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I'd like to be amazed, honestly, but it's just not in me. None of this -- the sadism, the attempts to squelch the media (everything from the hell the woman who snapped those photos of the flag-draped coffins has gone through to the transparent FCC crackdowns for "obscenity" on outlets that have been critical of the Bush administration), the poor justification for an unprovoked war that was not only morally unjust but apparently planned by a kindergarten class for special needs kids -- is really surprising at all if you're jaded and misanthropic, which increasingly seems a rational way to approach modern American life. There's a quote from sf novelist Jack Finney (that I just relocated in Stephen King's book on horror fiction, Danse Macabre) that's been running through my head off and on since we went into Iraq:
"I was...an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than the rest of us."
I think one of the most pernicious ways in which the conspiracy theory frenzy of the '90s affected people who tend to think different, or more, or whatever, than the "average" person was its introduction of the notion of sinister but knowledgable cabals of evil types who steer nations into terrible positions for their own dark (but incomprehensible) ends. It's becoming clearer that the Bush administration had no idea whatsoever what to anticipate in Iraq, and didn't especially care, and that's it. I don't think they knew any more than most of the rest of us, and I don't think they even wanted to know. Like who was the military official a week or so ago who, when asked, said he "thought" the US death toll in Iraq was (at that point) something like 500, when it was actually over 700? It's a pretty stupid thing to lie about -- an easily-checked fact -- so this is a person who was either (a) not well informed about a mission he is himself helping to operate or (b) lying, and stupidly. We're giving them too much credit. I think everything is exactly as it appears to be, and that basically a group of schoolyard bullies are now running the country, and they're every bit as violent and dullwitted as that statement implies. |
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