Justice Feelgood Marshall (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} textureslut) wrote,@ 2005-07-06 15:02:00 |
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The Incredibly True Story of the Nation That Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies
Ok, this is going to get REAL long and probably very boring for those of you who don't dig political posts. For the two of you who have been complaining that I don't write about politics anymore, though, it's party time.
Various parts of this post have been bouncing around in my head for a long time, and are mostly coming together now in partial response to something Sweetney posted a couple weeks ago. Sweetney was questioning whether we are headed for imminent economic collapse, and I can't really answer that because I don't know shit about economics. However, I have been thinking about imminent political collapse. Basically, there's been a question that's been bothering me a lot since the 2004 election, and it goes a little something like this: Is George W. Bush REALLY as bad as I think he is and is America REALLY as totally fucked as it appears to be, or is it just that every generation has a tendency to believe that they are living in uniquely dramatic times that threaten to tear apart the nation (e.g., Vietnam/Watergate before us, McCarthyism/mutually assured destruction before that, Great Depression/WWII before that, Reconstruction/Civil War before that)? In other words, is America just on the far arc of a pendulum swing that will eventually return to the center, or is it headed off a cliff with no hope of returning and no bottom in sight?
After giving this a great deal of thought and trying to remove my political biases from the question as much as possible, my conclusion is this: Yes, things really are as bad as they look, if not worse, and America is probably toast as the world's most powerful nation within our lifetimes. Herein, I flail about and meander as I attempt to explain the many many reasons why I think that, and why I do not think that it is a defeatist and pessimistic belief, just a realistic one.
I. First, the most obvious reason: George Bush has this country deeply invested -- financially, emotionally and rhetorically -- in a war that is simply too broadly defined to ever be won. Not the war in Iraq, the war on terror. (The fact that they are two separate things is a huge problem in itself, of course.) The war on terrorism, by definition, can't end until it is impossible to commit an act of terrorism. Terrorism is defined as the use of violence to frighten a population for the purposes of achieving a political end. Think about how easy that is to do, and think about how many different motivations one could have for committing an act of terrorism. A democracy can not function correctly in a state of perpetual war, and that is exactly what we will have as long as Bush is in power, because he has raised the stakes so high on this that to back down now would be an admission that America is incapable of asserting its will, which would be fatal to long-term foreign policy. He's turned the old "speak softly and carry a big stick" concept entirely on its head -- now America's strategy is "Talk a lot of shit and pray it all works out the way it says you will, because you sure as fuck are going to need a lot of luck for that to happen."
We might -- might -- have had our only chance to get out of this death spiral at the 2004 election. A new administration would have had the ability to treat the last four years as an aberration, and ratchet down the rhetoric enough that we wouldn't be forced to try and follow through on Bush's insane crusading optimism. I'm truly not certain than a Kerry win would have been much better anyway, because he would have walked directly into the biggest shitstorm ever and had probably the hardest job of the presidency since FDR while at the same time dealing with a viciously effective right-wing attack machine completely dedicated to stopping him at every turn (more on that below.) But after 8 years of this, we're guaranteed to be so far down a hole in world opinion and military strength that our options for deescalation will be far more limited than they are now -- and they suck pretty badly now.
I remember the exact second that I first realized we were in more geopolitical trouble than I ever thought I would see in my lifetime. Not 9/11 itself, not when Bush said that all nations were either with us or against us, but when he first uttered the phrase "Axis of Evil" in the 2002 State of the Union. I remember staring at the screen in disbelief at the fact that he had just conflated three utterly different nations with three utterly different political ideologies into a single entity. It was the moment, I think, where our foreign policy well and truly jumped the shark. Yes, I'm fully aware that American foreign policy was ugly, brutal and unfair long before W ever drank his first Budweiser, but it was that moment in the speech, of Bush blithely opening up a three-front war just for a rhetorical flourish, that was when I started thinking that 9/11 might have actually been the beginning of the end of this nation as we know it.
II. The war in Iraq, as I said above, is not the war on terror. At least, it's not completely the war on terror. It infuriates me to no end how many people think that the situation in Iraq is The Brave US Military vs. The Evil Terrorists. It's the military vs. elements of the former regime, vs. Sunni nationalists, vs. foreign jihadists, vs. garden-variety thugs and criminals, vs. paid killers, vs. people who just want us to get the fuck out of their country. The motivations of these groups are exceedingly complex and sometimes they conflict with each other, but the point is that there is a very wide variety of people who have a very wide variety of reasons to blow shit up. This is not a issue with a military solution. That is, it's not the kind of fight you win by crushing enemy positions and killing enough of the enemy that they can't continue to fight. The more people suffer and die in Iraq, the more people have a reason to join the insurgency to get us out, and those people are ostensibly the same one you are trying to help. So this is an issue with a political solution - that is, you try to give all the various groups something they want -- EXCEPT that your major problem is that any government that appears to built by the US is going to have zero legitimacy.
I can't remember where I first saw this specific formulation of the problem, but it's depressingly accurate in its simplicity:
- As long as there is a single US soldier on Iraqi soil, there's going to be a bloody insurgency.
- As soon as there are no US soldiers on Iraqi soil, there's going to be a bloody civil war.
The only other possibility - an native Iraqi army takes over its own security -- is a fucking joke to anybody who has been following the process of said army building. I'm not going to get into that here, but here's some background on that. The point is that Iraq, which was supposed to be the pushover of the Axis of Evil, is inexorably grinding our military to shreds and becoming a bottomless money pit. One thing that I hear a lot from war supporters is that people wringing their hands over military casualties are wimps because we've "only" lost about 1,700 people and we lost many, many times that (58,000, to be exact) in Vietnam. To which I say a number of things:
1. Right, tell that to the fucking parents, friends and lovers of those 1,700+ dead.
2. Most of the attacks in Iraq are aimed at Iraqi army recruits and civilians. That comes to a hell of a lot more than 1,700 dead and in the long run those are the casualty numbers that are going to force us out.
3. Medical technology has advanced in the years since Vietnam to the point that many, many soldiers who would have died on the battlefield now survive the same injuries. So they're not on the KIA list. However, they are blind, or legless, or paralyzed, or otherwise definitely never Fighting 4 Freedom again. Currently the number of wounded who did not return to duty within 72 hours stands at 6492. (The total wounded number: somewhere between 15,000 and 38,000.)
4. And the most interesting Fun Fact - currently, the attrition rate for American soldiers in Iraq is approximately the same as the attrition rate for Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan during their invasion. As you may or may not remember, during the 1980s Osama bin Laden fought a long-term guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan with the (clearly stated) goal of destroying their empire through slowly bleeding it dry. Of course there were many, many other reasons for the collapse of the USSR, but their quagmire and eventual shameful withdrawal from the area was certainly a precipitating factor. (And, of course, the quagmire and eventual shameful withdrawal led to Afghan civil war, which led to the rise of the Taliban, and oh boy, history is nonstop comedy.)
I should move on, but speaking of the Lessons of History, I just have to take a moment at the end of this section to express the dizzying combination of disbelief and rage I feel when I hear George Bush trying to compare the state of the nascent Iraq government to the American Revolution. NO, you obtuse idiot, there are almost ZERO valid comparisons between this and the American Revolution, and of the few comparisons that CAN be drawn, WE are the colonialist Redcoats and THEY are the brave Minutemen. WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND? I am a fucking state-college DROPOUT who spends 25 percent of his waking hours DRINKING BEER and another 15 percent playing The Sims 2 and even I know enough basic history to know exactly how retarded you sound when you try to argue that line.
Anyway, that's my case for why we are fucked in both the war in Iraq and the broader War on Noun, but those things alone, I don't think, make a case for America tanking as a dominant power in our lifetimes. If you add this to the the domestic trends, though, I believe the case is a great deal stronger.
I. If you've bothered to read this far, you have probably read George Orwell's 1984 at some point in your life. If you have not, I seriously beseech you to read it now. If you haven't read it recently, I seriously beseech you to read it again. It is by now cliche for partisans to accuse their opponents of Orwellian tactics, but that doesn't change the fact that, pre-9/11, 1984 read like science fiction and now it truly reads like prophecy. A recent post by the always excellent Billmon nailed this as perfectly as it could be nailed (please follow this link, it's incredibly chilling.)
But of course, it's not just the massaging of statistics that makes post-9/11 America look so Orwellian. Osama bin Laden has slipped into the role of Emmanuel Goldstein, the all-powerful yet completely invisible bogeyman than can be evoked at any time by the government to instill fear in the populace. A lack of support for the leader is construed as active support for the enemy. Words not only lose their meaning, but actually mean the opposite of their original definitions; we're told a state of perpetual war is the only way we can ever ensure peace. We're told that George Bush's ignorance is not actually ignorance after all, but the strength to differentiate between good and evil. Only weak people overthink those things -- they're flip-floppers,, they're nuanced. "Fair and balanced" means "partisan and divisive." History changes with no government acknowledgment that things were ever any other way -- first we went to Iraq in self-defense, then we went to Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a bad bad man, then we went to Iraq to build a wellspring of democracy, and before all that Saddam's Iraq was our ally in the fight against Iran's Islamic fundamentalism. Easily proven facts are outright denied (remember Bush saying in the third debate that he never said he "wasn't worried about bin Laden?") and the media makes no effort to correct the record.
This leads to a major difference between 2005 America and 1984 Oceania. Oceania was a fascist dictatorship with a completely state-run media. America is a capitalist democracy with a corporate media. In search of profits, this corporate media has done a bang-up job of strangling democracy by turning news into entertainment. Now news appeals to the lowest common denominator; shiny video-game graphics, explosions and sounds that are meant to evoke a Pavlovian response ("Ooh- that sound means an Important Piece of News is coming!") are used to introduce everythingon cable news now, from the death of the Pope to the mysterious disappearance of yet another Innocent Young White Female. Shoutfest talk shows get much, much better ratings than reasonable debate. Without truly balanced news, original reporting and journalistic challenges to government statements, there is no way for the average citizen to make an informed choice about anything. Yes, of course it is possible to get access to a wide variety of independent news on the Internet, but the great majority of Americans are still not very computer-savvy and still get the majority of their news from television, which no longer exists to inform but to entertain. Even if there was suddenly magically a computer and Internet connection in every American home, though, I imagine that TV news would still be the primary source of news for most Americans, because it's easier to have somebody tell you the news than for you to seek it out and read it yourself.
Republicans have totally figured this out, and over the course of my relatively short lifetime have gotten amazingly, almost terrifying good at message control, having people at all levels of the media and in all mediums pushing a party line simultaneously. Repetition works, and with a 24-hour news cycle, every minute is another opportunity to get a meme repeated and quite literally imprinted on the brains of millions of Americans. The Democrats suck at this, but they are going to get better. Either that, or they're going to disappear completely, because you simply can't fight a meaningless but short and memorable message ("Stay the course," "Freedom is on the march,") with a complex, unwieldy one (like, um, this fucking blog post.) This explains why conservatives tend to do better in mediums like TV and radio and liberals do better in books and magazines; we just need more words to explain our case. The problem is that -- and this gets back to Ignornace Is Strength -- conservatives have done a good job of making it look like mulling over an issue too much is in itself questionable and possibly treasonous.
So, bringing this back to the original point of America being fucked, we're in a situation where it is bad business, hard work and ultimately fruitless for the corporate news to seriously question whether or not we are headed over a cliff. I have the distinct feeling that many, many, many Americans have no clue how much trouble we're in as a nation. Oh sure, they know we're in trouble, they know terrorists are evil and out to get us and we gotta kill them all first, but America is good and the good guys always win, so we'll be all right eventually. I don't think they realize that Americans are the only people who see themselves as the good guys anymore. If this didn't do it:
-- nothing ever will.
II. One thing that I really haven't decided how I feel about is the ascendancy of the allegedly Christian far-right wing of the Republican Party. Part of me feels that they represent a very small part of America but have succeeded in claiming to speak for all God-fearin' Americans, and part of me is scared that the average non-city-dwelling American really does agree that this whole evolution-teaching, abortion-having, fag-loving culture needs to be yanked back 50 years or so. Part of me feels that Karl Rove and George Bush have cynically exploited the allegedly Christian right for their votes and don't really buy into their nutty End Times philosophy, and part of me is scared that Bush's foreign policy makes a hell of a lot more sense if he really thinks he is doing God's work by trying to hasten the Rapture.
I think it will be a lot easier to tell how dedicated to the the allegedly Christian right Bush is with his Supreme Court pick. I do know that there are very few things more divisive than religious beliefs, and that the Republicans have had zero compunction about using that to their advantage. One of the most terrible things about the religious right-wing (and oh, there are so many) is their willingness to paint their domestic opposition as representing Evil. Liberals tend to think Bush is mean, narrow-minded and stupid, but I think very few of them literally believe he is Evil except in the "very, very bad" sense. The religious right wing sees the left wing as literally, Biblically, demonically Evil, supporting policies that are against the will of God, and if one can be painted to be an enemy of God, there is absolutely nothing you can do to them that is too extreme. A division like this is fatal to a democracy. Like I said above, the major question is how deep that division runs, and how much the government and its enablers are willing to widen it, and we'll know very soon.
III. Here there ought to be some discussion of housing bubbles, deficits, outsourcing and the like, but like I said I do not know shit about economics and I'll leave that for others to mull over. There is one economic point I'd like to make, though, that being that the Clinton surplus that vanished at incredible speed once Bush took office is one of the easiest ways to understand that the right wing actively avoids doing anything that would actually help all its citizens. Better from their point of view to go into massive deficits, thus being able to claim that there is no money for government services while routing "necessary" war expenditures to favored groups like defense contractors and oil drillers. The Cost of War site is an incredibly depressing resource which shows in cold hard numbers exactly how much of a money pit the unnecessary Iraq war is, and exactly what else could have been done with the money. At the moment of this writing, $178,903,030,947 has been spent fighting in Iraq, an amount of money that would provide EIGHT AND A HALF MILLION four-year scholarships at public universities.
The bottom line here is that I think America is facing a variety of issues that will only be made worse by three more years of a stubborn Bush administration insisting on a staying a course that is running America into the ground both domestically and internationally. This doesn't even take into account how horrendously ultra-fucked we would be if there was another terrorist attack as damaging as 9/11 (although, quite honestly, it's hard for me to imagine a non-NBC attack that could measure up as an act of theatre -- you've really got to hand it to the Evil Turrists for setting the bar remarkably high with that one). After another major terrorist attack, we'd be looking at a police state and a draft.
I do not think that the collapse of America is imminent, but I do think it is unavoidable given post 9/11 trends. I think future historians will look back on the American emplre as lasting about 100 years from 1945 to 2045, with its best years coming between the breakup of the Soviet Union and September 10, 2001. All the elements to drag us down to the level of an ex-dominant power (Russia, the UK, and yes, even France) are totally there. Certainly people can, do and will disagree with this analysis, and by no means do I claim to have made a brilliant case - I've left out and skimmed over many things. I'm not a scholar or a history expert, I'm just somebody who reads a lot. I just wanted to quickly get down for the record why I think we're fucked, instead of just stating it as a fact.
Anyway. Have a great day!
