from “Lost in America”.
It comes to me when I hear Republicans petulantly whine, “Well, what’s you’re brilliant idea about Iraq? I mean, we can’t just pull out? We have to Do Something!”
Because for them say that -- even whisper it –- after spending the last three years screaming that anyone who suggested that All Was Not Well was a traitor means, at some basal level, they know Iraq is lost.
That they were duped.
That their hero – George W. Bush – has completely betrayed his office and this country.
The Moderates, at least, almost gotten to that place where, in their own language, they ask, like Bogie in the “Maltese Falcon”,
“Have you given me any of your confidence? Any of the truth? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else?”
Then insist,
“I can’t go ahead without more confidence in you than I have now. You’ve got to convince me that you know what it’s all about – that you aren’t simply fiddling along hoping it’ll all come out right in the end.”
And, finally, sadly, answer,
“I won’t play the sap for you… You’ve never played square with me for half an hour at a stretch since I’ve know you.”
But they must do all of this in a way so terribly tortured and contorted it makes Houdini, chained ass-over-elbows into a straight jacket, in a 3’x3’x3’ bank safe, at the bottom of a freezing river look as lazily relaxed as a fat man dozing in a hammock on a summer afternoon.
Because to own up to any of this out-loud, in public, in plainspeak is to admit that Liberals were hard-headedly, realistically right about Bush and Iraq from jump. And that the only remaining explanation as to why Conservatives so eagerly went along with Republican lies and insanity for so fucking long in the face of such overwhelming evidence is that they really are every bit as droolingly stupid, monumentally credulous and intractably fascistic as we always said they were.
That’s a helluva mirror to have to wake up to. No wonder they pay liars and freaks like Limbaugh and Coulter and Falwell so handsomely to stand between them their gargoyle reflections.
Which brings me back to “Lost in America”.
Albert Brooks’s character – David Howard -- has quit his job (or gotten fired, depending), gotten his wife to quit her job, cashed out everything they own, and have bought a 5,000 foot long RV.
In his upper-middle class cocoon, David has completely forgotten that he is hugely privileged. That he has all of the comforts America affords its wealthy and deluded classes, and that he doesn’t know the first fucking thing about real life in the real world. And so, because he liked “Easy Rider” and was unhappy with his job, he and the Missus are going to go “make a statement”.
They’re going to “Touch Indians”, damn it!
And then, before their trips had even really begun, his wife blows the whole “nest egg” in a Vegas casino. All of it. Like the GOP, she just couldn’t stop herself. Where they were rich and comfortable and protected in their Town Home on Wheels from the vicissitudes of Real Life, suddenly they find themselves broke and reeling.
Without an “Exit Strategy”, still in deluded shock over their new station in life, David goes to the employment office to looking for work in the little Arizona town where they have ended up.
AGENT
So. What can we do for you?
DAVID
Well, I'm originally from Los
Angeles and I'm now living here.
I need a job.
AGENT
Alright.
AGENT
(continuing)
What was your previous working
experience?
DAVID
Well, for the last eight years I
was a major executive with one of
the biggest advertising agencies
in the country.
AGENT
Oh, I see. And your previous salary?
DAVID
Seventy thousand dollars.
AGENT
You said seventy thousand?
DAVID
Yes.
AGENT
Over how long a period are we
talking about?
DAVID
A year. Seventy thousand a year.
DAVID
(continuing)
What's so funny?
AGENT
Nothing. That's very good. So,
what brings you around these parts?
Trying to double up that income?
DAVID
No. I came here to live. I
wanted to change my life.
AGENT
You couldn't change your life
on seventy thousand?
You couldn't change Iraq for half a trillion dollars?!
As it turns out, in this tiny town where fortune has swept them, the only available job is “Crossing Guard”.
AGENT
It pays three twenty-five an hour,
plus benefits.
DAVID
Benefits meaning what?
AGENT
Benefits meaning you can get a
ride to and from work if you need
it.
DAVID
Well, listen, I've just started
looking for work and I don't want
to rule anything out but I think
I probably can find something where
I can use my ability a bit more.
Would you have another kind of
file, like an executive box or
something?
AGENT
What kind of box would that be?
DAVID
You know, a box of higher-paying
jobs.
AGENT
My goodness, I forgot. Sure.
You mean the hundred thousand
dollar box?
Agent begins to laugh again.
Short of a draft, where the 101st Chairborne and all the College Yellow Elephants are pressed into service, where we put our industries on a war-footing, where we march a half-million-man army into Iraq with the understanding that we are going to have to fight an insurgent war for the next twenty years...we are out of options in Iraq.
There are none left but choosing the means by which we will exit, and whether or not our army will have to shoot its way out when it goes.
But because of the personal horrors they would have to confront once they open that door, the stark reality that everything they believed was absurd and everyone they trusted was a huckster and a liar, Republicans would rather leave kids to be molested at home, and mutilated and killed in the lonely deserts far away.
They would rather let thieves continue to loot the public treasury.
Like the spoiled children they are, they would rather hide their faces from the truth…
…and demand that Liberals – who have been right all along; who have fucking well warned them this was coming all along – come up with a magic answer that will undo all the blood and ruin – past, present and yet to come -- that is on their hands.
Demand that there must be a “hundred thousand dollar box” from which they can still salvage the shiny future of Cheap Oil and Empire their lying leaders once promised them.
13 comments:
I see you are cooking with gas again. I wish I could force wingnuts to read you rants in that bondage chair from A Clockwork Orange.
I think you forgot one aspect of the Conservative visage: blinding greed. Some are probably more greedy than stupid, believing that really, who cares if some po' brown folk blow up some other po' brown folk (regardless of origin on either side) so long as their activities result in an increase in the coffers.
I think it was George Carlin talking about Vietnam, but it would apply to Iraq also: "Pull out? That isn't manly!"
It's also very telling that so many corporations such as Halliburton have been using our occupation of Iraq as a big ol' pork barrel from which to drain even more largess from the public till. As if it weren't bad enough that literally trillions of dollars ear-marked for defense-spending simply vanished, meaning it was stolen. Far-right libertarian gold-bug types like to say that it's the growth of entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare that are breaking the proverbial bank, but what about all that money for military spending that just ends up being outright stolen?
Maybe we could just give their country back to them. Call it even. It would be great PR...."The Invaders with a Heart!"
Okay, so I LIKE the analogy of the Occupation of Iraq as a trough... but I think you've got it backwards. See, the corporations are all of these big, stamping and stomping, impatient horses that are used by someone to make lots of money (via farming, racing, pulling carts, relaying messages, or whatever). Those horses want - and need - water. LOTS of it. The trough "magically" appears (from the back of a pickup truck) BECAUSE of the desires of the horses (and indulgence of their handlers), not the other way around. Oh, sure, a few extra horses might smell the water and wander in, hoping for a swallow or two, but they're certainly not the raison d'etre for the trough.
And in the final analysis, We The People are the Ground - where all of the poop lands.
Got it?
Why aren't the Democrats running video of Rumsgelding on the eve of the war, saying it would last, perhaps 6 weeks, not likely 6 months...with the expectation that US forces would be greeted as liberators. Instead of flowers and candy, the US has reaped bodybags and cripples.
We did have a brilliant fucking idea, that would have saved their bacon, a few years ago. It was: Don't go.
But now, I can't come up with anything that would clean the blood off their hands, although as a liberal, I suppose it's a relief that it's not on mine--one of the few advantages to having an administration in office that thinks it can screw everyone who disagrees with them out of the decision-making proccess and still pass itself off as "democracy-loving."
But we still have to live with what these scumbags did--the expense, the loss of moral authority, the increased animosity--and therefore, increased danger--to Americans everywhere, etc. And I can't really think of a way to make that go away.
So here's the brilliant fucking idea I'm looking for now: The one that makes these SOBs and everyone who voted for them--the religious Right, the ones who thought their country's welfare was less important than sticking their noses into everyone else's bedroom, who thought a tax cut designed to benefit people who had more money than they know what to do with would benefit them and their $45,000 p.a. household, who thought the most important thing they could do with their vote was to stick it to the Left, to the Blacks, to the coasts. to the Muslims, to the rest of the plaet--pay for the decisions they made themselves, instead of burdening Americans who did the right thing with the danger, the dishonor and the debt that they caused.
I had no say in this. I did not collude in it. I see no moral reason why I, or my kid, or mu kid's kids, should be the ones who pay for it.
- Molly, NYC
"plaet" = "planet"
"Pull out? That isn't manly!"
Perhaps, roll off?
Isn't that what you do when you are finished?
"Pull out? That isn't manly!"
Perhaps, roll off?
I believe that makes Iran the wet spot.
To carry the metaphor further...
They'll pull out eventually, but not until they've found someone else they can fist fuck.
Afterall, their's is a violently pornographic foreign policy, no?
Yes, we did have the solution to this problem in Iraq at the beginning as was stated by Anonymous: Don’t go! And now the folks who decided to ignore all the warnings and warning signs want those of us who did the warning to come up with a plan to clean up their Mess-opotamia. Well, I have been thinking about this for sometime and I think that I have come up with a plan that might well serve quite a few ends.
I say we send Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bolton, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle and everyone else responsible for this horror to the Emerald City in Iraq. They must stay there until they have solved the problem they have created for the Iraqi people, the U.S.A., and the World. They cannot leave until the “Mission is Accomplished.”
Think about it. It isn’t as if these people are engaged in governing here. Other than the Photo-Ops, and self-serving quotes in the MSM, who would even notice they weren’t here? The upside to this they would no long be able to raise millions of dollars for the Republican Machine. Also, if we do this quickly enough Bush won’t get to sign the Torture and Indefinite Detention Act with his Unitary Executive Signing Statement making it even more evil than it already is.
I say this is a win, win, strategy!
JMHO!
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