Ruminations

I'm getting good and pissed off about this country yet again. There's just so much to dislike.

In no particular order, here's a rant about lots of things that outrage me.

This whole short-sighted humanitarianism you amerikkkans (I renounce my nationality and proclaim myself a citizen of the world, in case you were wondering). To wit, amerikkkans are masters of self-pity and autocompassion.

Take, for instance, the events of 11 September 2001. Something like 4,000 people died in a series of coordinated airliner hijackings and crash landings in the eastern United Snakes. I regret what happened that day, above all the tremendous human toll so senselessly taken on many innocent people who became unwitting pawns in a horrible episode of political violence. That infamous day, every person with a shred of human decency became a New Yorker. (I believe it was Jacques Chirac who remarked in the aftermath of the attacks that "We are all Americans." That's right, one of those freedom-hating, anti-American Frenchmen this country likes to berate.) You can't but feel awful and sad and upset.

But what irks me, and most of the "non-Western world", insofar as I can ascertain, is the shallowness of this sympathy. Americans felt bad because Americans had died (to say nothing of the dozens of Pakistanis and other foreign nationals who also perished in the Twin Towers). Period. Now, I can understand this sort of instinctive reaction. There's a sort of immediacy, a capacity to relate to the victims closest to you at work here. The people in New York were shell shocked because it happened to their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends and neighbors in their own backyards. I felt a little more distant, owing, I've always felt, to the physical and metaphysical distances that have always separated me from New York, which seems like another universe to me. Still, I felt sorry. But to the cab drivers and maids and vendors of Cairo, or the Mothers of the Disappeared in Buenos Aires, or the impoverished the world over, 9-11 didn't evoke much sympathy. Probably for good reason. Speaking at least from my firsthand experiences in Egypt, most Cairenes simply live too close to subsistence, in ceaseless danger of dying, to stop and mourn a tragedy in New York. Maybe they felt bad, maybe not. But none of those Cairenes had the luxury of allowing themselves to be paralyzed by the devastation of someone else's loss. I'm not going to fault them for that, though.

No, what really chaps my hide is to see how amerikkkans, so eager to cull sympathy from foreign quarters (and to chastize those who exhibit insufficient grief), prove time and again their inability to see beyond their own borders. Worse still is the comtemptible manipulation of a human tragedy like 9-11 to propagate further human tragedies abroad. We've seen an unfriendly government in Afghanistan toppled for refusing to turn Osama bin Laden over to U.S. authorities (all because the Taliban stubbornly insisted on due process in seeing proof that bin Laden helped orchestrate the attacks), creating a fresh power vacuum in a country already strafed by decades of war and drought.

Then there's the little matter of Iraq. Saddam Hussein, unpopular and demonized since a U.S. aboutface of support a decade ago, was played up as the "Butcher of Baghdad" and proprietor of those legendary "weapons of mass destruction" we've heard so much about (and seen so little of). Shrub & Co. decide they want sweetheart contracts for Iraqi oil, so they create a little WMD problem and play up the democratic shortcomings of Hussein's regime. (Note to international community: Where was the expeditionary force when those ballots were being manipulated in Florida back in November 2000?) This, naturally, gives us the pretext to invade Iraq -- not to mention a fictitious U.N. mandate -- topple a long-ruling dictatorship, creating a tremendous power vacuum and all manner of instability (which is why invariably the nightly news begins with a story about how more U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq today, well after Shrub's proclamation that the war is over). Oh, and 6,000 to 8,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of this war. And counting. But we're setting Iraq up for democracy (by telling them what to do). And we're a model of humanitarianism (look at how humanely we took down two of Saddam's sons and a 14-year-old boy). And we're so committed to humanitarianism that we just said we want Saddam, if he's caught -- alive, that is -- to be tried by Iraqi courts. So what if it smacks of victor's justice, of letting the victims become judges? Sure, it might have been more fair to say we were going to put him in the dock beside Slobo at Den Haag, but we care about humanitarianism. Whatever.

What really brought this whole point home for me, however, was seeing the illustrious buffoon-in-chief talk about sending the Marines to Liberia as a peacekeeping force to bring a halt to a brutal civil war. Well, some Marines finally went into Liberia last week, landing in the U.S. embassy compound. Except that they were only there to evacuate people from the U.S. embassy. To hell with the innocent Liberians dying on the surrounding streets, or the mass of dead bodies piled in front of the embassy in protest of U.S. indifference. As if that didn't drive the point home, Shrub told the press that he was concerned with Liberia, concerned with the lives of Americans and protecting American interests. Not one mention of Liberians there. That's because, truth be told, the U.S. government doesn't give a damn for the lives of innocent Liberians (or Iraqis, or Afghans, etc.) because they aren't an American interest. About as plain as could be, Shrub told the world that he doesn't care about human suffering or devastation or war, except when he can use it to help out his oil and defense buddies. It's enough to make me sick.

So, I come back to wondering what I should do about all this. What difference can any one of us, or all of us, make? I don't know. That's the frustrating part. I don't know what good we'll do, and I don't know how we can accomplish even that. The popular pat answer among liberals is to get Shrub out of office. Maybe. But even if the most left-wing Democrat won the presidency (realistically this means Howard Dean, much as I'd really, really, really like to see Al Sharpton in the White House -- seriously), I don't know that the needed sea change in policy would occur.

Frankly, I've found myself rejecting electoral politics over the years as a motor of change. This is not to say that I think democracy is purely a bad thing, that it's intrinsically flawed. I just think that, at least in this context, it's unlikely to produce the fundamental restructuring necessary to get anywhere in this world.

And no, that isn't a call for revolution. Sure, I'd like to see some more significant and meaningful form of protest, some kind of uprising or revolt against the status quo. But I really don't have the answer. I keep thinking that maybe if the government keeps pushing to the far right, that it'll provide the spark to change society needed to make any real inroads. My fear is that we'll have to endure many more years of an even worse society before we reach that point. But in the meantime, I'll take heart from something the sage Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote that I just came across again:

"Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires.... But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts forever and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist the force that is trying to repress, oppress and fight down the human spirit."

There it is. Take this revolutionary creed to heart and make it happen.