What we're fighting for,
or, The Triumph of Faith over Works.
A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.
2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No—really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It’s like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart—a chip here, a chunk there.
That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The “mistakes” were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible—from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.
The question now is, but why? I really have been asking myself that these last few days. What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent? I’m certain only raving idiots still believe this war and occupation were about WMD or an actual fear of Saddam.
—Riverbend, “End of Another Year”
So why did the president wait so long to rid himself of this meddlesome general? Well, politics is politics, remember. “Many of Mr. Bush’s advisers say their timetable for completing an Iraq review had been based in part on a judgment that for Mr. Bush to have voiced doubts about his strategy before the midterm elections in November would have been politically catastrophic.”
The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option.
We’ve all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.
Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn’t believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That’s the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” saith the Lord.
In some otherwise excellent comments on the clusterfucked execution of Saddam Hussein, Josh Marshall said something that gave me pause:
Vengeance isn’t justice. Vengeance is part of justice. But only a part.
I agree that when you’ve been wronged, it can be very, very hard to separate your need for justice from your need for vengeance. This is why judges should always and forever bend toward the asymptote of impartiality, and why “victims’ rights” drives are rarely a good idea.
Vengeance has no place in justice. Vengeance is temporary, short-sighted; the destructive flailing of the hurt who can’t see what they’re hitting. Justice is what you eventually build if you’re lucky enough to survive the ravages of vengeance. —You may feel I’m splitting a miniscule mote plucked from his eye, but this is important: a system of justice that gives any consideration to vengeance is a shameful system, one that mistakes means for ends, that sacrifices peace, justice, for the visceral satisfaction of righteous outrage. Righteous, perhaps; but outrageous nonetheless.
I mean, I know in my bones that impeachment isn’t enough for the various members of the Bush administration. Imprisonment will not bring back the hundreds of thousands of lives we’ve sacrificed for his petty vanity. —When he is turned out of office, I’d want him to tour the country, town by town, set up each morning in the square before the courthouse and allow passersby to sock him in the nose. Not quite inviting passersby to saw at the most famous neck in the realm—Secret Service agents could keep things from getting out of hand—but it would, perhaps, eventually add up in small dollops of vengeance to something you could measure on the awful balance sheet.
But the hundreds of thousands would still be dead, and our nation no closer to something we could claim was health, and the lines would become too long and unwieldy (even if we allowed consolation shots at the noses of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Snow, McCain, Lieberman, et bloody al). —So I agitate instead for hearings, and impeachment; justice, not vengeance.
They really are quite different.
Moral equivalency.
In case you needed another reason to watch the final season of The Wire.
Yes, the last season. The last theme is basically asking the question, why aren’t we paying attention? If we got everything right in the last four seasons in depicting this city-state, how is it that these problems—which have been attendant problems regardless of who is in power—how is it that they endure? That brings into mind one last institution, which is the media. What are we paying attention to? What are we telling ourselves about ourselves? A lot of people think that we’re going to impale journalists. No. It’s not quite that. What stories do we want to hear? How closely do they relate to truth; how distant are they from the truth? We have a story idea about media and consumers of media. What stories get told and what don’t and why it is that things stay the same.
I blog. You blog. He, she, it blogs. We blog; you blog; they blog.
Two Yotsubas! and a full Wayne-and-Garth “We are not worthy!” cluster to Teresa Nielsen Hayden. —Except, of course, we are; that’s our redemption, and our curse. Get cracking.
I’m the best there is at what I do. The trick is not to mind it—
Whew! Rube Malek and Cole Coleman don’t have to wait for Buck Williams or Rayford Steele or Storm Saxon to save their bacon. Mike Mackey and the fine folks at ACC Studios have unleashed a Berkeley professor’s flawed duplication ray to bring us—Libarro World!
- Lt. Kerry, a pro-military warrior,
- Deaniac, an unexcitable ultra-genius,
- Miss Rodham, a sultry anti-feminist, and
- Teddie, a distinguished teetotaler.
Available in the pages of Liberality #3. (Keep your eyes peeled for the “Final Drudge Report” variant cover.)
“He would be as happy as anyone to be rid of these men. They frighten him as much as they frighten everyone else.”
I was going to say something, anything about Orson Scott Card’s latest exercise in one-state-two-state-red-state-blue-state (here, but also here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). But then I remembered I’d already quoted what somebody else had to say:
Unsuccessful in war and unable to adjust to a troubled peace, Weimar’s visionaries dismissed what was for them an overly complex, difficult, and demoralizing reality and indulged in elaborating fantasies of a vicious war of revenge that cast them in the role of conquerors. In their literature these angry men gave vent to primitive wishes for the annihilation of France, England, the United States, or whomever else they pictured as Germany’s enemy. But the war visions of the 1920s were not merely the self-serving fabrications of isolated malcontents. Instead of being left to dissipate in the realm of dreams, daydreams, and semireligious entrancement, the visions of revenge and renewal were converted into a literature of mass consumption. The published fantasy—often a quirky mixture of adventure story, fairy tale, millenarian vision, and political program—was intended to act as a catalyst inflaming the same type of emotions among the readers that originally elicited the fantasies in the minds of their creators. In this manner, what originated as compensation for the frustrated individual was transformed into a psychological tool, a propagandistic call for militant nationalism and engagement in antirepublican politics. Some of these writers, in fact, were also active as political speakers and agitators.
“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Mark Twain, “but it does rhyme.” —Except, of course, he didn’t, and anyway, rhyme’s gone all out of fashion. Though I wouldn’t trust fidelity or fashion to keep us safe, not from this crew. Remember, “If This Goes On—”
Wolverines!
Webcartoonist David Willis is surprised when his Transformers Fan Club email list coughs up a bloody shirt. Red Fridays, folks: feel the magic.
Logan’s end-run.
Let’s see: this post from Big Media Matt leads to this post from Tomorrow’s Pundit Today Ezra Klein commenting on five minutes in which SEIU’s Andy Stern told CAP’s CampusProgress.org the following—
We’re thinking of creating a new organization called My Life that would be mainly focused on 18 to 34 year olds. It would be web-based, and what it would allow people to do is purchase on a national level health care that you can move from job to job. You’d also be able to do things like tweak your resume on file permanently in your personal account. You could access debit cards potentially and start doing some of the new financial transactions like putting money on your cell phone. It would have opportunities for people to network with other people who are doing similar jobs or somewhat of a Craigslist-type function. It would be in some ways what AARP is for seniors: a place that advocates on their behalf. But clearly it’s a different form of organization; whether you call that a union, or an internet community, or an association, I’m not sure. But it has that kind of potential.
—which reminded me of a post from Old Skool Nick Confessore from back in the dark post-election depression of 2004:
Imagine an endeavor under which the official Democratic Party sponsored a non-profit health-insurance corporation, one which offered some form of health insurance to anyone who joined the party—say, with a $50 “membership fee.” Since I’m not a health care wonk, I don’t know how you’d structure such a business, or what all the pitfalls might be, or even if such a thing is possible or desirable. But I can think of some theoretical advantages. The Democrats could put into practice, right away, their ideas for the kind of health insurance they think we all ought to have. They could build their grassroots and deliver tangible benefits to members. Imagine a good HMO, run not for profit and in the public interest, along the lines the Democrats keep telling us all existing HMOs and health care providers should be run.
Which, yes yes yes. More, please. And of course you’d call that a “union.” Allow me to quote Utah Philips quoting some other guy—
Thus proving everlastingly what a union is: a way to get things done together that you can’t get done alone.
And to play for a moment the game of US and THEM: THEY are already out there, in their megachurches, patching the holes THEY’ve made in the social safety net: “First, you find a church.”
MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a medium-sized airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services—childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: “First, you find a church.” A trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest analogy to America’s bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own miniature welfare state.
US could really use some more boots on this particular ground. Because let’s be honest, here: the point isn’t (just) to do good works. It’s to bind people to your party, your argument, your worldview; to provide, as Matt put it above, “the capacity to take people who aren’t ‘political’ sorts and make them see that politics is interested in them even if they aren’t interested in politics.” —That comparison with Hamas isn’t only a knee-slapper at the expense of the faith-based.
But let’s be further honest: one of the benefits of getting help from—and moreso of supporting the help given by—something like a megachurch is the ugly, comforting knowledge that the wrong people won’t be getting any. THEY must go elsewhere, and if they haven’t any elsewhere to go, it’s their own damn fault. —Partisan; exclusionary; tribal; the meanest of means tests, and Avedon Carol rings an important alarum re: My Life—
And this would mean, what? That you lose your healthcare once you hit a certain age, and then it jumps in costs because you’ll be in the other part of the demographic?
Now, Stern does say My Life would be “mainly focused on 18 to 34 year olds,” not limited to. And I think it’s a function of who would be likely to buy into the whole internet-mediated social networking 2.0 thing, as well as looking to reach out to people whose worklives no longer allow for unions as we’ve known them, and not a function of selecting only the young and liberal and secular and hip and healthy. —But the ugliness under the game of US and THEM is something to keep in mind: the whole point of the safety net, after all, is that it’s there for all of us, any of us, no matter what, should we need it. No binding other than citizenship required.
Also, “My Life”? Ack. Could it possibly be called something else—or is it actively intended to disincline folks like me, on the far side of the demographic line?
(I suppose it’s better than Welfr.)
Oh, hell yes.
You’ve reached Logan Echolls, and here’s today’s inspirational message:
A journey of a thousand miles begins with an historic midterm landslide.
Hedless conspiracy.
Noted in passing, over at the irreplaceable Slacktivist:
(One, possibly minor, but real, contributing factor to the trend of failing referendums and, thus, cuts in school budgets: “Tax hike” uses four fewer characters than “school funds.” This is why, my headline-writing friends on the copy desk tell me, you are more likely to read a headline that says, “District to vote on tax hike” than one that reads “District to vote on school funds.”)
Torture, working.
Since the Moscow trials of the ’thirties, in which so many of the Old Bolsheviks confessed to almost every possible crime—an actual majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee that had made the October Revolution were capitalist agents if the evidence given at the trials was to be believed—we have all grown considerably more sceptical about evidence extracted under torture. There is a remarkable similarity between, for example, a young German girl of the sixteenth century confessing that, naked, she had attended the Sabbath and there indulged in every variety of perversion and some of the confessions produced at the Moscow trials. One remembers that one of the Moscow accused confessed, in a fervour of self-recrimination, to having met and plotted with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen although, in reality, the hotel had been burnt down some years before; this is very like the fervent repentance displayed by some accused witches for impossible supernatural crimes to which they had confessed.
—Fancis King, Sexuality, Magic, & Perversion
It still stops me, gobsmacked, on the street, when the thought crosses my mind: I live in a country that seriously argues whether torture is justifiable.
How thin and threadbare civilization is.
Remember this: they tell us our constitution is not a “suicide pact,” that give me liberty or give me death be damned, some things are more important. —Such as keeping them in power. That, it seems, is worth dying for.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Doing the only right thing is sick, twisted; not referred to as a joke; not (at all) funny.
A note on framing, to our esteemed colleagues on the dextral side:
While I question the wisdom of rolling out a new product in August, still, I gotta tell you, I’m wholly in agreement with your impending shift from “MSM media” to “527 media.” After all, anyone outside your little clique who stumbles over such a reference and goes googling for whatever the hell it is you could possibly mean will trip over far and away the most famous 527 of all: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. —And that, my friends, is a connection we can all support.
