The INLAND ADVENTURER, a local monthly "tabloid" that consists mostly of business card ads, asked if I'd resume ranting, so I'm giving it a try. My first column (published in January) was a "bio," and I reserved the right in that to be lyrical or political, as the mood strikes—the following is the first actual rant—it will be published in February.
Anyone wanting to explore our government’s increasing totalitarianism and its indifference to the mass of its citizenry won’t be looking inside the Inland Adventurer for details—when I’m politically minded, I read the L.A. Times or peer at more radically critical sources, both online and in magazines. But I’ve said I’d share my journal musings, and on January 15th my concerns include a country sadly preparing for a bloodier war than most of its citizenry have witnessed. One photographer’s web site features bodies after 1991’s assault on Iraq—but few visit those vivid reminders of war’s real face. Besides, goes the rationale, they weren’t American bodies.
Pollsters find that more than half of us question the sanity of the U.S. launching a unilateral attack on Iraq (not on Saddam Hussein, mind you, but on Iraq). However, the military being what it is, high-level Central Command muckety-mucks have already sent so many troops and so much equipment to Kuwait that I can’t imagine this huge American force not being sent into battle. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s a forlorn hope.
Alas, I’ve become such a cynic. The threatened war seems suspiciously a diversion deliberately intended to keep us from focusing on the return of trickle-down economics and massive federal deficits, and on our resulting domestic economic woes. Many States, including California, are broke, but Bush’s Washington offers no rescue. Instead, our president’s “tax stimulus” package sends $364 billion, a whopping 40% of its annual help for the next decade, to the wealthiest 1%- of Americans. Ah, well, if we can keep those flags waving and our attention riveted on war, to hell with the little guy. So what if the rich get richer while the poor get poorer—no skin off our noses, right? Rice is better for our health than filet mignon anyhow.
Sam Crane, author of Aidan’s Way (Aidan is Crane’s profoundly disabled son, at 11 mentally an infant), in January 12th’s LA Times, offers Taoism’s perspective: “All things—good, bad, beautiful, ugly—exist together in a complex totality, or ‘Way,’ that unfolds of its own accord, impervious to human desires or interventions.”
Crane goes on to quote Chuang Tzu: “The real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things. There’s nothing that is not real and nothing that is not sufficient. Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange—in Way they all move as one and the same.”
And then came a line oddly about our massed troops: “Taoism is famous for its skepticism toward grand human designs to shape the pattern of nature and the course of history. It favors doing nothing over doing something that may unleash terrible unforeseen consequences.” The American Prospect’s December 16 issue offers a touch of reality; Robert Kuttner points out that if our concern is about Saddam Hussein using nuclear weapons, our threats of war make exactly such an insane response from him more likely, not less so. Terrible unforeseen consequences do indeed lurk in response to our actions.
We all know this war is as much about oil as it is about Saddam Hussein. After the 70’s energy scare, did we then spend the next quarter-century developing alternative energy sources to prevent our shamefully either kowtowing to or going to war with oil despots? No. Most of 2003’s new cars are luxury gas hogs for those who can afford them. Mercedes-Benz gleefully looks forward to a good year—the rich are its customers. But Chevy quit making the tiny hatchbacked Metro Geo—though my ten-year-old Geo still gets 40 mpg on the open road.
Patriotism? In my book that means foregoing flag-waving in favor of harsh scrutiny of the erosion of civil liberties that the 9-11 terrorist attacks have brought in their wake, and equally hard looks at the oil barons (such as the entire Bush clan) who continue to dictate our foreign policy. The only genuinely patriotic action anyone can take in response to the insanity of spending $60 or $80 billion on a war while all but the rich get screwed on the home front is to demand rational explanations from the powers-that-be (not that we’ll get them, but we do have to continue demanding them).
