Blindsided

If I had to choose, my favorite anti-war song would be New Model Army’s “Here Comes the War”, primarily because songwriter Justin Sullivan refuses to take a didactic stand. Instead he paints a chilling and thrilling picture of all hell broke loose:

“Today as you listen to this song
Another 394,00 children were born into this world
They break like waves of hunger and desire on these eroded shores”

It seems the Bush administration knows a thing or two about hungry children, since it continues the economic embargo against Iraq, which according to UNICEF has killed nearly 500,000 Iraqi children. I somehow doubt that these kids are Al Qaeda or Taliban. Waves of hunger and desire indeed.

Now maybe I’m reading too much into a straight forward (albeit gripping) rocker. Call me simplistic, but this gets to the core of America’s troubles with the rest of the world.

Namely, there’s a whole lot of people out there in the world and they want to survive. If they’re to live, they realize that we Americans can’t have the lion’s share of everything forever. Perhaps it’s time we as a nation grew the fuck up. But this quaint notion gets lost in something suggested by the song’s arrangement: The whirling dervish frenzy and sheer high of war. I remember the buzz running through the media in the previous Gulf War, when I worked for an NBC station in Orlando. The air literally crackled. I’m sure the Bush administration is relying on this high to sell their war. It’s scary, but it’s a rush. And they’re betting the buzz and fear factor will suck us in, trumping a mountain of logical fallacies in their case for war.

One of the Enron President’s key aims is to keep the American public angry over 9/11 and alarmed about everything else. Not a bad strategy, if you’re waging war to benefit a narrow sector of wealth and power, especially if the actual fighting is done by the poorer segment of our society (i.e. the all-volunteer armed forces).

The situation puts a whole new spin on the old Conservative hobgoblin of “Class Warfare”. The emotional pitch (timed for February Sweeps I might add) includes the proclamation of Colin Powell’s Dr Strangelove rant and magic lantern show before the United Nations Security Council an "Adlai Stevenson moment."

Someone who knows better, namely Adlai Stephenson III, points out that this comparison between his father’s courageous stand and Powell’s Sigfried and Roy gig is horseshit.

Stephenson adds that the Bush regime’s motive for mass murder is highly suspect: “After all, is the same Baathist regime aided by the Reagan administration when Baghdad used chemical weapons in its bloody war against Iran.”

But this is logic, and the Bush brigade’s crack marketing team flies in the face of all reason. So we’re misdirected by lies, that legitimate short-range missiles have magically become long range missiles, solely because Powell says so.

We hear endless stories about the Butcher of Baghdad’s senseless slaughter of the Kurds, while Washington promptly and quietly sells out said oppressed Kurds to Turkish killers. There is no logical or moral response to war’s critics, so Bush supporters are naturally itching for a crackdown.

It’s the return of cozy McCarthyism and master color coordinator Tom Ridge will be gratified to know that it gives the term red alert a whole new meaning. And what sexual dysfunction lurks in the Bush cabinet’s closet, when even sex appeal won’t sway them in their rush to war?

When the French pointed out, that contrary to Bush’s stirring rhetoric, that war is not a game, we responsibly reply that it’s our war and we’ll bomb who we want. (Speaking of “no game”, I’m reminded of the similarly titled Bowie song “It’s No Game”, and the disturbingly fitting snatch of lyrics:

“To be insulted by these fascists
Is so degrading.”

If there is a bright spot, it’s that a powerful anti-war movement is brewing already. United For Peace is organizing rallies and marches this Saturday, including one in my neck of the woods.

I’ll be there. It may not be much, but it’s the only real power I have a citizen and I’d be a fool not to use it. Or as Jello Biafra has noted, when the media is full of shit, you must become the media.

Otherwise, we as a nation, are just like George W. Bush – resentful, self-obsessed, and vindictive. To borrow liberally from the great Chester Himes, our president is the blind man on the subway:

“A friend of mine…told me a story about a blind man with a pistol shooting a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war… masochistic doings in the Middle East… And then I thought that all… violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”

And a blind man with a pistol doesn’t care who he takes out.
 
¶ 2/12/2003 :: E-mail Pat