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 Rob
Swift 
 "For
me, satire is a powerful tool and it's not sufficiently used; it's
not just for late-night jokes but really to promote fundamental change.
And it's inevitable that when you attempt to change the status quo,
you're going to make some people upset. That's the price of change."
 "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he
wants is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous
in fact, but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure
in the grand eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle.
Pyongyang isn't even in the Bible!" "It's
a done deal. By the end of 2003, Saddam Hussein will either be out
of power or out of the realm of the living. So who's next in line
for the coveted position of dictator -- uh, leader -- of Iraq, home
to the largest supply of crude reserves on Earth? Here's the list
of nominees."
 "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to
our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with
explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be
upon him. "
 "America
embodies mimetic relations of rivalry. The ideology of free enterprise
makes of them an absolute solution. Effective, but explosive.
Competitive relations are excellent if you come out of it the
winner. But if the winners are always the same then, one day,
the losers overturn the game table."
 "'When
it comes to learning from its mistakes, corporate America has
fallen off the rehab wagon more times than Robert Downey, Jr.
A quick glance at last week's papers reveals that it's monkey
business as usual on Wall Street."
 "'People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in, and
now they have to realize that they can actually create that
world and fight for the things that are worth fighting for
and not feel apathetic. We are all going to die. There is
no point in holding anything back. ."
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by Ross Levine News is to reality what screenplays are to movies -- mere descriptions (usually somewhat dry) of events infinitely more visceral and compelling, and at times, horrific. Suppose we were to turn on our televisions and see it all, not just the crying relatives, but the actual murder/accident that had removed their loved one from the world? Suppose, instead of simply reading "Thousands killed in Turkish quake," we were to witness each and every death? Sometimes we do witness such things; when the camera, or we ourselves, serendipitously -- unserendipitously, that is -- are present at a particular "ground zero" during a momentous or violent event. But more often than not, things come to us simply as news. And so the news from Iraq is that it's been a bloody period for American soldiers there. For example, in a town called Falluja, two soldiers were killed when unidentified assailants with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades attacked their column. Nine others were wounded, the story went on, with an American armored vehicle and MedEvac helicopter also destroyed. Now I assume no embedded reporters were there to capture the ambush on film, and news tends to be only as thorough as its "unexpectedness" -- no, in this case, let's say "suddenness" -- will allow; only when stories are "big" enough do we later get filled in on all the details. This was hardly a huge story -- after all, the war is "over." No, it hasn't been officially declared so, but there are other headlines on page one now that do not include the four-letter word for U.S. foreign policy 2002-03 -- "IRAQ" -- so it's more than begun to feel like yesterday's news. It's left to the imagination then, to construct, if we are so inclined, a mental movie of the death of these two soldiers in the desert, and since we don't have all that much to go on, our imaginations are decidedly unfettered. Machine guns, grenades, one of the soldiers may have taken a spray of gunfire, perhaps the other absorbed the impact of an exploding grenade at close quarters. There must have been considerable blood and misery (what Hollywood refers to as "splatter") in these fairly anonymous deaths. Anonymous because all we have is the word "soldier": no names, no hometowns. Let's move on, then, to the Pentagon informing the families -- mothers, fathers, wives, children -- so that while we the public were receiving this news, others were also hearing it, only not so impassively, not just as "news." The war they thought was "over" had claimed someone they loved. Next we unleash our imaginings on the nine wounded. "Wounded" -- now there's a vague term. If I venture into the garden and prick my finger on a thorn, I suppose I, too, am "wounded." If I get my arm caught in the blades of the lawn mower, I am also "wounded," though it's hard to understand how a single word can describe both these realities, which of course, it doesn't, at least not very well. So we have no idea what this means. "Nine wounded." Will some die of their injuries? Will they convalesce for hours, days, years? Will they have a scar to show off at gatherings, or a missing limb or two, or crippled organ, that will forever conspire against their fulfillment and happiness? We can be fairly sure, however, that the dreams of the two "killed" soldiers have gone up in a cliché puff of smoke that hardly did justice to those dreams, whatever they were. No, the war is not over, far from it. In some ways it may have just begun, like the Israeli-Arab war can be said to have begun at the end, not the beginning, of those six days in June 1967. The war in Iraq is now a "coal mine" of a war, burning below the requirements of a "major story," flaring up in spots, with real fire, but for the most part, emitting a great deal of noxious, toxic smoke. And mirrors, that is, courtesy of the current administration. In fact, our only significant gain from this so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom, is that we, and the rest of the world, are no longer subject to the constant broken-record harangues of Bush and his buddies claiming that Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction are the greatest peril we've ever faced. Now the regime -- ours, I mean -- is bending over backwards to explain why the WMDs haven't materialized. But that's all water now under some obscure Euphrates bridge, albeit water being further contaminated/enriched (you pick the word) with American blood.
Some half a million Americans died in World War II, but in that fight, the weapons of mass destruction showed up at our doorstep and forced our entire nation to make sacrifices, both small and supreme. This last war was a different matter, and whether it was about liberation, oil, imperialism or terrorism, the fact remains that now, now that it's "over," nobody can really say for sure what brought it about. Liberation you say? Why aren't we marching into the Congo then, where plenty of innocent people are currently facing death, surely a powerful impediment to their freedom. Is it because the Iraqis had oil and the Congolese are only the color of it? Which brings me to just that very oil. Right, it's for the Iraqi people, as if we were all filling our gas tanks with chopped liver. Imperialism? Surely if we meant to "stabilize" the Middle East by ejecting Saddam, well, there's definitely some imperialism in that. Last time I checked, imperialism meant extending a nation's authority by establishing influence over other nations, so how can we deny that the Iraqi political margarine we're attempting to concoct is not imperial? And terrorism, well, if the war was indeed about that, then we seem to be lost in the desert, because, what with recent fireworks displays in Riyadh and Casablanca, Iraq was apparently not Al Qaeda's main base of operation. Afghanistan, Iraq: are we going about the globe gobbling nations and leaving shells behind? Nobody likes dictators (unless, of course, they serve one's interests), but sometimes, even a dictator is preferable to anarchy. The big question becomes: when does anarchy coalesce into enough democratic stability to make it possible for us to withdraw? Does anyone care to remember "Vietnamization," that bon mot of Nixon-speak meaning to let go of a rather lengthy foreign escapade? It wasn't long before socio-historic forces in that country returned to their "natural" flow and brought about the very government that we had predicted and preached as doom for all of Southeast Asia. Yes, we'd been defeated -- not by Vietnam, but by ourselves, the story went, our hands tied so that we couldn't do the job the "right" way. This was not to be the case in Iraq, and sure enough, the war was "over" -- in no time, thanks to our now much-heralded military might. But the fact is Iraq, which before the war was at most a lukewarm cauldron, is now boiling. And we can't leave until it simmers down -- until evaporation, I assume, leaves a residue of democracy at the bottom of the pot. But is that really what's down there? Or is it a bitter sludge worse than the worst excesses of the Hussein years? Either we remain and bear the "Imperialists!" epithet or we depart and watch our friends and foes battle to fill the vacuum. Either way, the notion that we will -- at whatever point -- leave behind a little America along the banks of the Tigris is downright laughable. But it's too late now. We're in there, and the Pentagon is already calling for a larger stabilization force. Iraqis are puzzled -- angry, perhaps? -- that their liberators are now slowly, surely, turning into their rulers. But, of course, it's the natural progression of such wars. We are now faced with the problem of yet another regime change, and unless we bomb ourselves, how are we going to know it's time to go? Will Bush be calling up Tommy Franks and telling him he's got 48 hours to get out of Iraq? Out of ... Falluja. The name sounds poetic, unless your son was slaughtered there. We may have Baghdad and Kabul now, but we don't really have Falluja and Jalalabad. Yes, it's hearts and minds all over again -- and did we ever have a shot at capturing those? Bush, Inc. convinced itself that the end of Saddam would endear us to his oppressed subjects, but Bush, Inc. blinded itself to the more likely aftermath -- the looting and pillaging, the lack of law and infrastructure, and now, the bloody ambushing, as Iraqis, unwilling to see an outside power "dictate" the running of their country, start mistaking American soldiers for the power-broker, Halliburtonian hegemonists who sent them over there. Which is why the news from Iraq -- on page three, if even that -- is rather unsettling.
But then again, as I said at the start, news is not quite reality, though sometimes that's more by design than default. We mustn't forget that news can be orchestrated, either to embellish or obscure. Were intelligence reports doctored to help justify the war? Was staging involved in the Jessica Lynch rescue, to further punch up our military's glory? Was that aircraft carrier at sea, or just a stone's throw from San Diego? These are the revelations I live for, like the story that surfaced after the last Gulf War, suggesting that our acclaimed patriot missile system had actually failed miserably at shooting down Saddam's SCUDS Or the one from the war before that, a "fictitious" (to steal a word from the much-vilified Michael Moore) attack in the Tonkin Gulf . Yes, this is when your jaw drops in stunned disbelief: what makes the world go 'round is not necessarily truth but its manipulation by those powerful enough to get away with it. If news were reality, if every time one of our soldiers died in combat, we witnessed the actual splatter, just like in the movies, we might be inclined to give up war. At least, war on such spurious terms as these. Where are the weapons of mass destruction? There may well be some out in the desert, but we should also look for them in the lies that we allow ourselves to believe, even after the truth is told. 31 May 03 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is.
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