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LETTER TO MARS (05.19.2004)
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BY PETER KURTH
This is a column that died several times before it was born. Writers will know what I mean by that,
but so will any American who’s been awake and upright for the last
few weeks and kept half an eye on what’s ever more grimly called
“the news.”
There’s only so much of it you can take, after all, before you
run a hot bath and start hunting for razor blades.
“We have a media system that has failed us absolutely,”
says Mark Crispin Miller, a particular hero of mine whose forthcoming book,
Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New
World Order, should be on everyone’s summer reading list.
“The media cartel is on its knees for Bush,” Miller
writes, “delivering him an endless blow job far more scandalous and
dangerous than anything that ever happened between Bill and Monica. …
Daily life has taken on the quality of nightmare. We look on at horror after horror;
protest en masse, and watch the world protest, to no avail; see utter
mediocrity exalted, moral idiocy flaunted, fraud and thievery rewarded;
hear black called white and white called black. No one in power says anything that makes
a lick of sense. And then you flip
on CNN, where everybody's acting like it's normal. Well, it isn't normal. And I think the
majority of people in this country know it.”
Bravo, Mark – or, as Dubya might say,
“Hoo-hah!” You can tell
that something’s gone terribly wrong in America when you turn to a friend and casually
ask, “So, did you watch the beheading video?”
Are you safer now than you were before Bush came to power? And how would you explain the debacle in Iraq to a stranger – let’s say, a
visitor from Mars, who’s come to beg Congress not to let Dubya
liberate his planet, too?
I guarantee you’d be hard put to find the right words. Take the battle of Fallujah, for example,
which we’ve temporarily “won” by allowing the city to be
occupied and militarized by the same “Ba’athists,”
“loyalists” and “Republican Guards” whose hides we
were so intent on tanning a short year ago – just before Bush
declared that our mission in Iraq was, you know,
“accomplished.”
“Oh, that was war,” I can hear you say to your visitor
from space. “This is post-war.” Or maybe those were “major combat
operations” and these are flat-out disasters. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that Fallujah is now "for all
intents and purposes a rebel town,” “an inspirational ground
zero for anti-Western militants in the Middle East. … Some worry that Fallujah may
become a free zone for bomb-makers, saboteurs, assassins and other violent
types whose desire to drive the United States out of Iraq remains undiminished.”
Maybe that’s what Dubya really meant to say on that aircraft carrier
last May: “Mission
Undiminished!” You know how he
is with sentences – not the brightest boy on the block.
After Fallujah came Abu Ghraib, with its digital record of torture,
abuse and lighthearted gang-bangs, of both the “hetero” and
“homo” variety. That is
to say, rape is still a male proposition, but, as usual, it’s the
women who catch most of the flack – the chain-smoking, trailer-bred
Lynndies and Sabrinas, who’ve given new meaning to the Army slogan,
“Be All That You Can Be” (Just Do Them One At a Time). Western journalists have rather
exaggerated the typical Arab male’s abhorrence of being naked among
his peers. But the sight of a grinning Lynndie England, flicking ashes at his perpendicular, is
bound to have sent him, as reported, straight over the edge.
After viewing a full set of the pictures of fun and frolic at Abu
Ghraib, grown senators and congressmen -- even congresswomen, that’s
how advanced we are! – emerged from their darkened chambers on
Capitol Hill, smiting their brows and exclaiming, in no particular order
and to no effect whatever:
“What we saw is appalling!" (Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist, R-Tennessee)
"I saw cruel, sadistic torture!" (Rep. Jane Harman,
D-California)
"You could not say that there was actually the act of sodomy,
but it appears that that may be the preparation for it." (Senator Bill
Nelson, D-Florida)
“I don’t know how these people got into our army.”
(Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colorado)
Take it from me, Senator, they came up the usual way, looking for a
break -- some assistance, a leg up or a way out of the economic dead-end to
which “globalization” and Republican politics have consigned
them. When Dubya says the abuse at
Abu Ghraib “doesn’t represent the America I know,” you can believe that he
means it, born as he was with a silver spoon up his nose. Explain that to a Martian.
Now, with just six weeks to go before the Iraqi people regain their
“sovereignty,” or their “limited sovereignty,” or,
as remarked by our next ambassador to Baghdad, John Negroponte, "a lot
more sovereignty than they have right now" – where was I?
Right -- just now, at the very worst moment, comes the assassination
of Abdel-Zahraa Othman, head of the Iraqi Governing Council, America’s handpicked, puppet regime in Baghdad, whose surviving members either will or
won’t have any role to play in the next handpicked, puppet regime in Baghdad.
This is assuming America can find any Iraqis left who
aren’t “insurgents,” “combatants,”
“militants,” “extremists,”
“terrorists,” "fiery clerics," "rag-tag
militias" and, probably, malcontents.
“One of the reasons why things have quieted down
recently,” Dubya told reporters last week, in complete contradiction
of the facts, “is because there’s fewer of them to make noise,
fewer of the enemy to make noise.”
Back to you, Cokie.
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