2005-11-29

John S. Hatch

Face It

Many decent Americans are perplexed and horrified as they see their nation plunge ever further into a moral and criminal abyss from which there may be no escape. The nation has become a living nightmare led by a cabal of greedy self-deluded psychopaths who dare maintain that God speaks through them. Imagine! How could this be?

Well, the delusions didn’t start yesterday.

In a recent article I wrote that America was doomed the moment the Mayflower docked. Had it only hit a reef off Plymouth Harbor and sunk! Snobby, ‘bluestocking’ Americans like to trace their ancestry back as close as possible to that sad arrival, but why would anyone want to be associated, even generations later, to such a band of narrow religious zealots, bigots, and murderous fools? America’s chief pastime, aside from sports, seems to be murder, right from the beginning. Beginning with the proud native people.

And so America began. As if there weren’t enough land. No, the Godly people had to begin their illustrious history by torturing and killing every indigenous person in sight. Men, women, children. Jesus told them to. Many people attribute the barbarous practice of scalping to the Natives, and even use it as justification for genocide. Not so. Scalping was a Pilgrim innovation, as was the deliberate introduction of smallpox to the Native population, a sort of early Weapon of Mass Destruction. America beat Saddam by centuries! Who can ever tally the human suffering caused by such insufferable self-righteous nonsense? Even Jesus would go mad. And these are the seeds of your new millennium. George W. Bush’s genes.

And wait a minute. What about slavery? How could that have been? How could a ‘God-fearing’ nation, so proud of its Constitution and ‘equality’, and ‘for, of and by’ the people, how could such a nation be so blind, so greedy as to countenance slavery? What other modern nation has so sunk into depravity as to justify the treatment of decent human beings as chattel, to be exploited, physically abused and murdered at will? Jesus said to do it, but we already established that he’s conveniently insane.

And was there ever a sincere apology for inflicting such misery on so many human beings for so long? Any remorse at all? No. Separate washrooms. Back of the bus. Lynchings . Apartheid. Fear. Criminalization. Prison. Damn that Mayflower!

And wait a minute. We’re skipping ahead a bit, apologies to all the murdered in between, but how on earth does such a self-congratulatory nation, a Christian country justify the fact that it is the only one to have employed nuclear weapons against a civilian population not just once, but twice? The argument that a million American lives were in jeopardy should an invasion have been necessary has long since been shown to be specious. America used the bomb simply because it could, and its victims were no more important than Natives or Black slaves. They weren’t white, after all, and not even bloody Christian. Bonus! So no big deal, and the Soviet Union got a warning. Two birds, one stone. Okay, two stones. But imagine the horror little children must have felt as their flesh melted away. Schools, hospitals, homes, two populations. Gone in a flash. Well, in some cases it took a few months. Film taken at the time has forever been suppressed, because it was realized that if people around the world saw the extent of the horror, they would move heaven and earth to ensure an end to such barbarity. But American authorities like such barbarity, as do lots of the people. It’s in the bones, the blood, it’s in the soul. We’re number one! America , home of the brave. And by the way, although it will never be taught alongside Intelligent Design in American classrooms, the Nazis weren’t the only ones to extract gold teeth from the dead. At Io Jima Americans did the same thing. Well, why let it go to waste? It’s just German/American ingenuity at work.

And wait—never mind Nixon and his vulgar depravity, his war criminal underlings, his paranoid thuggery, never mind American National Guardsmen shooting and killing students for exercising their so-called Constitutional rights, and doing so with complete impunity, never mind My Lai and dozens of other massacres whose perpetrators were given medals and/or treated as heroes, or Operation Phoenix with twenty-five or fifty-thousand bullets fired into the skulls of an equal number of suspected Communist sympathizers, or all those dead Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian children. Do we know how many? Were their lives not as valuable as any? Do we know how much torture was inflicted? How to measure? Well, we were told by a General, no less, that Orientals don’t feel grief. Well it sure looked like grief to me, but I’m not even a private. Never mind the insane and illegal meddling in the affairs of Iran, the CIA inspired removal of an elected Prime Minister who just happened to want to nationalize his own country’s oil industry (at least then no one had the nerve to even pretend that it wasn’t about oil), and the installation of the nasty Shah and his evil CIA trained torturous secret police, Savak. Oh, and forget about assassination, torture and murder in Chile. Never mind. Don’t disturb your beautiful mind.

Never mind—what I want to know is, how could a nation be so somnolent, so smug its own fairy-tale mythology as infantile as a nursery-rhyme but capable of killing huge numbers, how could a self-respecting realm with a collective consciousness and conscience have been duped not only into electing a malign cretin such as Ronnie Reagan, but then into loving him as well? Doesn’t the fact that that happened explain something about the American psyche? Perhaps Adolph Hitler would have been an acceptable president had he only lost the accent, as Arnie is now trying hard to do. Ronnie and Adolph? Wait a minute!

There is good evidence that the release of the American diplomats held at the American embassy in Teheran was deliberately delayed by Reagan and his people so that he could take credit. The deal was cemented with the covert sale of arms to Khomeini’s rough regime, with profits going to the so-called ‘Contras’ in Nicaragua. More about that in a minute. There is also good evidence that the Contras were supported by funds raised through the introduction, by the CIA, of crack cocaine into black neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Seem outlandish? Of course it was—get those black boys stoned, then bust ‘ em and throw ‘ em in jail. Two birds .How smug Ollie and the CIA spooks must have laughed at their own cleverness! How could a government act against its own people? No, they’re Black, remember? And perhaps you never heard of operation Northwoods?

Stumbling, bumbling, mumbling Ronnie compared the Contras to ‘the founding fathers’, a comparison perhaps more apt than he intended, or knew, given that several of them were slave owners and saw no contradiction between that and the shiny new Constitution (now there’s a quaint document, never mind the Geneva Conventions). The business of the Contras, with considerable help and financial aid from America, was to instill as much terror as possible in the Nicaraguan populace with the purpose of deposing the Sandinista government, which just happened to be legally elected and was doing not too badly in terms of providing such basics as health care and education .. How to achieve this noble and necessary end? Through rape and torture and murder. The methods were well known and had been honed many times, in places like the Philippines, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos. You don’t just kill nuns, you rape them first. Kill teachers. Kill union organizers, social workers, doctors, low-level government bureaucrats, farm workers. Kill! It’s the only way to spread the good old American way. A Founding-Father Favorite was to smash a live grenade into the mouth of Mom or Pop or Junior and have the family watch as the head explodes. Fun for the whole family, and quite effective, too. Thanks America, thanks Ronnie! Ronnie had many good friends in the region, including ‘Blowtorch Bob’ D’Aubisson who got himself installed as president of El Salvador with a little help from his (American) friends. Why was he called ‘Blowtorch Bob’? Well, let’s just say it wasn’t for nothing.

If murderous Ronnie was your dearly beloved old Granddad, no wonder ‘W’ doesn’t seem that large a step down. He’s just part of a continuum, completing the work of his Daddy, who gave us ‘the. Highway of Death.’ Thanks, Dad, just what we wanted. That was the highway leading out of Kuwait. After the Americans got finished burying scared kids alive in the desert (using bulldozers), the no-longer-combative Iraqi army was ordered by the U.N. (and Saddam complied) out of Kuwait. The war was over, and they just wanted to go home and maybe stay alive. The highway was crowded with retreating troops and also with scared civilians wanting to exit Kuwait. So the Americans bombed both ends of the highway, which was mined on both sides. There was no escape as helicopters and planes bombed and shot everything that moved , until there was no life left. Recorded transmissions show the pilots shrieking and whooping with glee as they rained death on the helpless people below. So many wanted to get in on the fun that extra air traffic controllers had to be brought in to avoid collisions among the good guys. It was a enjoyable time, except if you were on the ground, where no one survived. The number of dead isn’t known, but is surely in the thousands. So far there has been no war crimes trial.

Wait a minute, I almost forgot to mention the sanctions. After America decided that Saddam wasn’t such a good buddy anymore, after Gulf War I, after American Ambassador April Gillespie told Saddam that America didn’t give a flying hoot if he invaded Kuwait (‘Ha ha, we were just kidding, you big lug! Gotcha!’) long after he used poison gas on the Iranians and later the Kurds (something America also didn’t give a flying hoot about until it became convenient), there were economic sanctions. Against Saddam? Well, no. He got richer and richer as did his odious sons, he built more and more palaces and monuments to himself. No the sanctions were against the innocent and helpless (not to mention hapless) Iraqi people. No one disputes that around 500,000 children died of hunger and easily preventable and curable diseases. When ex-Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked if this was an acceptable price to pay, she did not hesitate. Yes it was. I wish there was a God and a hell so that she could be assigned to its hottest region. I’d send her there in the Mayflower. Her answer, in a nutshell, is what is sick with America, perhaps a fatal illness.

Why would it be surprising that, after a long string of criminal presidents, all tolerable to the American people, that one would come along that was just a little worse? It’s merely Ronnie with a little more attitude. Now instead of nuns being raped, America is doing it to children (there are tapes that depict the sodomizing of young boys at Abu Grahaib prison in Iraq. The Bush administration is doing its best to spare the boys further humiliation by allowing the American people to view them.) Torture, once considered the most vile and cowardly of human activity, is now openly embraced by the government. It’s now a crime to burn the flag, a mere symbol, but Mr. Bush has nullified the Constitution, the real thing. Human rights are gone. The presumption of innocence is gone. The right to a fair and speedy trial—gone. His Majesty is declaring himself above any and all law, the Divine Right of Kings, while crazy Jesus whispers in his ear. Plus ça change…