Civil Wars

To repeat the current meme about Iraq being on the very cusp of civil strife is to note that the barn door is open, long after the horse has moseyed up the road. The conflict has been under way for some time, as anyone who looked outside the network media for information would have surmised. Recent examples of this syndrome (not civil war, but our lateness in realizing it) include Rwanda and Bosnia.

We did not take the Rwanda conflict seriously until we started hearing horrendous body counts, which occurred far too rapidly to comprehend, much less respond in a timely fashion. (Still, to our eternal shame, we never even responded at all, much less in time.) Bosnia didn't seem to take shape until the bombing of the Mostar bridge and the Srebrenica massacre, and even then, Serbs and Croats ran riot over hapless UN peacekeepers, their Muslim charges, and even each others' civilians.

So let us dispense with the bullshit pretense that civil war may yet occur in Iraq. For all practical purposes, it has been going on for months. The bombing of the dome was simply a convenient point of singularity people (both here and there) could point to to justify their observations and actions. The ensuing death toll has driven that point home.

But let's say for the sake of argument that we're still one more major event away from an actual civil war, as if such things ever have a formal declaration. What then? Leaving would be irresponsible and morally craven; continuing to stay would be highly counterproductive. Refereeing an endless match of Calvinball was not what the American people had in mind when they signed on to the vision quest of a boy-king who, it turns out, had no vision at all, nor the scruples to admit it once proven wrong, again and again. So this is a tar baby of immense proportions.

I think the first thing we (and by "we", I mean the for-some-reason-still-legitimized corporate media, not actual individuals who had been paying attention all along) need to do is demand accountability from the morons who got us into this. That does not mean an abject apology with crossed fingers; that means that the architects of this mess are either fired outright, or at the very least their errant policies are identified, and modified or halted immediately. This will take some soul-searching by the media, which will be difficult in the absence of said soul. Yet it must be done.

The best you can get out of "legitimate" media is a baffled "But the Democrats don't have a plan either!". This is incorrect -- John Murtha submitted such a plan months ago and was roundly criticized by the gutless cowards that occupy the nation's legislative body. Yet the plan is still there, waiting to be implemented -- or even seriously discussed.

Put it this way -- in the wake of the already-infamous "Katrina video", at long last the themes of competence and credibility from these people has started to wither away even with their own base. Whatever their previous discontents, the reg'lar folk that have hitherto supported this moron have jobs, lives, homes, families, and businesses that they must attend to, day after day after day. They are starting to realize the tragic incompetence of these people in a very visceral way -- if they worked with someone as arrogant and stupid as George W. Bush, they'd do everything possible to get his ass fired, period. Because his lack of....well, of everything -- intellect, curiosity, comprehension, and yet again, competence -- are major traits that are incredibly undesirable in a co-worker, an employee, a spouse. It is no longer mere snark to point out the endless boobery of this man, it is critical to the ability of the business called the United States of America to right itself and be productive and happy once again.

So once the acknowledgement of incompetence has been made, everything else is mere formality. It is no longer enough to whinge about what the Democrats may or may not be capable of accomplishing. They have been remarkably inept at taking what fate has dropped into their collective laps, but that hasn't quelled the inexorable discontent with all things Bush. People have, as they say, Had Enough of this chump and his money-grubbing friends. That is unlikely to change over the next eight months. Even the Democrats will be able to do something with it, provided they can rid themselves of the likes of Joe Lieberman, who may as well just switch parties and have done with it at this point.

But the point is, the video sealed the deal on Bush, if the Dubai ports scheme hadn't quite done the job. It proves pretty comprehensively that not only is Bush incompetent, but that he's indifferent to the suffering of his people -- never forget that after the storm hit, he still went to Arizona to play grab-ass with John McCain on McCain's birthday, then proceeded on to San Diego to trot out his tiresome Iraq/WW2 analogies and pretend to play his git-tar, and then spend another night at the tumbleweed farm on his way back to DC, where he should have had his ass three days earlier. And he's a fucking liar; we can all see him in the video, being explicitly warned about the impending danger to the levees, and compare that to his notorious claim to Diane Sawyer just a few days later that "nobody could have anticipated" the breach of New Orleans' levees. As we keep saying, who ya gonna believe, him or your own lyin' eyes?

But even as all this goes down, other distractions are being set up. Mississippi is pushing abortion legislation that matches South Dakota's little stunt. (And let me just say for the record, if Florida is America's Wang, then Mississippi is its taint.) Several other states will probably follow suit. Because this is the most important thing on America's plate right now, isn't it, whether or not teenage girls who have been raped by family members can get their incest demon spawn out of them without having to inform said family rapist. Nope, nothing more pressing for us than to keep wanton hussies in their place.

It is something of a cliché at this point to say that issues like that one are emblematic of an American "culture war" in play. But make no mistake -- it is a civil war in the making as well. Issues like abortion and gay marriage have been used for so long to get the fringes' backs up that they are locked in position at this point, and there's no backing down. Now, because we are fortunate enough at the moment to still have the trappings civil society -- elections, institutions, and so forth -- any violence thus far has been mostly marginalized. Sometimes there's a spate of church burnings; sometimes an eco-terrorist group will torch a subdivision of McMansions or a Hummer dealership. Aside from Tim McVeigh, domestic terrorism has not been a huge cause for alarm. It tends to bypass personal harm for property destruction, much to the chagrin of Ann Coulter. (I keed, I keed.)

But a lot of that has to do with how well we've become conditioned to our fate. We are kept busy and distracted. On the one hand, I'm somewhat surprised that there aren't massive weekly protests outside the White House, but on the other hand, every time I see a protest on TV, the first thing I wonder is how these folks found the time and opportunity to get off the hamster wheel. Most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck these days, and taking a day off to yell and march en masse is not a cheap proposition.

Still, let us stipulate for the record that the last three American elections were at the very least tainted. 2000 was portrayed as the deciding of a coin toss when the coin has landed on its edge, but that's glib. You give back the vote to just 10% of the Floridians who were "erroneously" disenfranchised by ChoicePoint as felons, and the discussion is moot -- Gore would have won. 2002 was the first year that electronic voting machines were used in many precincts, and the results were predictably odd. 2004 was the big one, though -- the electronic machines were everywhere, and reports of their "malfunctions" were widespread -- not counting votes, counting them wrong, tallying more votes than there were eligible voters in the damned precinct. By sheer coincidence, I'm sure, every single one of these reported "problems" accrued to Bush. And by sheer coincidence, the CEO of the company that made the machines and controlled the proprietary code to the software had promised in writing to "deliver Ohio for Bush".

As Jeff Wells pointed out at the time, we were so quick to point the finger at the obvious corruption and manipulation of the Ukrainian elections, yet completely ignored the exact same reports happening in our own voting precincts. Voter intimidation, illegal registration-dumping, call dumping to throw opposition phone banks (for which a GOP operative has been convicted; the Republicans spent some $2 mil in James Tobin's defense), and a clear pattern of serendipitous machine "malfunctions". Machines which, strangely, have no paper trail. You get a receipt in about two seconds every time you go to an ATM or an automated gas pump. Yet you couldn't get one from a Diebold machine. Why is that?

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

So here's the deal -- the machinery to steal elections (close ones, at least) is now in place and has been tested. And it works. There have simply been too many credible reports to completely ignore their validity. Now, let us assume, because it is reasonable to do so based on past behavior, that no matter what the polls say in November, they'll try it again, throw a Senate or Congressional race here or there to keep their lock on both houses of Congress. Because if the Democrats control both houses (or even one) after the midterms, impeachment is going to be the word for 2007, and their little money train is going to come to a screeching halt. And we will not be fooled by the media bleats of "impeachment fatigue", that because it was wrong to impeach Clinton, it's wrong to impeach Bush. Anyone floating such an argument should immediately be branded as intellectual cowards, and be drummed out of the business.

So let's say they find a way, in the face of all these polls, in the face of all this evidence that these people are corrupt, incompetent, indifferent, and unworthy of any public office, to squeak out a victory in the midterms. Two things are possible here -- either they stole yet another election, or they didn't. Either scenario faces us with stark choices, if we care about the direction of the country.

If the election was stolen, and there is evidence, then either there is accountability or there isn't. Either outcome will make someone unhappy, but if there is evidence and no accountability at all, then discontent continues to breed in the populace, as it is currently doing. How it will manifest itself, I'm not even going to speculate, but here you have the preconditions for strife along some sort of line. Instead of Sunni vs. Shia, perhaps you have red state/blue state, urban/rural, religious/secular. Bottom line -- either people give enough of a shit to start marching on Washington on a daily basis at that point, or we continue to sink in our quicksand of apathy. Neither situation bodes well for the civil polity; this administration has already shown a jones for secrecy and aggressive surveillance of dissidents, and its most passionate supporters also seem to be the most prone to doing something stupid and/or violent. They have been advocating violence (jokingly, of course, hardy-har-har) for years.

And if this gang actually wound up winning the midterms on the up-and-up, well, what does that say to you about your fella 'merkin? Really, at this point, there is no reason to continue supporting Bush or Cheney or anyone who advocates their tactics, except sheer spite and contempt. When that spite and contempt manifests itself in voting quite clearly against all manner of reason, logic, common sense, and the well-being of the nation, that is (to borrow one of their more shopworn tropes) objectively anti-American. It is putting partisan nonsense ahead of one's country. And I think the sheer level of contempt and disgust erupting on our side would be galvanized in such an instance. I literally could no longer take seriously anyone who could continue to advocate a single Bush policy. These people have botched everything they've touched -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Medicare, Social Security, Katrina, the trade deficit, the budget deficit. (Maybe, as Bill Maher pointed out, we're just in the midst of "fuck-up fatigue". Stranger things have happened.)

Shit, Bush just spent the weekend trading our nuclear expertise to India for a sack of magic beans. What kind of fucking moron thinks this is serious policy? There is more than one way to encircle China, and at the very least we should be able to negotiate like we've got some sort of upper hand in this. Nope. He snuck his way through South Asia, because we're utterly loathed there now, and signed off on something that gets us bupkis. That's not horse tradin', that's horse givin'.

The real American civil war, the one most likely to eventually erupt in some sort of violent response(s), is not one of the arbitrary dichotomies stated above. Artificial distractions such as abortion and gay marriage are really just hortatory rhetoric used to fleece the faithful come fundraisin' time. No, I see the real battle as being between Bush's beloved "have-mores" and the have-nots. After all, in a pyramidally-distributed economy, push inexorably comes to shove. Along comes a "they got the guns but we got the numbers moment", and the Paris Hilton claque has to run for their ski chalets.

I make no dire Nostradamus-like predictions. I am merely saying that something along this line very well could happen; it would not surprise me. (If you've read this far, it would probably not surprise you either.) Predictions don't often work out, even when the results are more or less accurate; some sort of galvanizing event takes place in the meantime that no one could have anticipated. People knew that Europe and the Ottoman Empire would eventually butt heads in a Great War, but nobody could have foreseen that it would been set off by a Serbian anarchist assassinating a relatively modest potentate.

Still, I submit that all the preconditions are here now, waiting for that spark. And despite my tone, despite my festering contempt for the Bushes and their lackeys and the parasites that keep them in power, I hope to hell it never gets that far. And it may not -- we seem to have a limitless capacity for dulling our senses and losing track of the narrative. That's why the Republicans have been so effective with visceral sound barks, and the Democrats lose with their vaunted reason and logic. The dumbassification of America, as Chuck D so thoughtfully put it, continues apace, as we all continue to ratchet down our expectations of ourselves, our fellow citizens, and our so-called leaders, and repeat the plaintive meme of "What will it take?".

I have no idea what it will take anymore; I give up asking. Cheney shot a man in the face while drunk and tried to cover it up, Bush is so adamant about handing the ports over to the UAE that he threatened to veto for the first time, and we saw a video that proves conclusively that everything we've said about this chump is absolutely true. All in the last three weeks. And there have been no consequences, none whatsoever.

The final civil war is perhaps the most pernicious one -- the one we all fight within ourselves, trying to keep our better angels in charge of things as we go about our business and take in what the world has to offer (or bludgeon us with). Jon Carroll has an eloquent take on it, though I still have some issues with it:

It's not easy to love our enemies. If it were easy, everyone would do it. It is not easy to love George Bush, and yet that is the mandate. If I just had to love fuzzy bunnies and Aretha Franklin, I could do that and still have time for a late lunch. But the mandate did not stop with the presidential election. The mandate did not stop with the invasion of Iraq. I must honor the divine spirit within Dick Cheney, or I am a fraud. Maybe not a fraud: I am, at any rate, not following the handbook.

I understand and appreciate where Carroll is coming from. I think American political discourse has been very seriously damaged by the road-rage mentality of the past ten or so years. The debate has been devalued, and many otherwise engaged voters have been permanently tuned out from sheer disgust with the whole thing. It becomes a vicious cycle after that, with the rage and ignorance of the remaining screamers just fueling the paradigm.

But at the risk of being somewhat hypocritical on this, I do believe that there is some qualitative analysis to be divined here. It is no longer sufficient to merely opine that love is the answer. Turning the other cheek just gets that one smacked as well. It would be bad enough to take shit from someone who actually had the upper hand in thought and principle, not just tactics. But to take it from the likes of Bush and Cheney and Rove -- sorry, no fuckin' way.

I show compassion for both suicide bombers and for the victims of suicide bombers. I show compassion for both the conquered and the conquerors. If I am just going to show compassion for the good people, I might as well get out of the compassion game altogether. The good people have plenty of compassion already; it's the bad people who need it.

Yeah, but it's also the bad people who have no use for it. Thus compassion gets just as devalued as the political discourse was in the first place. I have no compassion available for the scumbag who straps himself with Semtex and ball bearings and sets himself off in a crowd of children clamoring for candy. It doesn't make me want to annihilate all Muslims, as it does to some folks, but I just don't have the time or inclination to wonder where this asshole's life took such a turn for the worse that he felt like that was his last best hope of political expression. Nor do I wish to be a part of what is inciting him to do such a thing, but at some point you have to realize that such a person is by definition irrational, and that responding rationally to an irrational person is largely a fool's errand.

Look, it's 1930. Mahatma Gandhi felt about the British occupation of his nation the way you feel about, say, Dick Cheney's occupation of your head. He was uncertain what to do, so he did nothing. (That's in the handbook, too.) He searched for a peaceful and dramatic way to disconcert and dispirit the British oppressors. He found an issue: the salt tax. He organized a 250-mile march to the sea, collecting followers as he went. When he got there, he took some salty mud from the tidal flats, boiled it in water and made salt -- illegally. Untaxable salt. Everyone began doing it. It was smart, it was peaceful, it was compassionate, it was kind. And it worked.

But it's not the same, is it? There is so much forcing us into hatred; there is so much to have contempt for. (Just because something is contemptible doesn't mean you need to practice contempt -- just a thought.) All Gandhi had was the British Empire, whereas we have -- what, the Patriot Act? We're such whiners.

The thing is that Gandhi used what was available to him, which was nothing. An ascetic, having obviously renounced all possessions as well as violence, has only such a tactic at his disposal. Gandhi had the opportunity to teach people how to do an end-run around the British that they just weren't prepared for -- but then, the British didn't have the Total Information Awareness network working for them, didn't have the NSA data-mining everyone's phone calls and e-mails.

There is something to be said for the subtlety and grace of passive resistance, but the problem is that the dynamic is too easily steamrolled by the cynicism of the body politic and the 24-hour news cycle. Cindy Sheehan's crusade out in front of the tumbleweed farm started out doing exactly what it was intended to do, which was hold Bush accountable for endangering mothers' sons in a needless, heedless war. Look how easily the message got muddled. Suddenly everyone who had an axe to grind showed up to pimp their cause, and Sheehan was last seen posing as a useful idiot for Hugo Chavez. This does not mean that she doesn't mean well, or that she's not right, but that the dynamic makes it way too easy for the message to get diluted. Gandhi was the original "they got the guns but we got the numbers" guy, obviously, but it was a different time.

I honestly don't know how the hell anyone could maintain a truly focused, effective passive resistance campaign anymore. Americans are too easily bored; Sheehan could tap-dance nekkid on the National Mall tomorrow morning and get little more than a ho-hum at this point. She got arrested at the State of the Union speech for wearing the wrong T-shirt, and it was forgotten by that weekend. The fact that Americans are more familiar with American Idol than their own fucking Constitution and their inalienable rights (or even what "inalienable" means) tells you what that gets you.

Nope. "Love is the answer" sounds nice; it is, as the saying goes, a wish the heart makes. And that is our eternal, internal civil war -- the heart versus the mind, as had been discoursed in so many trite songs. But it's trite becuase it's true. The thing is, love can only be the answer when it's properly applied. Merely love-bombing your enemy, in this climate, gets you nothing but scorn and derision. Maybe it gets you picked up by the cops and thrown into Cook County lockup, where you're subsequently rolled up into a rug and served as an hors d'oeuvre for a prison gang. (That was probably a bit needlessly lurid, but you get the idea.) The point is, love is nice, but it is not in and of itself a solution. It needs targeted application, at the very least. Telling Dick Cheney I love him and honor his eternal spirit, not so much. One might as well piss on one's own leg and suggest that it is raining.

Conversely, the notion that anger can never be a solution is also glib and fatuous. I believe that the proper application of anger, in the proper degree and at the proper time, can be quite effective in accomplishing one's needs. Sometimes people just don't fucking get it, are willfully obtuse, and nothing short of a (verbal) pimp-slap will get their attention. Everyone has been in such a situation at some time in life. The degree in magnitude with world politics does not negate the basic principle.

Does this mean we should always be angry, that we should always scream our thoughts at our opponents? No and no. I think the anger can and should be leavened with humor; I think people respond better to scorn and opprobrium than to rage and fear and the threat of force. I realize that anger can be and often is counterproductive; I submit that in such cases, it is primarily a matter of misdirected energy, of poor application in terms of degree and method. Anger's about the only thing they can't take away from us. We just have to remember that temper is a valuable possession, and as such, we don't want to lose it if we can help it. But love-bombing? Sorry. Na ga da.

We are retreating into despair; we are retreating into cynicism. Despair makes us crazy and cynicism makes us stupid. There's a way out, but it's not pleasant. It means giving up the hollow humor of the defeated, the easy justifications of they-all-do-it-so-why-bother. It's not time to move on, it's time to stay right here.

And at the end of Carroll's bien pensant missive here, that I can solidly agree with. I think it's a fight worth fighting, and I see that there are good people fighting it. It's a war of words, and we have most of the quality wordsmiths on our side here. Unlike the Doughy Pantload and his ilk, we do it largely uncompensated, because we care about what's been done to the country over the past five years, and what more these people have planned for us all. Unlike the think-tank babies and the sinecured weasels, we are not in it to abuse the English language, to molest it and rape it, impregnate it with foul thoughts and vile deeds, and then force it to carry the debased seed to term. That's really what that crowd has done here -- lawn-darted a country and affronted its citizens with their serial abuse of the language, of facts, of history, of intellectual probity. Words mean what they wish them to mean in a given situation, neither more nor less than that.

Anger is what keeps us in the fight, and anger is what will assure accountability. The difference is that the smart, angry people on our side are informed and impassioned, while the leading lights of the movementarians wallow in their nihilist fantasies, gleefully calling for murder, assassination, war, scorched-earth campaigns of every stripe. I hate to sound like I have my rubber-glue shields up, but there really is a qualitative difference in the level and application of anger on the two discrete sides, and if Carroll is right about rage and hostility being ultimately self-defeating, they'll be the first to implode by a long shot. Indeed, they are imploding right now; the challenge is for us to step in with our informed anger, and construct a reasoned, yet impassioned response.