Nihilist Nation
John S. Hatch
"But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant"
-- H.L. Mencken
Recently ICH offered an excerpt from 'Man Without a Country' an about-to-be published non-fiction book by venerated humorist and satirist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In it he said "Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the second world war and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine." The former war machine he refers to of course consisted of those paragons of godly civilization and healthy lovers of sharp elbow room (Bewegungsfreiheit), the heroes of the Third Reich. Mr. Vonnegut was a WWII prisoner of war in the city of Dresden when it was bombed more or less into oblivion for no better military reason than Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a little later on, or Beirut recently, *with all kinds of stops and drops in between. Out of his experience came the fine novel, Slaughterhouse Five. The latter pitiless war machine to which he sadly refers, is of course today's America.
Pitiless. But when was America ever compassionate? I think pity pretty much missed the boat. Ask the Natives. Ask the slaves. Ask that policeman in Birmingham to have pity and not release his mad German Shepherd onto a live (black) human being.
Ask Nixon to have pity and call off his hard hats and cops against kids merely exercising their civil rights (there used to be civil rights in America) guaranteed by the Constitution (there used to be such a piece of paper before it was accursed and God Damned). There was never much pity at home, and even less abroad in terms of foreign policy. Look at the number of nations that America has invaded and plundered, and subverted, and where they have committed rape and torture and murder and mayhem, all in the name of 'Freedom' and 'Democracy', but actually in the name of corporate/military money-grubbing, oil, and Empire. But now corporate crook Halliburton is building concentration camps, and this time not exclusively for the Japanese. So maybe something has changed.
Sixty-one years plus a few days after the criminal and cowardly bombing of Hiroshima, and Nagasaki three days later, we hear the same tired and insupportable arguments trotted out to try to defend the indefensible--'we did it to save lives. We took the lives of babies and women and grandparents and the ill in hospitals, we vaporized schoolchildren, we created a firestorm worse than the one in Dresden--to save lives. Both Japanese and American lives'. Sure, why else? Besides, Truman described the city of 300,000 as a 'military base'. Kamikaze babies trained there under killer military grannies. There is no moral precept that I can find allowing an individual or government to 'trade' existing 'real' lives for potential future ones. Unfortunately or otherwise, a function of the human condition is that we don't know what the future will bring, and therefore have no right to assume any certainty whatsoever, not even that the sun will rise tomorrow. But it is simply not true that an invasion of Japan would ever have been necessary. The military advised against the bombing, and so did the scientists.
The truth is that although there were holdouts in the military, the Japanese had been looking for ways to surrender, with one condition--the retention of the Imperial system. That is, they asked that the Emperor neither be deposed nor tried for war crimes. America refused, because she wanted to use the bombs as a field experiment, to warn the Russians of America's might (and pitilessness) and to study the effects of intense radiation on a large population, something which of course was not yet well understood. If Hiroshima was brutal, Nagasaki was a case of savage overkill that must have made Dr. Mengele giggle maniacally. And after the ghastly experiments were over, Japan was allowed its one token condition after all. Emperor Hirohito remained, and the imperial system has endured. It was first established circa 660 B.C.
So what has changed to cause such a worldly-wise a man such as Mr. Vonnegut to despair of humanity? World-weariness, perhaps, and that would be understandable. This is a world to make even the lazy worn out. But I think there is something else. I think that aside from intelligence and insight, humor involves a great deal of emotion. One cannot be as funny as he is without knowing great sadness, even despair. And the catalyst that makes great humor (including political satire) possible, is hope. Hope is what drives informed imagination between despair and idealism and results, sometimes, given other qualities, in great and uplifting humor. That perhaps is what has changed. Hope has died.
Vonnegut's wonderful science fiction writer Kilgore Trout gave us 'Ice-9' , that 'allotrope' of ice that can catalyze with ordinary water at normal temperature and destroy the world. (A fanatical and conscientious writer, KT can only get published as filler between lewd girlie photos in porn magazines, photos which I'm sure he wouldn't bother to glance at, even if he had the time. Kilgore is a word man.) But now Presidents Bush, pere et fils, have bequeathed upon the world tons upon tons of pulverized depleted uranium. Depleted uranium shells are a favorite in spreading peace, freedom, and democracy, because they can pierce just about any hardened material to deliver the above virtues. Used widely in the first Gulf war, Afghanistan and now in Iraq, uranium 238 causes grotesque birth defects, multiple cancers and other various illnesses when ingested or inhaled in infinitesimal amounts. Because the dust is so light, it has easily found its way to the stratosphere and has already significantly raised radiation levels worldwide. Ice-9 is permanent. Depleted uranium has a half-life of only 4.5 billion years. Ice-9, so far as we know, is still fiction.
I think it's possible that Mr. Vonnegut so strained his powers (not to mention those of the venerable Kilgore Trout, apparently a collaborator and near relation of some sort) in his musings, ponderings and writings, that he may have even entered, unconsciously to be sure, a chronosynclastic infundibulum, defined as 'those places where all truths fit together'. Past present, and future. This would perhaps explain his amazing prescience, and perhaps another reason for abandoning fiction--everything he writes always comes true, more or less, even the bad stuff. It's as if he always knows what's coming. So it's possible that it could be Mr. Vonnegut who ends up getting the blame for all the shit that's going on, and he knows it. Not Bush, not Cheney, not Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or Perle, certainly not Condoleezza--the culprit, the evildoer, the perp is Kurt. No, I really think it's the hope thing.
Still, take Billy Pilgrim, for example. Slaughterhouse Five. Optometrist, resident of Ilium, family man, war veteran, prisoner of war, innocent, unstuck in time. Are the prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and god and Cheney only know many secret locations stuck or unstuck in time? Maybe both. Perhaps there are not that many would-be optometrists being held in slaughterhouses (well, who knows?), but we know that there are many innocents being held in what amounts to the same thing, pawns in the great 'war on terror', just as Billy Pilgrim was a cipher in a cold military machine. Two, actually. But he eventually got to go home to live the experiences over and over, and try to come to terms with his life. And while he suffered indignities and deprivations at Schlachthaus Fuenf, those were pretty much universal on both sides, and not intentionally inflicted as sadistic humiliations or torture. When time travel (or not) became too much for three of the (uncharged, untried) inmates at Guantanamo and they finally succeeded in killing themselves (no mean feat given the barbaric denial of privacy under which they were held) where many others had failed, the American military had to deny even those small, sad pyrrhic victories, insisting that '...that is not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.' Poor, poor us, always the victim. Now the most ghastly and unstuck Attorney General in the history of the nation has decided that it is quite likely that, innocent or not, never mind trials or justice or basic humanity, decency, compassion, many of the Guantanamo detainees (and presumably this applies to the other prisons as well) will never be released. Too embarrassing. Against National Security, because they would be free to tell their stories. Mr. Gonzales, the top law enforcement officer in the United States has since turned his attention not to the law, but how to avoid it, to circumvent it. Isn't that the criminal's job? He's concentrating on interrogations, and trying to convince Congress that it's quite acceptable to terrorize prisoners into defecating and urinating into their clothing, to sexually humiliate them, to use stress positions, semi-drowning, heat and cold, loud music, sleep deprivation--in short, anything short of murder is by this definition still is not torture, and is thus acceptable under his screwed up unstuck understanding of the Geneva Conventions. An illegal act is not illegal if the president does it. Torture isn't torture when the military does it. Injustice is not injustice unless the Attorney General says so. So there! This is after a negative Supreme Court ruling. But business as usual, simply dodge the highest (neo-con) court in the land. Oh--unhinged Alberto doesn't do rape, but since that too is at the discretion of the military to investigate, which it basically does not do (including the sodomy of young boys captured on videotape now in a deep vault somewhere in the Pentagon)--no problem. Whew! Bastards were getting close for a minute! Great job, Bertie-Bert!
One can imagine career day at Abu Ghraib--proud father Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller with his awkward, beaming, awe-struck son standing beside him, staring at the scene before them: vomit and stench everywhere. German shepherds snarling at naked, handcuffed, cowering prisoners, some bleeding from bites; 'pyramids' of hooded, naked prisoners, others hanging handcuffed from open cell doors; children being sodomized by glass tubes or sticks; female guards making fun of the genitalia of naked, hooded men; in a corner, guards posing with a dead body covered in ice; a caped and hooded man standing on a box with electrodes attached to him; handcuffed and hooded men, their bodies smeared in either canine or human excrement; flashes from cameras; everywhere, cries and moans and screams from the inmates, and laughter from the military guards and personnel. "Son, if you work really, really hard, someday, all this could be yours!" The new American dream, for a new American century.
In Mother Night Howard W. Campbell Jr. poses as an American Nazi propagandist in Germany. What was satire and humor can become sad irony when certain circumstances change. In light of America's very own Reischtag fire, Vonnegut becomes Dante, and satire is replaced by nightmare. Humor becomes impossible, except maybe gallows humor, an entirely different matter. The number of Americans who believe in the official version of 9-11 roughly corresponds to the number who believe that their President is doing a good job.
Having been raised in a fairly strict Catholic household in the 50's, back when the Good Sisters of Whatever-They-May-Have-Been were persuasive in their beliefs that no camel or Protestant could ever pass through the gates of heaven, and that there was a pagan under (but God help us, not in) every bed, I soon came to realize that at least some religious rhetoric was probably hyperbolic. For one thing, Sister Helen Agnes (she was lame and had a parrot--how did that happen? Never mind, they're both in heaven now, yo, and a bottle of rum!) she told us first-graders that pagans had had the friggin' nerve to dump St. John into a cannibal vat of boiling oil ('Fucking bastards!' we all piously thought). She explainesd how usually in these cases ugly human fat came bubbling to the surface and that was that. Boil, boil, toil and trouble. (Nun/pirates really would tell such stories to six year olds, and nary a psychologist in sight. They weren't even invented yet.) Well, not only did his faith in Jesus save good old St. John, he actually emerged looking thirty years younger. Whew! But it was the beginning of my (I hope) healthy skepticism. Thirty was really old even for a Quebec Irishman in the 50's, let alone some guy from the Bible. St. John minus thirty years couldn't have left much. Besides, Sister said that heaven was verboten to certain zoological creatures and Protestants. My Father happened to fall into the latter category. Poor guy...
As my thinking progressed and my skepticism increased, I was still naive enough to believe that Christianity was at least a huge puffed up Granfaloon, that is, a smug and sanctimonious grouping of people which in fact was meaningless, but at least benign. Harmless Foma spewed tediously out of this swollen granfaloon, sometimes making rude fart noises--'Jesus loves you!' ; ' God is love!'; 'the family that prays together, stays together' etc. But boy, was I wrong! Consistent with progress, pagans were replaced with Communists, then Communists with terrorists, and all the while religion, in the bizarre form of born-again Christianity was insidiously insinuating itself into the American body politic until by osmosis it infected the highest levels of government, thus largely erasing the crucial division between Church and State. But the Christ of this Christianity is not the Jesus who recommends turning the other cheek or loving one's enemies. This is Wal-Mart Jesus, G.I. Jesus, savage son of a savage God. When God speaks to President Bush, the instructions are to invade, to kill, to drop bombs on innocents, to torture. If neo-con Christians have their way, then Terrorist Jesus will be back in a mushroom cloud in the Middle East to smite all the enemies of the Reptile Republicans (including any recalcitrant Jews who don't convert--stupid Hebes), to initiate The Rapture wherein deserving Wal-Martians will be wafted upwards, naked (here one tries not to visualize too closely all the attributes of Rev. Jerry Falwell) to whatever passes for heaven these days. Then Kristallnacht Christ will be ready to preside over a peaceful Fourth Reich lasting one thousand years. Coincidence, or what? Can't wait.
'Why do they hate us?'
"The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation." --President George Bush, August 11, 2006. That's why.
'What we are seeing in Beirut is the birth pangs of a new Middle East'.--Condeleeza Rice. That's why. Maybe.
'We don't do body counts.'--Gen Tommy Franks. That's why.
'We don't do torture'--President George W. Bush. That's why.
'George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the US. He was appointed by God.' -General Boykin. Maybe that's why.
On U.S. sanctions against Iraq: 'We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?' -Leslie Stahl
'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.' -- Ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, 60 Minutes (5/12/96).
Could that be why?
Or:
Hiroshima?
Nagasaki?
Overthrow of Iran's Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1952? The installation of the murderous Shah of Iran, 'King of Kings' and 'Light of the Aryans'? The brutishly savage 'SAVAK' secret police, American trained?
The 'School of the Americas' Coup and Torture College?
Vietnam?
Cambodia?
Laos?
Operation Phoenix (25000-50000 murdered)?
Nixon/Kissinger coup against democratically elected government of Chile?
Nixon/Kissinger assistance to Greek junta?
Invasion of Grenada?
Invasion of Panama?
Iran-Contra fiasco? Dirty war against Guatemala?
Dirty war against Nicaragua?
Reagan's nun-butchering 'Freedom Fighters' of Nicaragua?
Dirty war in El Salvador?
Reagan's good friendship with the likes of President 'Blowtorch Bob' of El Salvador? Gulf War I?
Depleted Uranium?
George H.W. Bush's 'Highway of Death'?
Invasion of Afghanistan?
Destruction of infrastructure in Afghanistan?
Bagram?
Gulf War II?
The vilification of Islam? Shock and Awe?
The destruction of infrastructure in Iraq?
The use of cluster bombs?
500 pound bombs?
The use of white phosphorus?
The bombing of ambulances and hospitals?
50-100,000 dead Iraqi civilians?
Abu Ghraib?
Secret prisons?
Extraordinary renditions?
Torture?
Virtual suspension of the American Constitution?
The imposition of American economic policies on third-world countries?
Abrogation of international treaties governing nuclear non-proliferation, first strike use, etc.?
Rampant American triumphalism, racism, ignorance and arrogance?
Blatant hypocrisy regarding non-existent American 'values' of freedom and democracy ?
* Denotes likely war crimes/crimes against humanity
This list is far from comprehensive, but at least offers an alternative to BushCo.'s pathetic 'They hate us for our freedoms and our beliefs.' America is hated for what it does, not for what it believes, unless one can take that to mean America believes it can do whatever the hell it likes.
There is currently a convergence of three inter-related lines of attack in the Middle East, any one of which could easily result in nuclear conflagration. First is the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) Iraq invasion plan, predating 9-11 and under discussion just ten days after Bush's 'inauguration. These plotters were busy through the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years, and finally achieved perfect purchase with the selection of George W. This patient group includes Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cambone, and others determined to invade Iraq in a 'cakewalk'. Rose petals were flying in their fertile imaginations. Saddam and Osama were bosom buddies. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and a mushroom cloud for Condi. They hoped for a new 'Pearl Harbor type event' to scare the crap out of Americans. They got it, by hook or by crook. Next they want to invade Syria and Iran, quite likely with tactical nuclear weapons. Russia and China might not appreciate this, but the Bush administration is so mired in Iraq and war crimes and crimes against humanity, not to mention domestic lawbreaking that it is desperate for any distraction. They are becoming reduced to a strategy of 'nothing left to lose'. Pile crimes upon crimes and hope the sum is just too overwhelming. But prepare certain domestic ...measures at the same time.
Secondly, there is the all-powerful Israel lobby within the US, (conveniently overlapping with some of the PNAC people--Wolfowitz, Perle, etc.) which was also in favor of the Iraq invasion and helped to drive it, and now also wants to move on Syria and especially Iran. Israel, for all its legendary brutality just lost the battle in Lebanon, but no matter, because America will do the dirty work in Iran, and Israel will benefit in terms of hegemony and oil. Perfect! Of course there are certain gambles involved, but when did Israel ever shy away from gambling with other peoples' lives? Israel has 200 or so nuclear weapons and no hesitation to use them. Iran may have one in about ten years. Danger, danger!
Finally, there are the Crocodile Christians. They have been patient also, slowly building their base within government so that now they can even claim the President as one of their own (sort of). Having long since disposed of Gentle Jesus on the trash heap of history, the Crocs for Christ want Armageddon, and they want it now, dammit. Haven't they earned it? Why wait? They're here to give Crocodile Rambo Redeemer a boot in the ass to get Him going, if that's what it takes. Nobody ever said Armageddon couldn't be nuclear, and if the Christian Crocs have to blow up the whole world (including you and me) to achieve their 'dream', well it's God's way, and the American way. No more waiting on some cold mountaintop for shit that isn't going to happen. Everyone knows Americans make things happen. Usually bad things.
That could be another reason that people hate Americans.
God bless you Mr. Rosewater.
God bless you Kilgore Trout.
God bless you Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
They're killing the language.
They're killing humor.
They're killing us all.
Damn them.
John S. Hatch is a Vancouver writer and film-maker. johnhatch@canada.com
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