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News :: Peace |
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So You Wanna Go To War |
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by Mark Morford via Rev Dave
Email: DarkMatter (nospam) Hypocrisy.org (verified) |
31 Jan 2003
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A Young Person's Guide to understanding ShrurbCo's murderous attack on Iraq, and whomever else. |
Mark Morford: 'So you wanna go to war'
Date: Friday, January 31 @ 09:45:44 EST
Topic: War & Terrorism
A young person's guide to understanding ShrubCo's murderous attack on Iraq, and whomever else
By Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle
Where do babies come from? Why does the sun go away at night? Does Saddam Hussein really deserve a swarm of painful rectal polyps followed by utter screaming death at the hands of the Great Liberator? Why do old people shrink?
Why are evildoers always so oily? Why is that priest being so nice to me? Why are we launching yet another unwinnable war? What's nuclear nonproliferation? Isn't it pronounced "nuclear" and not "nukuler"? Is Barney the Dinosaur gay?
Is Dick Cheney actually alive? Why is Mr. Rumsfeld so black eyed and sneering, and why does Mr. Ashcroft always look like he just swallowed a moldy slug and why is the world now run by cadres of crusty tight-lipped warmongering hawks? How about Spongebob? Is he gay? He sure seems gay.
These are the questions your children want to know. Future generations will want to know. Maybe you, too, want to know. But of course, you can't know. Isn't that cute? Isn't that patriotic? Of course it is.
But we must try. There are things you can say. Answers you can half-heartedly give to the youth of America, to your very own kids, to your own jaded heavily Ritalin-ed inner child.
There are reasons you can vaguely equivocate, just like Geedubya does to the nation, shrugging and smirking and winking to his dad, as if to say, we're gonna get 'im, daddy, and damn the world all to hell for not backing us, yee haw boom boom crash.
Because plethoric and distressed must be the bewildered youth of America right about now, wide eyed and curious and more than a little baffled as to why on our very blameless God's grayish-green Earth we need to kill that bad Saddam guy along with about 500,000 other Iraqis for no apparent reason.
While at the same time we further infuriate their angry God's followers and induce more rage and terrorism just so we can fill up Mommy's new Escalade for a buck and a half a gallon for 10 more years. Oh wait, I suppose that answers itself.
Maybe you need some tricky, ambiguous answers at your rhetorical fingertips, muttered excuses you can sling to calm the tremors of their tender souls, assuage your kids' nightmares and your own, the ones filled with Ashcroft's singing and Lynne Cheney's cackling and Dick's defibrillator ticking. There are things you can say.
For example: Saddam is bad, honey, because they said he's bad. He's done some very bad things and even though he employed the very weaponry and virulent debilitating toxins the U.S. sold to him to commit those things and even though we knew he was doing those things all along and for years did nothing to stop it, well, it doesn't matter. He must now be stopped. Because we said so, honey. Yours is not to ask why. Hush now.
What's that? Of course you can have two angry Gods trying to rule the planet, sweetie. Heck, you can have 10. But of course, only one of them is ever right at any given geological moment. Thank goodness it's ours!
Call it a pious version of Newton's law, dear: An angry warmongering God in motion stays in motion, unless an object -- say, some heavy Lockheed Martin ordnance or 100,000 very confused ground troops who have no real idea why they're over there in the first place -- acts upon it. Boom! Bad guy dead! Oil lucre ours! Ariel Sharon grins! North Korea snickers, fondles its nukes! See? I know, it's a little confusing. There there now.
What's that, honey? You read somewhere that the Islamic religion also has terrible amounts of grace and beauty and also that Hinduism and Taoism and Buddhism and about a dozen other major belief systems are actually much larger and more ancient and beautiful than Christianity?
Most of them not necessarily believing in some sort of furious father figure that yanks everyone's puppet strings and allows us to justify bombing the living hell out of rubbly pissant nonthreatening nations in His name just so we can scam their oil and expand our power base in the Middle East and line the pockets of George Sr. and the Carlyle Group?
Damn it, kid, what the hell are they teaching you in school these days? Me an' your teacher are gonna sit right down and have a little talk. Meanwhile, let's get you in to see a nice Catholic priest to bounce on his knee and relieve your guilt. Oh wait.
Why are we so hell-bent on wiping out Iraq when that icky North Korea is a hundred times more volatile and treacherous and actually has a couple of working nukes that it swiped from quickly deteriorating U.S. ally Pakistan -- oh the cringing irony of it all -- which also has nukes, by the way, Pakistan does, and is also frighteningly unstable and whose own nuclear scientists are reported to be sympathetic to al Qaeda?
Dammit, son, I see you've really done your homework. Maybe you've learned a little too much. Maybe you're hitting a little too close to home, bud. Total Information Awareness isn't too fond of that, you know. Maybe you should go watch some cartoons now.
Gosh, I don't really know, kiddo, that's a good point -- Bush sure does seem to desperately want to keep this embittered fear-addled nation deep in the perpetual budget-pummeling black hole of war; first Afghanistan, then Iraq, then North Korea, then maybe Iran or Syria or Egypt or New Jersey or whomever else we can think of.
Years and years of war, in fact, as many as possible, gotta keep terrorism in check you know, keep the fear rhetoric flying, the dread roiling, the false terrorist-attack warnings slinging, keep the war machine cranking and the petroleum and aerospace and military industries flourishing and see all those grinning generals and oil-company CEOs? Exactly.
Does that answer your questions? No? It's OK -- they don't satisfactorily answer anyone else's, either. But it doesn't matter. Remember, kid, they don't care what you think, so long as you don't think too much. Understand? Good. Now, off you go.
And by the way, yes, Barney is totally gay. Just ask Mr. Ashcroft.
©2003 SF Gate
Reprinted from The San Francisco Chronicle: |
