The non-bomb

We got lucky with the Times Square would-be bomber in a lot of ways, starting with his incompetence and the background of old-fashioned police work not involving torture. We’re also lucky that Times Square is in the state of New York and not Arizona so that the street-corner vendor who spotted the suspicious truck was not hostile to the police or afraid of having his papers checked. (For all we know, he’s a foreigner without a visa, but no one here has asked nor would particularly care.)

The whole incident illustrates the absurdity of justifying the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan and Pakistan in terms of protecting U.S. soil. Although incompetent nutcases can do plenty of damage, there’s no underlying threat to our society from a random bomb-thrower any more than from a turnpike sniper or a mad slasher loose on the subway. We fear such incidents and mourn their victims, but there is no way to completely eliminate such acts from biped DNA.

How much more threatening would the Taliban or other Asian political movements be if they had the sense to try to explain themselves and their goals to the U.S. populace instead of blowing up our streets? Can we imagine the North Vietnamese leadership responding to the reign of destruction they underwent in the 1960s and ’70s by planting a bomb on the New York city subway? They had far more sense than that, and they won.

It’s pathetic and sad to watch Obama bow and scrape with the loathesome and useless Afghan president who thumbs his nose at anyone standing in the way of his corrupt regime. He cashes in on the heroin trade and steals the election, but the United States can’t bear to admit defeat or face the wrath of the dead soldiers’ families whose kids got shot up to sustain this creep. Instead, we continue to feed on the fantasy that Times Square’s safety requires Nebraskans to traipse around Kandahar with guns.

The Herd

Don’t mistake me for someone who cares that an elderly Mormon reactionary no longer gets to be a senator. But some of the poll crunchers and Beltway pontiffs argue that the peremptory toss of Senator Bennett into the trashcan by the Utah Republicans doesn’t mean anything because the GOP will hold the seat against any Democrat not openly endorsed by God and campaigning from a heavenly chariot. I don’t see it that way.

The tea partyers are a convenient bunch of white rabble for the Republicans to whip into a frenzy over health insurance reform, Latina judges or climate change bills. But now the masses are riding bareback into the manor house and setting fire to the French antique furniture. This has to be making the Brahmins’ stomachs mighty queasy.

Today’s story is that the Maine Republicans have similarly been seized by the Beck-ites who think Obama is a foreigner and Sarah Palin speaks to God. Once again, the reassuring line is that party platforms don’t mean anything, and so who cares if the wackos insert language calling for Jesus to start The Rapture on March 23rd?

Recent history does instruct us that we laugh at political goofiness at our peril and that the weirdest, most far-fetched fairy tales always carry the danger of lighting a bonfire in biped hearts that can be extremely costly to put out. Nonetheless, I permit myself to smirk over this display of grinning zealotry, encouraged by the Republican Party leadership for 30 years and now eagerly turning upon its erstwhile masters ready to rip out their insides and feed on their entrails.

Beck, Palin, Limbaugh, Dobson, Falwell, Robertson & all that gang pander to anti-intellectualism, dismiss disagreement and make up ‘facts’. They delight in running like a pack of wolves; in fact, they remind me of the most juvenile tendencies of our ‘60s enthusiasms, the same disregard for strategic alliances and a similar impatience with doubt. As long as bad old liberals and ACORN were the only targets, that was fine, but now it’s the Republican old-boy network itself that has got in their way. How grand!

Europe on edge

By chance, or perhaps not, two events in Europe are unfolding with unusual speed: the potential of a new financial panic and deepening recession and the sudden scramble to decide what course Britain will take given that no party won a clear majority in their May 6 elections for parliament.

Our domestic papers haven’t been much help in figuring out these parallel dramas, but the continental fusses could affect us deeply. Greece’s sovereign debt problems threaten to spill over throughout Europe and create a new run on the too-big-to-fail megabanks, all of which are incestuously intertwined. There is already talk of a disastrous refreeze of global credit markets, which could toss us right back into the recession we thought we were escaping.

The banking regulation that now hobbles through Congress has been beaten and bloodied about the head and shoulders by the blunt instruments of the ever-bloated banker lobby—an amazing display of its continued sway over (or shall we say ‘purchase of’?) Capital Hill despite having just wrecked the country. But a new episode of finance-induced economic collapse could change the gameboard. The just-defeated Brown-Kaufman bill to mandate the shrinkage of all banks to a mere $100 billion in size might look less radical if we get Round II of the bursting bubble less than two years after Round I.

The European Union’s central bank poobahs are meeting Sunday to try to come up with some convincing move to stave off the viral spread of a new banking panic, and we’ll see if they pull it off. However, unlike the dictatorial and secretive powers awarded our Fed chairman, the ECB board has to navigate through a coalition of opinionated and jealous states where everyone has a veto. Such conditions would complicate to death a PTA bake sale.

Thursday’s mysterious and still unexplained 600-point drop of the Dow in fifteen minutes is a sign that all is not well. Large amounts of money swirl about seeking safe harbor.

Meanwhile, the British populace has pronounced itself at the polls. Unfortunately, no one can quite agree on what it said there. Their weird voting system (we should talk, but anyway. . .) produced a three-way split with no majority and the balance of power residing with the guy who came in last. Any conceivable solution can be said to have two-thirds of the country theoretially against it: a minority Tory government? Exhausted, unpopular Labour back for a fourth term, perhaps minus Gordon Brown? Nothing makes sense, and the sudden headlessness compounds the aura of uncertainty.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that these two things are occurring over the same weekend. But one can hardly escape the double impression of a pair of rickety carriages careening madly downhill with various drivers fighting over the reins.

War party ousted

So the Liberal Democrat boomlet fizzled out, and the Brits are saddled with the horrible Tories. No doubt this is quite depressing for some English people, but I say good riddance to New Labour, the Anglo equivalent of Clintonism without the vaginal cigar.

It’s amazing to pour down column after column in the British papers and find tales of coming horror from aghast liberals while there are virtually no references to Tony Blair’s great crime—the slaughter occasioned by the colonial conquest of Iraq. Which failed, no one seems to recall.

Unbelievable that Britain’s curiously provincial scribblers can bang on about their national health service, the coming cuts in social expenditure, immigration policy and whether the Queen should ride in a carriage drawn by four horses or six. But none of these sophisticated wankers can condemn the snakes running their favorite party for raining death on foreigners in a pointless war and turning their country into a nightmare of violent lawlessness, tyranny, dysfunction and collapse.

The Tories didn’t object to that, and they might well have sucked George Bush off in precisely the same way Blair’s Labourites did. But that’s no excuse. May they all join W and Tony and rot in hell throughout eternity. The decent ones resigned in protest.

Almost!

GOP senators and talk-show hosts today high-fived each other today for a ‘close one’ after an attempted terrorist bomb attack fizzled in New York’s Times Square.

The blast, had it occurred, would have propelled the minority party toward certain electoral triumph in November.

‘Obama got lucky’, said Texas senator John Cornyn [above] referring to the attempting bombing of the famous entertainment district that would have injured or killed dozens of civilians. ‘But we only have to be lucky once, and then it’s sweet revenge at the voting booth’.

Republicans have long understood that their relentless appeal to fear of a repeat of 9/11 brings them political rewards. While acknowledging that their Democratic adversaries are respectable and patriotic citizens, GOP National Committee chairman Michael Steele reminded Americans that the ‘tree-hugging, pantywaist, Miranda-worshipping, homo appeasers’ are unwilling and incapable of defending the nation and protecting their own wives and daughters from rapists.

Despite the narrow loss of a violent terrorist incident that would have turned the country from its dangerously weak-kneed course, there was a bright side as Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman introduced a bill to require the torture of all arrested terrorist subjects before any questioning by police detectives.

‘It just isn’t right that these guys can escape punishment by merely relating all the details of their terrorist training and preparations to FBI interrogators’, said Lieberman, ‘thereby depriving us of the chance to kick their balls in’.

Lieberman also called for President Obama to dump Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, who blocked the potentially game-changing terrorist act. Lieberman suggested Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (no relation) as a possible replacement.

Republicans will regroup at a weekend retreat to discuss how to respond to the temporary setback to their grand strategy. ‘It’s disappointing to have come so close’, said a high-ranking former Bush Administration official reached by cell phone while on a hunting excursion, who agreed to speak without attribution. ‘But the conditions are in place for a successful event that will remind Americans who truly understands the terrorist enemy’.

[Disclaimer for the especially thick: You have just read a satire.]

May 4, 1970

I have been alive for the last 40 years due to a fluke of history. The kid lying dead in this picture, shot by the Ohio National Guard on the campus of Kent State University, could have been me.

His crime was to appear in public to oppose the Vietnam war, which still had five years to run and eventually would kill two to three million Vietnamese, mostly civilians, and 55,000 U.S. soldiers. The spillover war in Cambodia would add more untold hundreds of thousands as perhaps one-third of that country’s inhabitants were slaughtered by the demented Maoists who seized power there.

What was achieved by this endless carnage? A communist government took control of South Vietnam, unified the country and now does business with capitalist clothing manufacturers to produce pullovers. (I wear some.) Tourism is booming, and no one worries about whether the Vietnamese are building atomic weapons, getting too friendly with the Taliban or promoting Marxist revolution in Burma (which would be a decided improvement there in any case).

What ever happened to the youthful distaste for pointless warfare and militarism that we celebrated then? Why do passers-by in the Atlanta airport feel the need to applaud as automatic heroes the line of troops in camouflage filing past them without a second thought as to what those kids might be told to do with their weapons and to whom?

Who paid for the decision to continue this destruction and waste of life and resources any and everywhere at any time, whenever a president determines we should, based on whatever feeble lies he needs at the moment? Where is the soul-searching about the use of American firepower on either practical or moral terms? Why do Henry Kissinger and John McCain get to parade around triumphantly or even brag about what they did there instead of keeping a prudent silence about their role in a frankly criminal enterprise and world-historic debacle?

The photo above reflected the consternation of those times, how unimaginable it was that National Guard reservists would fire on their own children. We soon learned better. That summer, visiting my home town in Ohio, we were doubly shocked to hear many of the townspeople applaud the action—essentially saying that they wished we were dead. They proceeded to re-elect Richard Nixon, who had pumped up the hatred of us peacenik youth, in a landslide two years later.

We didn’t give them the satisfaction of disappearing, but their view of war and conquest has gradually erased the memory of that generational rebellion with help from Meryl Streep (The Deer Hunter), scores of angst-ridden Vietnam memoirs focused on our suffering troops (their victims appear only in the background), historical rewrites, a decade of intervention in Central America on the side of neo-nazi nun-murderers to protect Texas from red Latinos, Reaganite triumphalism and permission to ‘feel good about America’, and probably a half-dozen other influences I haven’t thought of.

Now, it’s pure fantasy to imagine hordes of youth heading into the streets to denounce American war-making in remote corners of the world or to question the virtue of our military machinery—or even how much of our shrinking treasure it absorbs. Even our Nobel-peace-prize winning president has the revolting tastelessness to joke with the sycophant press about predator drones, like the ones he has sent to annihilate the families of his enemies halfway around the world since his first days in office.

The times shown in this photo were different: we thought about non-American populations and what life was like from their perspective. We shuddered at rampant destruction and questioned the practice of raining death upon defenseless civilians.

Now, instead, after experiencing arbitrary slaughter on our own soil one September 11th, nothing matters but revenge.

You clean it up

What better example of what Tony Judt called in his recent NYU speech the combination of vast ‘private affluence and public squalor’ than the destruction of half our coastline by the rapacious oil companies. Some of the usual mean spirits already have dubbed the Gulf oil spill as ‘Obama’s Katrina’, which is the closest they come to acknowledging that their hero’s performance in the original one was somewhat inadequate. That will generate knee-jerk defenses of the federal government’s handling of the disaster from people with a weird attachment to the Democratic Party, but in this case it will involve acrobatics that would make Cirque du Soleil proud.

Obama’s on his own with this one. It was his decision to issue the executive order to expand offshore drilling and make the bizarre spectacle of thousands of fat white guys (led by their token, Michael Steele) chanting ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ at the Republic National Convention his own cause. What exactly he thought he was getting in exchange for jettisoning his environmental allies on a crucial issue is not very clear given the ongoing, ferocious denial of global warming issuing from the Palin/Beck/Huckabee camp.

No, smart guys in the White House, this is your catastrophe to deal with, your time to convince us that you know best and that the people who elected you can be arbitrarily ignored through executive order when big, important deals are to be cut with the powerful.

Speaking of executive orders, how curious that the one Obama could issue to speed up the slow, ridiculous, agonizing decline and decease of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell is nowhere to be seen. Now Defense Secretary Gates, a hold-over from the Bush horror that we voted against, is saying that we should wait for the issue to be ‘studied’ some more as if the evidence that the policy is bigoted and useless has not yet been accumulated. ‘Our military must be afforded the opportunity to inform us of their concerns’, said Gates with Obama’s silent consent. Harry Truman didn’t think ending racial segregation in the ranks needed years of research—he just did it.

As we watch the oil seep into our national shoreline, we can contemplate just how far from democratic rule and the people’s will we have moved as the Obama team scrambles to explain to us why the huge oil companies should be allowed to continue to wreck our planet—oh, and also why we should rush out in November to defend the party that wipes its collective behind with the mandate of 2008.