesale. Of the 24 victims found to have been shot as well as burned, we were left to wonder why they would have shot each other. Indeed.

When I was 13, the government murdered 80 citizens on television. They used tanks against infants. They did this because the adults had odd religious beliefs, and the government was concerned that some of them were abusing children. At least now they couldn't be abused anymore. They used tanks, cyanide gas, and automatic gunfire that killed 80 people, and then said that those people had shot themselves and set themselves on fire.

I don't think FBI men woke up that April day and decided to kill children. I think that the government forgot what it was long before that day. And when they tried to violate the religious freedom and physical privacy and security of real American patriots, those patriots, however bizarre their beliefs, showed an actual, concrete belief in the constitution.

When an utterly tyrannical act was properly resisted, the government had a crisis of conscience. It turned to what had gotten it into the mess in the first place: arrogant and disproportionate and unreasoning violence. With this in mind, can we really put Timothy McVeigh in an entirely different moral universe? Devastatingly, no.

Before the War

Still comfortably shy of 30, I am nonetheless already old enough to speak nostalgically of "before the war", a recent yet impossibly distant time when "fellatio" and "lockbox" were the watchwords of government excess.

Four years ago, the above pictures were released to the world. More than any other images, the photographs from Abu Ghraib illustrated to me the real cost to the American psyche of perpetual war and perpetual fear.

It is one of the singular examples of the slippery slope; we begin by torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, responsible for 9/11 and just two years later we are torturing Omar Rahman, age 14, because somebody claimed that his cousin knew where a mortar casing is buried.

Thanks to the inquisitive, though never cynical, influence of my parents, I am less given to shock when government scandals surface. But 4 years ago, when I first saw these pictures, I was shocked.

In retrospect I am shocked that I was shocked. I was still managing to live in a world that had been abruptly snuffed out. I was still living before the war.

King

The 1960's were in some ways even more violent than the 1860's in the United States. While the number of deaths during the Civil War exponentially exceed the number of American deaths during the 1960's, there were individual deaths among American leaders during that decade that permanently altered the American reality.

John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy certainly occupy this tragic pantheon. But Martin Luther King, cut down 40 years ago this weekend, was more powerful than these other men in ways that are seldom acknowledged.

Martin Luther King had a larger impact on America than any person who has ever served in the government of the United States. Chew on that. King is the symbol of a moral reckoning that covered more ground in less time than any other moral reckoning in recorded human history.

To consider the power of this man, murdered before reaching the age of 40, is a sobering undertaking. A man who lacked the coercive apparatus of any government or any gun shifted the very meaning of the word "American" more than all the money or the murder in the world could ever have done.

We must also remember that King gave speeches other than the "I Have a Dream" standard. Towards the end of his life, King said things about the American government and America's role in the world that, in the current climate, are every bit as inflammatory as anything Barack Obama's preacher has said.

King called the American government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world." That is a statement that the current political discourse simply would never tolerate. It is a debatable assertion, but there is a kernel of truth to it.

It is a rather ironic thing that American society writ large came to accept that segregation was wrong, but that same society was largely unwilling to reject the premise that it had the right to slaughter Vietnamese. There was a connection there that King was uniquely equipped to speak to.

King exuded humanity, and the entire underpinning of his philosophy was the premise that if any people are denied their freedom, then we are all in prison. So while America was right to reject segregation, it had not shaken the sickness, the dehumanization that made it possible, unless and until it fore swore a prerogative to slaughter foreigners who were no threat to America.

That is a bridge we have yet to cross. The important thing about King was that he spoke early and often about that bridge. The slippery slope is another useful cliche. If a culture is willing to treat blacks or Vietnamese or anyone else as less than fully human, that culture will eventually devour itself.

One of the many eerie ironies of 1968 was Bobby Kennedy's speech in Indianapolis on the night of King's murder. My friends and I watched the speech on youtube last night after an immoderate consumption of single malt scotch. The sense of what was lost to America that year is a visceral, nauseating thing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IivNv61pDg&feature=related

Kennedy went into the black neighborhood of Indianapolis with no police escort, the chief of police having refused to send any police into an area he was sure would be burning within the hour. And it fell to Bobby Kennedy, a laughably stereotypical privileged brat, to break the unbearable news to a crowd of black folks.

When he tells them of King's murder, a sickening shriek ripples through the crowd, and we are whisked back to a time before cell phones, before the Internet, before cable television, to a time when face to face interaction was still the medium for human communication. And a more human moment could rarely be witnessed.

At that moment, Bobby Kennedy was in serious physical danger. He spent 1968 acting as if he fully expected to be killed, ala Malcolm X in 1965. It is an incredibly liberating thing to be unafraid of death, and it liberated Bobby Kennedy to be the man he was that night.

He spoke to the crowd of forgiveness, of peace, of love, of his own pain over the murder of his brother, the first and last time he spoke in public about John's killing. He quoted Greek poetry off the top of his head. To a crowd of black folks in Indianapolis. And there was no riot that night in that city, unlike most.

Exactly two months after King's murder, Bobby Kennedy's lifeblood seeped across the floor of a kitchen in a California hotel. More Americans were killed in Vietnam in 1968 than any other year, but it was the loss of Martin and Bobby that made those deaths even more pointless.

On Christmas eve of that same year, astronaut Bill Anders took a picture that showed the world what King and Kennedy had seen, but had never lived to see recognized. A picture of a single world suspended in a hostile void of nothingness. Ironically, it was Lyndon Johnson, whose warmongering forced him to abdicate the presidency in 1968, that said it best. "We must love one another or die."

Here are the last words Martin Luther King spoke in public. If you can listen to him say, "I'm not fearin' any man" without getting goosebumps, you should get that checked out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0FiCxZKuv8&feature=related

The Anger

There is an insidious anger seeping through our collective discourse, the likes of which is somewhat common in the history of our republic, but which is peaking in the present. We are losing sight of the humanity of those we disagree with.

I am not very old or very wise, but I do know this: if you are capable of treating a stranger as a non-person, as sure as the sun rises in the east, you will treat your brother the same way when an invisible line is crossed.

"Community", like "love", "liberty", and "dignity", are not bromides. They are not slogans. They are real, albeit intangible, forces that make us what we are. We, in America, are one people.

How do I know this? I know this logically, since all Americans cede a considerable portion of their belongings to the state. I also know this as sure as I know how to breathe: people are people, and anyone who would deny another another person's humanity is a scourge upon the earth.

The history of the world is, among other things, the history of warring tribes, with grievances and mentalities that ring pathetically petty from earth orbit.

It is still too soon for the earth to move and think and act as one, but what of the United States? Why is it that we are still incapable of recognizing our common "American-ness"?

There is an anger. An anger and a fear. It is held by many. When people are angry and afraid, they look for people to lash out at. Jilted lovers, unappreciated artists, and 1930's Germans know exactly what I'm talking about.

In America today, this anger, which at its root is about a loss of control, threatens us in a dire way, a dire strait, which is based upon a crooked premise.

The American working class defeated Hitler and Tojo. The American government was sufficiently appreciative and intimidated that they subsidized the rise of the most powerful middle class in the history of the world, the perfect bulwark to both communism and fascism.

There was a time, in my father's adolescence, when a high-school graduate could smoke a pack per day, drink a six pack per night, own a house and two cars, put two kids through college, and have a wife that did not have to work unless she chose to.

That time is over. And therein lies the rage. The memory of what was. The question now is, "who will we scapegoat?" Will we scapegoat the immigrants, for taking our jobs? Will we scapegoat the poor for not "paying their way"?

The only hope that the republic has is the public. If we form a circular firing squad of poor folks, of single moms shopping at Wal-Mart that look at the Hispanic cashier at that Wal-Mart with misguided but very genuine hatred, then we are finished.

Immigrants are not the problem. They are human beings. And, if human beings are the problem, then suicide for the holder of such thoughts is the only logically consistent option. I defy any American to deny that they would sneak into Mexico if they could earn 5 times their current wage by doing so.

Law is not the problem, either. Those who clamor for immigration enforcement, such as myself, are not driven by racism or hate. I am driven by love and a sober appreciation for American limits.

We should let anyone into the United States, but not unless and until we can guarantee that they have full protection of the law, proper documentation, and adequate housing. I don't want to live in a country with 20 million non-persons.

I diverted into an unintended specificity with this piece; I did not mean to delve into the immigration issue, but it serves as an example of the larger issue. We must keep mind of our common humanity. Most of us want the same thing. Pity on the nation that loses sight of that.

When We forget that we are We, anything is possible. That's how Hitler started, and that's not hyperbole. When the We ceases to be the We, all the me's in the world don't add up to a God-damn thing.

What Do They Want?

America's civil religion requires us to treat the question "what does al-qaeda want?" as a non-sequiter, akin to asking "what's the greatest speech ever given by a cantaloupe?"; it just doesn't make any sense. Being an apostate to that religion leads me to want to answer that question honestly, rather than to question the legitimacy of the question itself.


The civil religion requires that wherever America is attacked, or wherever American attacks are resisted, the culprits must, by very definition, be nihilism and evil incarnate. Since American motives and actions are held to be universally selfless and beneficent, any opponent of such actions must despise everything that is right, everything that is....American.


This delusion is evident when our leaders, without any influential dissent, endlessly parrot the idea that the hundreds of young Muslim men who have committed suicide in the act of killing Americans do so because they despise feminism and representative democracy.


There is no small amount of truth to this, of course; Islamists despise many aspects of American culture. I empathize with the Islamists in their critique of MTV, for example. And there are many things that I despise about Islamic culture. The question is, would I give my life to express hatred of someone else's culture? No. Would the Islamists? Some, perhaps. But nearly all give their lives because of America's actions, not its culture.


As much as Islamists might abhor American movies or fashion, that is not what really exercises them. Every European state is far more sexually permissive, and far more dismissive of their Muslim minorities, than the United States. Europe is not targeted for attack, however, unless and until its states endorse American foreign policy.


Aren't we much better off with a foe of identifiable and finite grievances, rather than a bunch of suicidal automatons who aim to rule the world in a miserable medieval iteration of an invented past? Of course we are. Unfortunately, we are constitutionally incapable of acknowledging the notion that the Islamists could be sane.

If bin Laden means to destroy America because he can not bear to live in a world with Americans, regardless of what they do, then why does he insist on repeating the same grievances over and over? His three primary grievances are: American support of Israel, American support of Muslim tyrannies, and American occupation of Arabia (first Saudi Arabia, now Iraq and Kuwait).

What do we have to lose by acknowledging that all three of those things are true? They are true. We can say that without ceding any moral authority to bin Laden. At least, we should be able to. But most of us can't.

America has done the three things alleged by bin Laden, cited above. Our leadership has to get its head out of its collective ass and acknowledge what is evident to any child: actions have consequences. Touch the stove, get burnt. That doesn't mean the stove is better than you; it's just how the world works.

Once we acknowledge that the Islamists have rather specific complaints, all grounded in American policy, we can then say, "would it be in our interest to sacrifice anything, anything at all, to avoid such high levels of hostility?" This is a very difficult step for Americans to consider, because we are fed the notion that we deserve to act without restraint or consequence.

The sad reality is, however, that our foreign policy is going to get a lot of us killed. Why not entertain the notion, for example, of ending support for Muslim, especially Arab, dictators? Is the defense of Mubarak or Assad or Abdullah or the al-Sauds worth another 9/11? Maybe it is. I don't happen to think so, but the debate is nowhere to be found.

Ron Paul dared imply that we should at least consider bin Laden's oft-cited grievances, and Rudy Giuliani jumped on him like Paul had just taken a dump on the Virgin Mary.

Here is what the Rudy Giulianis of the world are implying: The terrorists did not attack New York because of anything we had done in the Muslim world; they attacked because they could not live in a world where Rudy Giuliani was free to dress up like a woman and marry his cousin. Mohammad Atta grew up in Egypt and studied in Germany, but when he found out that Americans have freedom of speech, he flew a plane into a building.

When specific actions have detrimental consequence, what rational people would reject the very idea of assessing whether the action was worth the damage incurred? Well, Americans do just that. We're burning our hands on the stove, refusing to let go, the "logic" being that "we're better than the stove."

The irony in all of this is that this refusal to honestly assess the situation has led to an unnecessary war in Iraq, which has consumed lives like snow melting on the sea. Hundreds of thousands of innocents. What we lose sight of is that the United States, the same country that could ruin so many lives in Iraq, failed to use sufficient force in Afghanistan.

This may sound off putting, but our biggest mistake after 9/11 was that we didn't kill enough people. While we desperately need to take a risk/reward analysis of our foreign policy, murder is murder. 9/11 was murder, and we should have killed a LOT of people shortly thereafter.

There were hundreds, probably thousands of people who, directly or indirectly, aided and abetted the 9/11 attacks. The full death-sowing force of the American arsenal was NEVER bought to bear on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. That is unforgivable. And that is the price to be paid for refusing to look in the mirror.

We deny that anyone could have any rational complaint with us. When they attack us, we are unprepared, we have no plan to immediately slaughter them where they train, we continue insisting that all that resist are irrational, and then we invade a country that had no relation to the attack, using infinitely more force than we did against the people that carried out the attack. That's us. Who are the irrational ones, again?