Monthly Archives: March 2006

Biting the hand

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The other day I stopped by a weekly gathering of friends of mine, a local watering hole to which a number gather for happy hour. As I swung out of the car and strode toward the door, I thought about how my appearance here was always to renew contacts and solicit participants for some event or other.

One of the first friends I saw came over to me saying “you’re getting to be quite a regular here.” Well, I told him, not really, but I know where to catch everybody. “No, he said, you are kinda becoming a part of this group.”

I explained my quest to get as many people as possible to march within the peace contigent which we were sneaking into the apolitical St. Patrick’s Day parade under cover of the Bookman bookmobile entry. The bookmobile is bright green, a shoe-in for St. Patrick’s Day. And it’s a good cause in itself: children’s literacy. This time the message would be broadened to encompass moral literacy.

I knew my friend traditionally rode his bicycle in this parade. I asked him if he might be interested in doubling back and joining what I’d hoped would be a mass of peace marchers. The bookmobile spot was near the end of the parade. Perhaps there would be time after his early bicycle gig to make his way back and ride with us. It seemed all the more easy since he’d be on a bike. And the cause of world peace is pretty hard to resist.

No, he said. Not possible. After the parade it’s a tradition for his crew to head straight to his house, make a beeline to the booze is what he said specifically.

Now I don’t want to be judgmental. Maybe the parade is rather arduous by bicycle, maybe drinking beer is the only natural order of business. Who am I to question whether self-medication is a perfectly legitimate coping mechanism to this world gone awry. Maybe there is a path to inner peace through communal inebriation. Maybe they’ve got a plan to raise world consciousness by drinking together. It’s not impossible that such a strategy could be a million times more likely to succeed than a sober one.

I did ask myself if I was once again taking for granted that public protest was the only honorable position to take on the war. And once again I felt like an outsider at that bar. I thought to myself, on this drinking thing, I am so not with you.

Neocons

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Blue meaniesA friend asked me what are neocons. I couldn’t tell her exactly. Neo-liberals bent on world subjugation? The asshole elite? It seemed easier to define them by what they are doing, rather than what they say they look like.

I settled on an analogy with the Nazis. Hard to say what a Nazi is. National Social Democrat something something. Fascist doesn’t come into the official title. You know Nazis when you see them. You certainly know Nazis by their deeds. Neocons are like that.

The Beatles had already conceived of the fascist industrial asshole archetype. They called them BLUE MEANIES. Talk about “vaguely reminiscent of the sixties.” You think the war protests and environmental activism of today remind you of the sixties? The villains are the same. Blue for blue-blooded, blue for cold-blooded.

Gunship diplomacy

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C-130s laying suppression fire before landing.
The C-130 gunships are coming! C-130s are flying platforms for hi-tech observation and weaponry. U. S. Military leaders have announced that they are deploying C-130s to Iraq in greater numbers, one of them called “Spooky.” You wonder -why now? What’s happened in Iraq that we now want to rain death upon the Iraqi population without needing to differentiate between men and women, adults and children, between friendly and unfriendly Iraqis?

Have you seen the video footage smuggled to the press which documented a now infamous C-130 raid upon an aledged Taliban compound in Afghanistan? From a safe height, gunners on the plane destroyed cars and buldings and picked off every single person running for cover. Infrared imagery illuminated every person’s body against the dark ground.

There were some valiant dashes for cover in the Afghan example, even a run that resembled a miraculous field-length touchdown where the runner was able to zig-zag between each shot from the C-130 cannons. You couldn’t help but want to cheer the little figure on. In the end the C-130 got everbody and redirected its fire to obliterate the entrance to a nearby cave.

One advantage to using the C-130 gunships in Iraq now will be that we will know how many Iraqis we are killing. The C-130s will have video records of the Iraqi casualties. We’ll have tiny white images of every body we destroy. We’ll know the children in the videos because although the little white figures emit a similar heat footprint, the children will have been taking smaller final steps.

Gunship diplomacy denotes the practice of bringing colonies to heel by the mere show of force, usually a technologically advanced ship sent to patrol the coast of a subjugated people who have known otherwise only houses made of natural materials.