BUSH WATCH...KENT SOUTHARD

Why Conservatives Jump Cardboard Butterfles

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

I drove past Marion Morrison International Airport yesterday, a couple of times, hard not to as centrally located as it is here in conservative Orange County. The runway butts right up to the 405 freeway, so that when the big 757's come in over traffic you can just about reach up through your sunroof and tickle the passenger's feet. Takeoffs are very entertaining from here - that flight path is over the very rich neighborhoods of Newport Beach, so the plane jumps off the runway into a very steep climb to an altitude of a few thousand feet where the throttles are chopped and the plane nosed over to a quiet cruise out to sea. If you're on board it's a real kick.

  Inside the airport terminal itself is a huge bronze statue of Marion Morrison, complete with cowboy hat and gunbelt and suggesting something of that characteristic gait so familiar to the world. What, you're not familiar with Marion Morrison Airport? Ok, it's real name is John Wayne Airport; but John Wayne's real name was Marion Morrison. How you get John Wayne out of Marion Morrison is beyond me, but you can kinda see why he did it. (Cue The Music Man - 'Marion, the Librarian')

  The 'conservative' worship of John Wayne, all too well exemplified by Orange County's John Wayne Airport, is perhaps the template of their preference for the fraudulent and bogus in their choice of heroes. John Wayne, whatever his actual name, spent WW2 carefully avoiding military service during a conflict that found Jimmy Stewart piloting a B-24 and Clark Gable manning a freezing open waist gun on B-17's. John Wayne never wore a uniform that didn't come from the prop department.

  But it was John Wayne that developed the persona, the out-sized, exaggerated butchness that was scaled to the size of the big screen. Scientists have performed an experiment where a male butterfly was offered the choice of a live female butterfly or a cardboard female butterfly that was much bigger than any real butterfly could possibly be. Reportedly, the male jumped the cardboard butterfly every time.

  Explains a lot, doesn't it? From SUVs to silicon implants to Arnold Schwarzenegger? I don't know if the experiment shows an inherent fault in the male mind, or the confusion caused by excessive size to indicate an insect-level of intelligence; or maybe all the above. But I do believe it well explains the roots and core of the 'conservative' movement as it's been known since Vietnam.

  In a very real way, you can trace the history of the modern conservative mind just by driving the 405 that passes John Wayne Airport. Up in LA, all the studios that created the media-induced realities that have displaced our own experience are mere miles apart. The Culver City exit off the 405 takes you right to MGM/Sony. A couple miles further up, a jog up the 10 will get you to Paramount; or continue on the 10 to the 101, the Hollywood Freeway, which takes you to Universal, or continue on to Burbank and you find Disney.

  Take the 10 the other direction off the 405 and you soon see the exit for Santa Monica Airport, where Douglas Aircraft had its origins. Just south of Culver City the 405 passes a huge mall built on the vacated grounds of Howard Hughes Aircraft. Up in Burbank was Lockheed. As the 405 continues south it passes by LAX, the former home of North American Aviation, then General Dynamics; and then into Long Beach, home of the expanded Douglas, then McDonnell-Douglas, now Boeing plant.

  As the 405 comes into Orange County, you first see the towers of McDonnell-Douglas, now Boeing, Space Systems, but after that it's tightly-packed bedroom communities as far as the eye can see.

  See, it's all here, available to see in a couple of hours drive - the image manufacturing, the inflated defense dollars, the ahistorical suburbs. After growing up in the Southwest, I spent a couple of decades 'back East,' and it's given me this perspective - it seems to me these Sunbelt communities that came into existence largely since WW2 are indelibly marked by commercial culture in a way the older states are not. It can seem as if they've left Western Civilization behind, displaced entirely by the images and thought habits and values of the dominant commercial media.

  And whatever the intent and efforts of the many liberal and progressive inhabitants of the film and tv industry, their effect works mostly on the fringe areas of the main enterprise - which is essentially producing that cardboard butterfly effect.

  It isn't ironic at all that Ronald Reagan spent his movie career trying to have John Wayne's - because his political career that followed consisted of transforming Wayne's cardboard-butterfly butch persona into an organizing political principle (at the apparent service of the military-industrial complex.) And so we have the modern Republican mind, where George McGovern is a limp-wristed sissie, despite being a B-24 combat aircrew commander; ditto for Kurt Vonnegut, infantry scout captured during the Battle of the Bulge, Norman Mailer, infantry in the South Pacific, Oliver Stone, infantry in Vietnam, etc. The butch Republican prefers the manly Reagan, with his pancake makeup; Bob Dornan, who crashed 4 aircraft before finishing his Korean War era Air Force tour in an acting troupe; the Air Guard AWOL George W. Bush in a perfectly accessorized flight suit; and now Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  (I'm not saying Gray Davis didn't have his problems - probably 99% of the recall vote came down to his tripling of the car tax. The tax had been cut in half during the boom years of the late 90's, and if Davis had merely put it back to where it was before nobody could have said anything. But to triple it, when most people are in fairly tenuous economic circumstances already, was idiotic. If there's such a thing as being too politically stupid to live, I'd say Davis was it.)

  But you saw the current Republican mind at work in the nature of Arnold's rallies, how an itch to violence was always current. Reportedly two nuns had protest signs ripped from their hands, an obscure opposition candidate, a woman, was pummeled.

  In his first post-election press conference, Arnold said he would look into ways of giving citizenship to illegal immigrants. This after campaigning to revoke Davis's granting them driver's licenses. There was huge conservative feeling against this; I'm sure we're seeing the sure hand of Karl Rove here - he's known all along the GOP can't win the next presidential election without the Hispanic vote, and they need them most in California.

  But as with Schwarzenegger, so with Reagan and George W. Bush - the actual substance of policy, the actual truth of issues, matters little to their constituencies - as long as the image remains intact in their minds, that cardboard-butterfly (female, let's not forget!) larger than earthly possible action-figure image, then they can feel safe in refusing to think.

  It's been the dominant experience of those of us paying attention the past 3 years that the narratives put forth by the Bush administration have nothing whatsoever to do with the facts. Lately, the administration seems to have been pursuing a dual-track strategy - admitting the facts, while still maintaining the original narrative. No link between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, admits Bush, while Cheney maintains that 'Iraq was the geographical base of the terrorists that struck us on 9/11.' Perhaps the administration has divined that different groups have their ears and minds tuned to different frequencies, as it were - NPR listeners will hear Bush admit a fact and decide the administration is being truthful; Fox watchers will soak up whatever Cheney offers them while filtering out anything that contradicts it.

  Already we have Tom DeLay supporting a change to the constitution allowing foreign-born citizens to be elected president - it would seem there are big plans afoot for Arnold. Literally an action-figure figurehead, while the substance of the GOP agenda remains DeLay's Christian Reconstructionism and Federalist dictatorship of the rich. Sorry, I don't think we're quite that stupid yet. --10.13.03

Where's Bluto? Bush Management Is The Team, We're The Equipment

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

Did you see where the Pentagon has been hosting screenings of the Battle of Algiers, in the hope of picking up some understanding of the dynamics of indigenous guerrilla resistance? Geez loueez, they sound like a bunch of goddamn fairy English Majors! But I guess that's just how life is for us English Majors; we 'got' it when we saw Battle of Algiers in some film festival freshman year, thirty-some-odd years ago. For the most part, we English Majors only credit ourselves with a keen grasp of the obvious, but it seems our fate to live our lives watching much of the citizenry and our national leadership blindly walk off cliffs and into brick walls. We try to warn them, but no one listens.

  You would think the Pentagon types might have learned the lessons of the Battle of Algiers from a little thing called the Vietnam War, but I guess that didn't happen. The 'lesson' apparently taken from that war found expression in the Powell Doctrine, which basically states we should have the capacity to kill absolutely everything we deem needs killing. We have had that in Iraq, we might all agree. Funny how life works, how you keep finding yourself facing the same crisis until such time you learn the lesson you're supposed to. (And that movie would be Groundhog Day.)

  A couple of other films come to mind with applicable lessons for the current situation in Iraq - Platoon and Apocalypse Now. (Vietnam again! Well, Back to the Future.) These movies come to mind for what they have to say about what happens when American kids with guns are put into a war of ambiguous aim and boundaries, engaging a shadowy enemy that can't be differentiated from the surrounding populace of a strange and impenetrable culture. What happens is the troops end up being afraid of everything and everyone, and often kill innocents. All of which feeds the indigenous guerrilla movement. (And so we're back to Battle of Algiers. Kind of a closed loop, isn't it?)

  Remember Spielberg's's Empire of the Sun? Stunning re-creation of the true story of a young British boy who spends WW2 as a prisoner of the Japanese in China. There's this great scene towards the end when the Japanese command has disintegrated, and the countryside is covered with refugees. From the sky falls a huge metal cylinder on a parachute, and then we see identical cylinders filling the sky to the horizon. But they're not bombs - the cylinders are filled with food, Frigidaire sized, and stuffed with everything from fresh fruit to chocolate bars. That single moment tells you everything that could be said about American abundance - of both American agriculture and American industrial ability. And also about American planning, of thoughtfulness and intelligence. See, the Roosevelt administration didn't wait until the refugees were swarming over the countryside to realize the reality of a dire situation. Somebody obviously thought ahead 30 minutes, ya know? Considered the contingencies, and had the solution ready. Contrast this with the Bush administration in Iraq, where they adamantly refused to plan for the post-war period. Simply refused to consider the contingencies. Iraqi florists would get rich selling flowers to be thrown on our troops; the only thing parachuted in would be Ahmed Chalabi to take the reins of an intact government; our armored columns only pausing long enough to down-shift and pivot towards Syria and then Iran. That was the plan, period. And they're so dense with hubris, so intractably thick, that it's still the plan, with the minor addition of getting foreign troops to come in and deal with the mess so we can get on with the next invasion.

  Not all movies are created equal, of course. A few weeks ago, I saw some of Oliver Stone's football movie on TV. As opposed to his Vietnam and Wall Street movies which drew from his personal experience, this one seemed to accept all of football's self-importance and vainglory at face value. Whenever anybody asks, I respond by saying I last watched football during the Carter administration, which is true. In the days of Terry Bradshaw with the Steelers and Roger Staubach with the Cowboys, it seemed important. Maybe it was. But a movie came out then, North Dallas Forty, taken from a book by an actual NFL player. North Dallas Forty took nothing away from the individual grit and effort of the players, in fact did great honor to it, while at the same time giving an unvarnished look at the whole milieu - a world of often sordid appetites sanctioned by a wider white male culture eager to bask in the reflected glory of the players.

  The climax of the movie comes off the field, when it's revealed that management has been setting up the story's anti-hero, a wide receiver played by Nick Nolte, on a trumped up ethics charge so they can get out of paying off his contract. The care the movie has taken in honoring the individual efforts of the players has been building towards this point - because we now see that the team's management, the suits, don't honor it at all. The coach tells him, 'We allowed you to make those plays.'

  And then Nolte's character sees the truth of the situation, realizing his and his teammates' efforts count for naught to the team's ownership - pointing to the suits, he says 'They're the team. We're the equipment!' That line burrowed into my brain, the full meaning revealing itself over the years. It wasn't just revealing as to the true nature of power in professional sports, it was also the complete and perfect template for corporate America. When Alan Greenspan officially, publicly, endorses a policy of 'worker insecurity' in order to suppress wages - think, this is then our official government policy. It's official government policy that our economy is being run for the sake of corporate management and ownership. 'They're the team. We're the equipment!'

  The advent of the Bush administration has brought a kind of formalization to this arrangement, where we are no longer properly a nation of citizens with individual rights. 'Rights' are something reserved to the ownership, along with everything else. As Ronald Reagan wrote that he didn't find being president much different from acting, perhaps Bush doesn't find the White House much different from owning a baseball team. He's the state, we're the vassals.

  Perhaps the difference between this White House and a professional sports team, is that whereas sports management can be expected to display a certain level of expertise concerning their game, George W. Bush is surrounded for the most part by College Republicans. And as any English Major will tell you, the most profoundly stupid and willfully cruel people on campus were always the College Republicans. Bush seems a natural fit with them, which doesn't bode well either for us or the poor people of Iraq. I'm glad Animal House is out on DVD now - remember the 'straight' frat, the 'thank you sir, may I have another' guys, the guys with the love of both authority and cruelty? Yeah, that's Bush and company. Doesn't the thought of Bluto in the White House seem kind of good about now? --09.28.03

Bush Says You're All Sinners, You're Lazy, And You Have No Rights

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

It was another one of those things, that if said by any other occupant of the White House in our history, would have set off howls of media and public outrage across the country - people are losing their jobs because their skills are out of date, said George W. Bush. Another way of calling them lazy, you might say. ('You're lazy, and, he added, you're all sinners!' He sounds just like my mad grandmother. Though the full statement of that line of theology - 'You're lazy, you're all sinners, and you have no rights!' has to this date only been implied by Mr. Bush.) But coming as this did the very same week that 10% of our high-tech IT jobs were announced to be shipped overseas where they will merely be done cheaper, it would seem the facts of the matter directly contradicted Mr. Bush's statement. (And not for the first time.)

(There was also the loaded irony of Bush commenting at all on anyone else's job skills - the man who, in the words of one wag writing to the LA Times during the 2000 campaign, without his name but with the same life he'd led, would be lucky to get a job selling shoes.) (Ok, that was me.)

But no, Bush wasn't speaking to the facts, he never does; what he was doing was speaking to the narrative of belief, the received consensus of reality, of his core base - which is the only thing he ever does, for as long as their belief remains intact - as long as he never admits the intrusion of facts - he will never lose them.

It's been a tenet of the Republican middle-class as long as I can remember, that those who lose their employment in mass job dislocations are somehow individually at fault - their skills weren't up to par, they weren't educated, they drank too much, whatever. I remember from the early 60's, when the first wave of factory automation and factory closures did much to decimate what Black working class had been established, we felt fully justified that they weren't up to educational standards, etc. (You know, they weren't white.) It didn't enter our narrative at the time that these same Blacks had left the South and sharecropping, moving perhaps thousands of miles to the industrial North and California for these jobs and a chance to better themselves through hard work. It still hasn't entered our narrative.

This narrative held intact through the 70's and 80's, when vast numbers of the white working class were displaced by factories going to Mexico and overseas - since GM, 'Generous Motors,' had such handsome benefits, paying for most of whatever night school you might take, it was your fault if you hadn't taken advantage of that before your factory shut down. It went without saying that the person making such an argument obviously had never done line work, never done heavy lifting in sauna-like temperatures, losing pounds a day, and going home to sleep the sleep of the dead. The narrative remained intact.

But now we're at the place where even the most highly educated among us, with the most advanced 'job skills,' are seeing their jobs sent overseas.

Notice how Bush always answers every troublesome question put to him, to the extent he bothers at all, with the phrase 'it's my firm belief.........'? This serves as a guidepoint to his faithful that the matter at hand is a matter of 'belief,' in other words a point of contention in the culture wars between the supposed heathen secularists who oppose him, and his devoted true 'believers' - believers in the literal truth of the Bible for starters, from which starting point there can be literally no latitude for, or intrusion of, inconvenient truths or facts, because the 'truth' has already been revealed. In fact, it seems Bush only ever addresses any issue when it's felt the time has come to cast that issue as a matter of 'belief,' and so claim it back from the world of facts.

But whether the remnants of the middle class, hanging on to a middle class standard of living at what has become professional class costs of living - hanging on through the traditional middle class value on education - whether they will accept Bush's attack on them within their own narrative, I think very well may not happen.

But perhaps the most significant change that the Bush administration has brought to the country, or perhaps has simply revealed, is that the middle class narrative is no longer the dominant narrative of the country - it's no longer our story. When our largest company is WalMart, and our largest employer Manpower Temps, it's an indication that the nation's demographic center of gravity has fallen drastically.

There was a news item recently where it was revealed that the publishers of 'conservative' book titles got a huge portion of their sales from WalMart, and further that WalMart executives knowingly consider their customer base to be 'conservative,' and tailor their merchandise toward that.

In other words, the Bush administration and the rest of the conservative media machine have knowingly crafted their message to this new class that's not quite middle, not really working - they may have a house and SUV's, but both husband and wife work to pay for them, and they have no net worth other than whatever equity may have been produced in a real estate bubble, and they have no college money for their kids.

And in our economy that seems to be run for the exclusive benefit of Wall Street, most everyone in the country lives somewhere else. This means that most people live far, very far, from the actual authority in their lives, so far that they really have no conception of how the country works. And in our national media echo-chamber, many such live pretty much at the bottom, not discerning that what's shouted down to them comes courtesy of powerful agendas.

When such vast portions of the population are deprived of any real volition in their lives, they are also deprived of their own story, and so they are hungry for a narrative that will seem to tell them their story and also make the world explicable to them. Being deprived of volition and meaning in life also tends strongly to instill a deep and inchoate rage, looking for expression.

There's a famous right-wing web site called 'Free Republic,' familiar I'm sure to many readeing this. Every utterance of George W. Bush seems exquisitely designed to hit their sweet spot. As it happens, Free Republic is hosted in a city in California's Central Valley that I spent some months working in when I was in telecom, and I think I got a pretty good feel for the place.

Eating an early dinner, I heard the waitress tell the diners in a nearby booth that she was having some discipline problems with her teenage daughter. The man in the booth, late 60's at least, became florid in the face and began sputtering 'Hit her! Hit her with a stick! Take her pants down, turn her over and hit her from side to side! Hit her till she turns red!'

Eating breakfast at the counter, an older woman sat down next to me, and I could sense that she and the waitress here both had their conservative 'radar' on and had detected that I wasn't one of them. The waitress starting talking about how good she was at Trivial Pursuit, knew just every fact imaginable. She offered the example of the origin of 'the whole nine yards,' apparently the length of ammo supplied for a battle to 19thc cannon crews. Sometimes I'm as quick as I think I am, and I piped up, 'Do you know where the phrase 'rule of thumb' came from?' They didn't, so I explained - it was the old English law that stipulated you could only beat your wife with a stick that was no bigger than your thumb. So the lady sitting next to me says, 'I bet my husband wishes that law was still in effect.' Then there was this pregnant pause where she and everyone else realized she had just expressed the desire for her husband to beat her with a stick, and then her hard little kernel of conservative obstinance popped like a balloon, and then afterwords everyone was really friendly to me.

The city's housing tracts had never seen a coat of paint since being built, most of the city looked like nothing had been painted since about 1949. But this is a trait I'd noticed in the housing tracts of Southern California as well - see, in the consumer, 'convenience' economy, if our only allowed identity is as a consumer, whatever's 'inconvenient' threatens our identity, indeed the identity of the whole group. (And there's nothing more inconvenient than painting a house.)

I tried 7 times to order a #4 combo meal at KFC, wing and a breast, original recipe with two sides. I succeeded in getting the correct order exactly once - they were out of chicken, they were out of original recipe, they were out of sides, they were out of utensils. The town has a charming little old downtown from the 30's, where some restoration has gone on. I stopped at the Starbucks there once at 9:30 in the morning for coffee - they didn't have any. Would take about 30 minutes to make it. All this confirmed my sense that when whole substantial towns are this far down the corporate hierarchy, so deeply at the bottom of the media and advertising echo-chamber, people no longer have the mental volition to even make fast-food places work right.

Staying in the mile-long string of how say, less expensive, motels hard by the freeway, I was privy to some of the extra-curricular activity that accommodated the motels, the freeway truckers, and the large and pleasant park just across the freeway. There seemed to be some sort of union - at noon, slim young men in bicycle shorts, but without bicycles, would loiter around the intersection. Mid-afternoon seemed the shift for tired white-trash women with pickup camper shells. Night brought the pros - black women that could have been straight from Times Square, roiling along the sidewalk like sharks on the hunt.

All in all, a portrait emerged of a people deeply afraid and insecure, deprived of the mental strength to deal with some of life's most basic tasks, powerless in a world they don't understand that can seem deeply ugly.

See? The entire conservative media message is simply the concerted effort to give these many tens of millions their life story, their narrative, an explanation of the world within and beyond the city limits - all their troubles, disappointments and dissatisfactions are the result of the 'liberals,' a mythical evil force that has ruined the world. And using the basic building blocks of shyster advertising, the new mental coin of this country - overstatement and simple-minded literalism - they repeat and repeat the message.

I think this is important to understand, because it means we are not a 'conservative' country, and this is not a 'conservative' moment in our history. A great portion of Americans make up a manipulated country, abused and neglected really. Folks like those who live in Free Republic City have reached a critical mass perhaps, but they did not originate the lies they may believe; and we have to believe that the more we tell the truth about George W. Bush and his administration, that the truth will win in Free Republic City. --08.22.03

Bush Smirks With Pride As He Lies And Lies

Kent Southard, Bush Watch

A Bushwatch reader writes to commiserate about the state of the telecom industry, where I worked and where she has done much business. She adds that there ought to be felony prosecution of the heavily advertised 'tech' schools that keep promising the availability of tech jobs after their hefty tuitions are paid, when in actuality there are none.

This reminded me of my own small, religiously-affiliated liberal arts college, which assured us that 'the business world really prefers liberal arts majors.' Imagine my surprise, of course, to discover differently. (I was raised conservative, as I've mentioned, but I wasn't raised corporate, which used to be a distinction with a difference. When my parents were still married, my father, a West Point grad, really did used to go around the house saying 'Duty, Honor, Country.' Afterwords, moving in with my grandmother, the family became rather excessively religious, with convictions of the underlying morality of the business world perhaps untested by actual experience.)

So, as I said, imagine my surprise. My sense of things were confirmed many years later when speaking to others who'd gone to small, liberal arts colleges, they told me they'd been told the same thing, i.e. 'the business world really prefers liberal arts majors.' So it was then obvious that, perceiving some crisis in desirability of their product, the small, liberal arts colleges of the country (at least the ones of no great academic distinction) had likely attended some seminar, or had engaged the services of some consultant, and they had chosen this line of, how say, hype, in order to convince their students they hadn't chosen foolishly.

Call it, the 'lies told to stay in business.' I've come to think there's maybe no principle more central, more sacred, to American business. My late aunt, a beautiful woman who sadly suffered much abuse in her relations with the family, had as her last long-term job a position at Entrepreneur Magazine as a 'certified business consultant' or some such. Entrepreneur was/is in the business of selling 'business start-up kits,' and they maintain a staff of these consultants to handle the phone inquiries of customers - all of them being advertised as having M.B.A.'s. My aunt had a Master's all right, but it was in English - as far as I'm aware she never had a business class in her life. But, she said, she was really good at 'selling the sizzle instead of the steak.' In other words, it was a B.S. product moved off the shelves purely through B.S.. (And no, I don't think you could say this was an example of the business world using the liberal arts major.)

Lies told to stay in business, lies at the heart of business. In our economy and culture where substance (quality) has been sacrificed and substituted with marketing, untruth seems to have become the core of almost everything - the car repair shop where the service writers seem to have gone to Butler School, offering you coffee and speaking splendidly, while the mechanic in back is a know-nothing kid who was delivering pizzas last week; the apartment management staff who turn brittle and surly the moment they're held accountable for anything - in fact, the way most every transaction turns brittle and surly the moment you stop taking their happy-talk sales-jive at face value.

You think it's an over-statement that perhaps nothing is more sacred to our current American business model than the right to lie? What else, exactly, has been at the heart of the Wall Street scandals of the last years? What else is at the heart of the Bush administration's scandals beyond count? The entire attitude of Bush is that, if you were entitled to the truth, you'd be in management - which is as far as I can discern the entire core belief of the Republican Party and its hard money constituency.

To this crowd, dissembling - lying - is as natural and fundamental as breathing. I remember this press conference in the early 90's with Ford CEO Alex Trottman - he was asked if by moving so much manufacturing to Mexico; a) would Ford cars be cheaper as a result, and b) couldn't this possibly hurt American workers? Trottman was very forthright - he said no, prices wouldn't go down because we're obligated to maximize profits for our shareholders, and it wasn't Ford's obligation to look out for its workers either.

See, Trottman told the absolute naked truth - but Trottman is English, no American executive would have said what he said. An American would have given some blather about 'old economies and new economies,' and he 'didn't have the exact figures on prices with him right now,' etc. Trottman didn't grown up in our corporate culture, and so it seems to me he didn't have that natural reflex to dissemble.

But Bush - Bush is so proud of his innate instinct to dissemble that he can't help but smirk with every lie he tells. And it seems to me that the great peril to our country right now, is not necessarily the lies and evil that the Bush administration embodies, but rather the self-justification of lying that is embraced by much of his supporting base.

The prosecutor who put Charles Manson away, Vincent Bugliosi, wrote a book about the theft of the 2000 election in which he detailed the criminality of that event. But perhaps his most worrisome observation was that, in his circle of conservative acquaintances, none of them cared that the election was stolen - they were merely smug that their guy was in the White House.

This has been the great threat hovering over the country, I believe, not just that Bush does wrong, but that a great part of his base doesn't care what's right or wrong, what's true or false - their might is the only right they acknowledge. That the observable truth to the rest of us: that from Iraq, to budget projections and the economy, to the environment, literally everything, there hasn't been a single instance of truth uttered by the administration - is taken as a point of pride by them.

In the wider culture, this has something of the cache of wearing clothing sporting logos or advertising slogans - it's the wearer's acknowledgment that corporate advertising is where the real power lies, and they imagine themselves partaking of that power. In the same way, real power in our society seems to lie with those entitled to lie with impunity, and that status is envied and coveted.

It is to this culture that Bush is the true Alpha Male - not a leader, not a patriotic American, not a Christian - but merely the untouchable liar, who lives without consequence, accountability or responsibility, where no shame accrues as long as fresh lies flow and the well of self-justification runs deep. How our nation chooses to deal with Bush's lies will determine our character, and future, for generations. --07.28.03

P.S. So, apparently we've found Saddam Hussein's two sons. This is only reasonable because, as opposed to the Weapons of Mass Destruction, Odai and Qusai actually existed. Naturally, George W. Bush used the occasion to sell a little snake oil. Bush stated that with the death of the two brothers, the Hussein regime is now officially over; and hence, Iraq will never further be a threat to us or the world. Notice the construction of this statement - starting with the observable fact, the argument uses this as the basis of support for what is really an untruth: that the Iraq invasion was justified to remove an 'imminent threat.'

The few times I've endured the O'Reilly Factor, I've noticed he uses the same shabby rhetorical trick to set up every debate - introduce the proven fact in the first clause of the statement, then follow with the lie in the second clause, which to the weak-minded is taken as a formulation of logic. Watch him sometime; it's painfully easy to spot. It's also an indication of how the 'conservative' message has become so dominant in our society - because in our culture so saturated with advertising exaggerations and management manipulations - full of implied satisfactions that aren't quite explicitly promised, saving anyone from being held actually accountable - in this society, the conservatives know the lie is supreme, and they embrace it fervently.

The Guilt Of Bush And His Administration

` Kent Southard, Bush Watch

I'm not sure how important it is to ask, what did Bush know and when did he know it? After a lifetime of thinking he'd hit a triple when he'd only been born on third base, Bush seems to have wondered off into his own reality entirely, imagining himself a character in the Old Testament - chosen by God. "God told me to strike at al Qaida, and I struck at them; and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did...." Bush said to Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas. That the Christian message of the New Testament is largely that God no longer talks like that, or that no responsible public figure I'm aware of in the 2000 years since then has spoken of himself like this, seems to have no effect on Bush - but then, little does, does it?

No, we need only look at Cheney on down - Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Feith, Perle, etc. The guilt of the Bush administration is also apparent in the careful way these people tried to build 'plausible deniability' into each step of the deception - if Cheney made uncounted visits to CIA staffers in an attempt to intimidate them into falsifying intelligence, nevertheless the CIA was responsible for those final reports. If Cheney refused to accept the CIA's refusal to vet the Niger yellow cake for the State of the Union, nevertheless the CIA signed off on it.

Perhaps the most telling point to emerge recently is Gen. Wesley Clark's statement that on the afternoon of 9/11, as he was about to go on CNN, the White House called him to pressure him into linking the attacks to Saddam Hussein. Clark said he'd be glad to, but asked for proof - for which there was none. It is now a widely reported matter of record that this cabal, as they refer to themselves even, of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. have advocated for over ten years the overthrow of Saddam Hussein for the sake of both the security of Israel and our own strategic oil interests. They created the Project for a New American Century, which advocated this plan of action as the first step in a campaign to control the world's oil.

That Clark received that call from the White House on 9/11 is significant - because it points toward the complete and fathomless guilt of the Bush administration. This same cabal, this PNAC, were also public in their advocacy of the need for a new 'Pearl Harbor' in order to galvanize American public support behind their plans for military conquest.

For centuries, mankind looked at the map of the globe and noticed that the shapes of the continents seemed to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, but the notion of such actually having happened at one time was inconceivable; until the realities of continental drift and tectonic plates were discovered, our minds simply couldn't grasp the obvious.

So it is now - the great mysteries of the Bush administration all fit together: the stonewalling of the Cheney energy commission; the stonewalling of an investigation into 9/11; the obstinate and obdurate war on Iraq. This administration came into office with a clearly defined goal - military conquest for oil dominance. The administration began with announcing a huge, new 'energy crisis,' complete with fraudulently inflated energy prices across the board; but when Jim Jeffords defected this line of effort was no longer politically viable, so the 'energy crisis' suddenly vanished. Then came the new 'Pearl Harbor.'

Our poor troops in Iraq don't seem to have a friend in the world, do they? They didn't realize they were to be a colonial army of occupation. Of course, if the cabals' vision had gone according to plan, with the Iraqi's throwing kisses and flowers and signing up for Sunday School, then the troops would merely be fighting instead in Syria and Iran; as was apparent from the administration's words immediately after the fall of Baghdad.

But now the administration seems to be in a bit of pickle - WMD scandal aside, the vainglory of the blitzkrieg has already worn off for the troops in Iraq, and if they keep getting jerked around you get the feeling they're going to mutiny. The plans for empire are dead in the water; meanwhile our military's tied up running a colony of 30 million souls, while North Korea is promising a very hot war, possibly very soon.

The old Chinese curse - may you live in interesting times - certainly seems to have come true for us. --07.17.03

Living In A Diseased Value System, With Bush As Its Major Spokesman

` Kent Southard, Bush Watch

So, I was sitting getting a haircut from the really nice lady who gives a haircut far above what you'd expect from the Supercuts chain, and somehow the conversation turned in such a way that she asked, 'Do you go to church?'

'I grow tomatoes.' I replied. I wasn't simply trying to avoid a possibly contentious topic with someone who was at the time working about my neck with sharp scissors, because my tomatoes are the most divine thing I'm comfortable sharing in public. I know what many of you are thinking right now, and doing, mainly rolling your eyes and thinking 'Geez, some people need to get a life even more than me.'

I know, I used to do the same thing, I'd read some account where people were complaining about the cardboard taste of supermarket tomatoes and think, how much difference could there possibly be to even worry about? But I was wrong. I mean seriously, you have no idea, it's like discovering naked ladies, an experience so elemental and profound that a long-dormant voice arises from the depths of your mind and says, 'Where has this been all my life?'

What this is, is real food. Did you know most varieties of tomatoes you get in the supermarket are bred with DNA from Flounder, as in fish? And not for flavor, but to make them firmer for shipping. (So now you know where the cardboard taste comparison comes from - what else is good for shipping? Cardboard, of course.) Flavor's pretty much the last thing our commercial food industry seems concerned with - tomatoes, like any fruit, get their flavor from the sugars that develop from ripening in the sun. Supermarket tomatoes are picked green, and turned red by gassing them with nitrogen.

Tomatoes grown naturally, tomato varieties that have withstood the test of time by dint of their flavor rather than their shipping ability, tomatoes without fish DNA, have a flavor, a depth and fullness of flavor that truly astonishes. The black varieties, like my favorite, Black Brandywine, have a depth and richness that's like a good steak. Not black really, a deep brick red that's simply gorgeous, these blacks you give out to people and they always come back for more, a neighbor's firehouse became instant converts.

I came into this the same way I get into most things, accidentally. My gal friend Terri had signed onto the waiting list for the local community gardens, and six years later, with Terri back east tending to grandchildren, the city called and asked if I was interested. Space rental was $10, a year, and being a liberal arts major with any number of creative pretensions, I said 'Yeah, sure.' I called friend Cathy and asked if she would be interested in joining in, and as was her way she immediately took charge. As we stood on the 10' X 20' plot, with myself staring at the dirt with a somewhat Homer Simpson-ish grasp of the situation, Cathy determined that a raised bed must be built, the soil amended, before any planting could be considered. So I built the raised bed, Cathy had a truckload of topsoil brought in, causing not a little jealousy among our fellow gardeners.

And shopping around the nurseries, I thought a 'Black Brandywine' sounded interesting, and in it went. I wish I could convey the experience of eating these things, fresh picked and perfectly ripe - because it's something more than flavor, really. It's delicious, yes, and satisfying, truly satisfying. I want to say after you've had one you lose all ambition entirely, because that's almost it, though not quite. It's a satisfaction that's full, and complete unto the moment: it tends to quiet you down, I think because a satisfaction that's real, however small in the scheme of things an item of food is, tends to take away all the nagging little appetites and selfishness-es that fill our heads thanks to our omnipresent advertising and commercial culture. It puts things in perspective, really gives a scale as to what's valuable and what isn't.

I had experienced much the same thing a few years previously when Terri and I had gone on a tour of 100 yr old Craftsman houses. The houses were the antithesis of the McMansions of our time - they were cozy, with built-in bookcases and tiled fireplace mantles, and deep backyards with well-planted gardens. Most were not large, but you only had to step inside the front door from the invariably lovely porch, and take in the beautiful woodwork, the windows that let light and air flow through every room, and the thoughtful layouts, and a voice, that long-dormant elemental voice, rose in your mind and said, 'Quality, value, intelligent design. I'd forgotten.' I returned many years for that tour.

Quality, yes, we've forgotten. Quality, you might say, is the common denominator between my tomatoes and these houses. Another word for quality might be honesty. The way things are meant to be, the way things naturally are, before the evils of cost-cutting and other profit-maximizing strategies are imposed.

Up the coast a short ways is a major development of new homes that covers pretty much the last large expanse of ocean-view land above Camp Pendleton. The development has been divided between four builders, with the lowest priced townhouse being over $1million, the most expensive being over $4million. Outside one of the developers sales offices, inlaid in a wall, is the proclamation that 'Visible wealth is the sign of unseen spiritual virtue.'

Touring the model homes, the floor-plans are deeply seductive, with bedrooms and other major rooms typically opening into courtyards or balconies; copper gutters edge the tile roofs, bathrooms that could host a party for Hugh Hefner and all his girlfriends are intricately inlaid with tile design, all have huge roman tubs, and showers with seating for more than one. Most restaurants I've worked in had smaller kitchens than what these houses have, with utility rooms featuring washers and dryers that look like they came from Porsche. And needless to say, each room seems to come with a $10,000 TV.

Yet niggling details intrude. For one thing, the houses are jammed up against each other like a trailer park - how is your trophy wife supposed to sunbathe topless by the pool if your neighbor's sniggering 13 yr old, and all his friends, are perched on a balcony not 20 feet away? But there's more. Walking down the steps into the wine cellar of one home, something seems somehow odd. The steps and surrounding material looks to be limestone, which is what you'd perhaps expect in the wine cellar of a Mediterranean style home, but the sound your steps make is not the sound of stone. You tap the 'limestone' on the walls, and the sound is more like.....cardboard. They've used something like papier mache....in a $4 million house. I mean, they didn't have to use expensive French or Italian limestone if they were trying to save money, there's perfectly fine Spanish limestone available at cheaper cost, and I think maybe even some from South America too. But they used some fake cardboard composite - as real as the Matterhorn at Disneyland, theme-park level of construction.

The interior walls are all designed thick, like maybe a foot, suggesting the substantial construction of a centuries-old Tuscan farmhouse. But again, tap it - it's hollow, nothing but the same drywall and frame construction you get in any housing tract built to last not quite as long as the mortgage.

What does all this say about the values of the builders, and those who will buy? I would say they have a scant recognition of quality, wouldn't you? I would also suggest that judging from the slogan outside that one builder, we might infer a rather smug self-justification has perhaps blinded them to this sad fact.

It's one of the curious aspects of American life that about 25 years ago, a great portion of the public re-discovered the concept and reality of quality in the form of Japanese cars. The American auto makers tried to maintain, and still maintain, that this was a merely a matter of 'perceived value,' as opposed to actual value. (When Ford recently purchased Volvo, a Ford/Volvo spokesman said 'With Volvo, quality used to mean, lasts a long time. Now it means, works right when you buy it.' Why should the two meanings be exclusive of each other? And when was there a vote on this?)

Curious in that, in the intervening years, while millions swore undying loyalty to their Honda Accords, and the quality of the Lexus and the German BMW and Mercedes displaced Detroit at the high end as well, this appreciation of actual quality has had a variable application to the rest of our commercial culture. This is because the ongoing war that the American corporate model wages on us and the rest of the world continues, a war in may ways to redefine quality as a luxury item - quality, or honesty, in all its forms, be it in commercial product, public education, or employee health and well-being.

A couple years ago, I saw a news item where commercial tomato growers in California were destroying their crop because they could only get a penny a pound. The article said they usually got 2-3 cents a pound. How much do you pay in the supermarket for tomatoes? A bit of a markup, you say? The cost of the label on a bottle of catsup costs more than the catsup inside. So you would think there was enough room in that profit margin to grow a tomato that tastes good, that sacrifices a little shipping quality for actual nutritional and living value? But no, our corporate model doesn't allow that. Our masters have to have it all. But as we see from a tour of their homes, their's is a madness that has sucked even the material value out of their own lives too.

The Bush administration is currently pushing to impose our fish-DNA tomatoes and other uselessly modified foodstuffs onto the Europeans, who seem to have no desire whatsoever for them. See, here's the thing about the European economic model - they've never lost sight of quality, in any aspect of life, from quality of product (BMW's) to quality of food, to quality of education, vacation, health care, etc. They not only haven't lost sight of quality, honesty, they recognize it as the fundamental bedrock of economic success. That the American model makes war on this, and make no mistake about it, from frankenfoods to controlling the Middle East's oil, that's what we're doing, is the central organizing principle of our historical moment.

There's probably a single man, as much as anyone, to whom this course for our nation might be attributed. There are two actually that have created this singular moment in our politics - Kevin Phillips in the Nixon administration created the GOP's Southern Strategy, giving us our new Imperial Confederacy; and Robert S. McNamara, architect of the Vietnam war, got that plum job because he'd already made his name at Ford Motor, making the company over into a model that subverted Ford's traditional relationship of engineering, and accounting and marketing.

Henry Ford used to walk through his accounting office periodically, and fire the entire office. He felt their work was of little value, and this was his way of letting them know. Ford put engineering first, and figured a good car would sell and make an honest profit. It was McNamara's scheme to drive down the build cost of a vehicle, whatever the cost to quality, and sell more cars through heavy marketing. Which is how Ford got to where it wouldn't spend $1 extra per Pinto to keep it from exploding in rear-end collisions, why the Explorer was rushed into production even they knew it would rollover with a simple flat tire.

It seems to me our economic history has followed from that - and along with it, Detroit's decline, the use of fraudulent accounting to prop up a bubble stock market, and now a military empire that seeks to conceal our lack of economic competitiveness by denying choice, and oil, to the rest of the world. McNamara has apologized for Vietnam, perhaps someday he will for Ford, too.

The conservative movement has for rather a long time managed to characterize those of us in opposition as being anti-work, anti-business, etc. I think it's exactly the opposite - we believe in quality, in honest work, in honest business. There's probably nothing I admire more than good work, and nothing I despise more than the shoddy and the deceitful. I have no problem with the need for a large business organization to produce something like a car, though I'm less convinced of the need for this with food. What I do argue with is when I'm told, as we were with my telecom employer, that no matter how hard we worked, we would never get a raise because 'all profits have to go to increase shareholder value.'

We simply feel we should get a share equal to our effort, we don't agree those at the top have the right to take what's ours simply because they have the power to. We believe in quality products, and the honest provision for our legitimate civic needs, such as education. It's the natural order of things, the simple, satisfying, honest ordering of life that is the only way to support life.

And as an aside, my tomatoes were the only thing that helped Cathy's blood numbers during the cancer other than the hateful chemo - real nutrition at work.

We fight a madness, a diseased value system, a spreading cancer. That its main symbol and proponent, Bush, is such a virulent embodiment of its every awful detail, is perhaps a blessing; for the rest of the world it seems to have helped make the situation clear, and as his foundation of lies continue to be exposed, perhaps this will become clear here at home too. --07.11.03

America And Impeachment

` Kent Southard, Bush Watch

The simple, unadorned facts are these - the only 'intelligence' source that professed unequivocally that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD and an ongoing nuclear weapons program was the Pentagon's Office of Special Programs, established by Donald Rumsfeld and which had no agents in the field, only a half-dozen 'analysts' that were actually Republican congressional staffers. Their reports were contradicted by every other intelligence organization in the world, including our CIA and DIA and Britain's MI6. The only source for OSP's 'intel' was Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted swindler who left Iraq during the Eisenhower administration, and who had been promised by the Bush administration to be the top candidate to rule Iraq should Saddam Hussein be overthrown.

That Iraq no longer possessed WMD was widely presumed, ever since the defection of Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Jamel al-Majid, in 1995. He told Western intelligence that the U.N. inspections were working so well that Saddam Hussein had given up keeping stockpiles of WMD, and was planning to merely keep the 'recipes.' The non-existence of WMD's also accords with the observations of former Chief Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, who maintained that as the bio and chem weapons have very short shelf-lives, and the manufacturing facilities had been destroyed, there was no physical possibility that stockpiles of these weapons still existed in Iraq.

This was all obviously known by the Bush administration, and accordingly it is also obvious that the administration lied through its teeth about the reasons for warring on Iraq, lied in every generality and every particular. Virtually every member of this administration that wanted this war is also a signator of the Project for a New American Century, whose plan formulated some years ago calls for domination of the world's oil supply, starting with an invasion of Iraq.

These are the simple, unadorned facts. Either the American people demand an Impeachment of this president and vice-president and they are removed from office; or else the America of the founding fathers is finished, and we might as well admit it. --06.16.03

30 Seconds Over San Diego

` Kent Southard, Bush Watch

The only thing I ever heard George W. Bush say that I respected, came sometime in the first half of the 2000 campaign. Apparently after another interminable Groundhog Day of giving the same witless speech 3 times before crowds in backwaters he had never seen before nor would again, he said he'd rather just go home and feed the cats. Taken one way, you could say Bush lacked enthusiasm for the job he was seeking; taken another way, you could say that compared to his current environment, he simply preferred the company of his cats.

I liked that a lot. With their qualities of droll observation, quick humor and empathy, cats tend to raise the ambient I.Q. of a room, and it seemed a kind thought that after a day surrounded by soulless politicos, sychophantic 'journalists,' and the truly satanic Karl Rove, Bush would seek the comfort of their quiet company. It was as if there might be some small sweet spot in that sour little soul after all.

But Bush had not just spoken off-script, he had spoken off-message as well, for in the vast trailer-parks of the Sunbelt and other hot-beds of conservative support, cat ownership is considered, how say, insufficiently butch. And as in Bush's America you cannot be too butch, in fact no comic book exagerated butchness is too comic book exagerated, I couldn't help but notice that after this remark his cats were never mentioned again until they were given away upon moving into the White House, one of them getting lost in downtown Los Angeles. There were immediate pictures with dogs, and ever since nothing but pictures with dogs. It was one of the early indicators of perhaps the two most salient characteristics of this administration - that no item, no matter how seemingly insignificant, is too small to lie about; and that they maintain a pitch-perfect ear for the sensibilities of an uncommonly low denominator.

(Not that I don't like dogs, I love dogs, my family always had both. But when you have a national psyche so obsessed with its image of 'masculinity' as ours that it discriminates against pets, you gotta know we've slipped a major cog somewhere.)

So now that we're here, let's talk about the carrier landing some. When I was working in telecom, I had a few assignments on Coronado Island in San Diego, home of the North Island Naval Air Station and the famous Del Coronado Hotel. This was always cool, I enjoyed taking my lunch to the beach wall on the strand between the Hotel and the Air Station. This is the same stretch of beach, by the way, that President Clinton was jogging along during the Monica thing, and some woman came right up to him and started yelling all the Rush bullet points right in his face. It was all over the local news. Contrast this with Bush, who even before 9/11 instructed the Secret Service to keep protesters completely out of his line of sight, quarantined in '1st Amendment Zones.'

But anyway, one day I climb up on the beach wall, and about half-way out to the waterline, on a slightly raised dune, a woman has arranged a series of low screens about her body. She's sunning topless. Well, sometimes there is a God. So, I'm eating my lunch, and trying to be cool about the whole thing. Occasionally an aircraft would fly over in its final approach to landing at the Naval Air Station. Presently, one of those Vipers came over, what Bush rode in, in a bit of a bank, and spied the young damsel below. Instead of landing, the pilot went around again and, turning over her, stood the plane on its wingtip maybe a hundred feet up, so that they could look straight down at her. I thought it was funnier than Hell.

But see, that's kind of the thing about San Diego Bay. Probably half the guys with boats will admit the whole point of owning one is so that when you take your date a ways out on the water, she'll hopefully feel the sudden urge to take her top off. Not that there's anything wrong with that. This also tends to provide a lot of 'targets of opportunity' for the Navy and Marine pilots stationed there.

I mention all this merely to provide the full context for Bush's 30 mile flight to the USS Abraham Lincoln. This wasn't 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, or a bombing raid on Haiphong Harbor of the sort John McCain performed - Bush's 30 Seconds Over San Diego Bay was more of an overview of a free-floating version of Hooters. If the aircraft carrier had been any closer to shore, you would have seen women flashing the tv cameras. Several observers noted the size of Bush's 'package' as he stepped onto the carrier's deck, well, now you know why.

(Though, actually, the best explanation of his 'package' that I've come across was that Bush didn't know enough to release the tension on the straps of his G-suit after leaving the plane, creating not only the bulge in question, but also great discomfort while walking around.)

Speaking of John McCain, if I had $100 million I would give it to him with the proviso that he run against Bush again, and that he would saturate the tv screens of the country with this ad - there's film footage extant of a terrible accident on John McCain's aircraft carrier, a rocket accidently fired from a plane on deck, causing great explosions and fires. McCain is sitting in his jet in the middle of all this, his plane's on fire, men are dying all around him, and it's his responsibility to save himself, to climb down and wade through all this around him. It's as hairy a moment as can be imagined. Then factor in, McCain had to climb back in a jet the next day, shake the previous day off, and go get shot at again. And of course, later he was shot down, seriously wounded and imprisoned for 7 years.

And my ad would show this footage, contrast it with Bush's 'heroic' carrier landing, with maybe a juxtaposed shot of a babe waving from a boat in San Diego Bay, and the voice-over would go like this - 'In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush's campaign called me a psycho, said I was a 'Mandarin Candidate,' brainwashed by communists. They said my wife was a drug addict, they said I was the father of a bastard black child. Now, I ask you, after seeing this footage, who would you say is the honest man, the honest hero?'

-

Setting up my new apartment, I put up the rabbit ears to see what stations I might get now. No more PBS, which used to sneak up the coast from San Diego, oh well. NBC from LA comes in clearer now, so there's Chris 'Tweety' Matthews - "Do they hate us because of our big SUV's and big tv's?" Gee, I dunno, did 'they' only start hating us a half-dozen years ago when the big SUV craze hit? Are we the only ones on the planet who can afford Japanese televisions? Do they hate us because our inflated real estate values has us acquiring even more debt through refi-home loans to buy this stuff with? Do they hate us because of the 5-1 trade imbalance we have because nothing's made here anymore?

Fox out of LA is very clear now, and their local morning show leaves me almost dumbstruck. They've got three people, a straight news guy, who looks like he used to be a real news guy, and two, no other word for it, hotties. And they're dressed like something from a rock video, skirts way up to here, cleavage way down to there, lingerie as outerwear, etc. At 7 in the morning, it's a bit of a shock. One's a 'good' girl, doesn't show the cleavage so much, is alleged to teach Sunday School. (I swear, I'm not making this up.) The other is the 'bad' girl, and always has that freshly effed look. And the banter, the chatty girl-talk, seems all to be about the sex scandals of Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton, how awful they were, the bitchiness of Hillary Clinton, etc. The news guy, who often seems actually embarrased to be there, at one point holds up his copy of the script, and actually says, 'See, we're given this stuff to say.'

So, understand, being Fox, the talking points are straight out of Rove and the RNC, but the pitch and target audience is, what and who? Who thinks it's normal to be half-dressed all morning on a work day? And these girls talk non-stop, and talk fast non-stop. Is Fox trying to reach the meth-user vote here?

It strikes me that the one constant in the conservative media message is that they're selling self-justification - our glutonous consumerism is justified if the 'evil ones hate us' for it; a less than tidy life can be justified if we join the rage because 'Clinton lied under oath.' None of it has to make any actual sense, but this weakness for self-justification seems very strong right now, and it's what the Republicans play to.

Curious, isn't it, that it's only now that the truth is going mainstream about all the Bush administration's lies that justified the Iraq war. Curious, and ironic, because Michael Powell will on Monday deliver the entire American media landscape to corporate monopoly, guranteeing their ability to tell us whatever they want, or whatever they don't want. Maybe the administration is in a race against time? Holding the lid on the Iraq scandal until Jack Welch and Rupert Murdoch can buy the rest of the country's media and make the problem go away? Until the next 'battle in the war on terror' can be staged? I dunno. I guess we'll see. --06.02.03

How Long Will The Middle Class Remain In This Abusive Bush Relationship?

` Kent Southard, Bush Watch

I don't think I'm alone in detecting a definite Andy Warhol '15 minutes of fame' quality in the exultation over the Bush Blitzkrieg's victory in Iraq. It hasn't helped, of course, that the Bush administration has seemed genuinely surprised to find Iraq once invaded, to be full of Muslims. Perhaps they expected Mormons, or Christian Scientists, I dunno, but the images of hundreds of thousands of Shias chanting 'Down with America,' images identical to those coming from their Shia cousins in Iran for over 20 years, give cause to even the most casual news follower to wonder, 'What were they thinking?' (And not just Shias, but Sunnis, Kurds, Iraqi nationalists, and Pan-Arab idealists, oh my!)

That the Bush administration continues to live down to our low estimation of its abilities doesn't surprise really; when you have an administration who openly taunts its sole member who speaks in complete sentences (Condi Rice, apparently), where 'smarts' are held in such low esteem, then it's only reasonable to expect stupid policy. We also have come to expect a low and base dishonesty from these people, and this the Bush administration has gratified in spades - WMD? We weren't lying, really. A matter of, you know, emphasis. What we were really doing is sending the entire world a brush-back pitch, see, because that's our policy now, and now it's a successful policy. See? (And like Gomer Pyle would say, Surprise! Surprise! There's lots of oil here!)

But perhaps the rapid deflation of the bubble of this grand victory is due to the fact that to most adults over the age of say, 30, there's a worn-groove familiarity to it all. This is simply the rhythm of life under Republican administrations - we make some big brahuha over kicking the ass of some pitiful little country, meanwhile the middle class continues to sink like a stone.

I'm a fan of the thinking behind the voluntary simplicity movement, but there's also such a thing as involuntary simplicity. Such is my post-layoff moment right now, as with many, fighting a rear guard action to arrest a devolving standard of living. Currently I'm needfully looking for a cheaper apartment, which has unexpectedly brought me some interesting conversations with leasing agents. First was a charming and attractive middle-aged woman who spoke with a Russian accent. She was going back next month, she said, after living here for a decade. 'There's no life here. This so-called freedom you talk about so much, it's only available to the wealthy. For everyone else, it's very tough. Nothing but work, work, work. There's no family life, no life with friends.'

Next was a late-20's man of almost incongruously professional presentation and bearing. Turns out he has a law degree. Turns out he's going to Marine Officer Candidate School in the fall. Was in the Marine reserves, and really, really, really doesn't like the corporate world after trying it. 'It's a lifestyle issue.' he said.

What I feel was the issue for this young man, and I don't think he's alone in the officer corps in his feelings, can be reduced to one word - respect. The military can seem very attractive, or seductive, in this way: in the military, you are required to salute ranks higher than yourself; but the higher ranks are then required to salute back. In other words, at least the pretense of mutual respect is maintained. Not so in the corporate world, where the ethos is more 'eat shit and die,' and if you have a problem with that, then you're an 'America-hate My natural father was a career Air Force officer, and I can attest it's a different life - 30 days paid vacation from day one, periods of perhaps intense work interspersed with significant time off or down. And unlike the corporate world, the military doesn't expect you to have to pay for your own training as a jet pilot or whatever; everyone gets aptitude tests, performance tests, evaluations, and if you show aptitude for some skill, they'll train you for it. The corporate world considers it a personal problem if you haven't had $150,000 to gain the education they're looking for.

Speaking of my father, he apparently chased skirts to an embarrassing degree. My mother would always say she knew in the first year of the marriage that it wasn't going to work out. Yet she stayed in the marriage for ten years, having me and my sister. This seems to be a constant in divorces, that it was known from the first year that something was fundamentally wrong and yet the marriage continues for years. I've had jobs like that, known from the first minute exactly who, where and how it would go south, and yet kept going to work.

I think a lot of Americans are in the same situation now regarding our country - we've had a feeling, perhaps for a long time, that things are fundamentally wrong. We work to get our minds around what's wrong, and maybe we wrestle out a piece of it - no respect, no life, no way to live on what jobs are available; while some just continue to hope things will work out. But I wouldn't be too surprised if this Bush administration isn't clarifying the thinking of a lot people, waking them up to the realization that it's time for a divorce. 05.04.03

A True Count Of American War Casualties

` Kent Southard, Bush Watch

It was just about this time 29 years ago; I was driving my '66 Barracuda to morning class at the 'commuter' college on the north side of St. Louis, when I heard on the radio that during the thunderstorms the night before an Ozark Airlines twin-turboprop had come down short of the runway, breaking up on the very campus I was driving to. Sure enough, as I turned into the college entrance, there was the crash scene scattered against the slight hillside that carried the entrance road. Like everyone else, I stopped and got out of the car.

So many people say at times like this that 'it was like something out of a movie,' and I stood there waiting for something of that experience, but it wouldn't come. A movie, or tv image, is a picture frame put around a specifically composed image, its meaning implicit in the composition, with dialogue or narrative added to complete the meaning to be conveyed. But there was no picture frame here, no narrative, no story; there were hardly even any recognizable pieces of airplane to be seen, it looked like the contents of a landfill had been dumped on the hillside, with a heavy concentration of foam plastic seat cushions. It was just a bunch of junk.

After class, a classmate asked if I wanted to get a cup of coffee at the student union. He wanted to talk. He was a Vietnam vet, and the morning's scene had reminded him of something from the war, how after a battle the generals and other high-ranking officers would chopper in to have their pictures taken on the battlefield with the bodies of the enemy dead. The crowds gathered that morning had reminded him of that practice, in a way he found mordantly amusing. He didn't seem to have much respect for the generals.

I think it was maybe that fall that I was a volunteer safety worker at the area amatuer sports car races, and a Formula Ford crashed directly in front of me. I was alone at this remote yet fast corner of the track, and on the cool-down lap after a qualifying session this driver's concentration had lapsed and he drove straight into the armco barrier. His car's tube framing collapsed around his legs, trapping him, while the impact itself had caused multiple compound fractures in his legs. I ran across the track, only to find there was nothing I could do, and then signaled for help. Then he began to scream. I stood there, helpless, and he screamed and screamed. He screamed the whole time they cut him out of the car. It was nothing like a movie.

Supposedly, the only honest war story is the one that goes like this - we went up this hill, and not all of us came back. Meaning, there is no narrative to be found in actual war stories, no meaning to be discerned in violent death. It's really the same thing as landfill scattered on a hillside, junk that fell from the sky.

But our tv has been giving us lots of images from the war on Iraq, overlaid with a distinctive narrative, purporting to tell us the meaning of that event. American tv hasn't shown much in the way of actual violent death, which is one thing; the other of course is the strident vainglory, mistakenly called patriotism, that has cast this most doubtful of wars as the moral equivilent of our wars for independence, against slavery, and the smashing of fascism, all rolled into one.

What this orgy of 'patriotism' actually speaks to, I think, can be found in a favorite painting of mine (speaking of picture frames), 'Christ's Entry Into Brussels.' In this painting, Christ is being welcomed into modern-day (19th c) Brussels by all the city's fathers and prominent businessmen and social elites, and it's just such a tremendous event, and everyone's just so very, very, proud to be part of this extremely important occasion, that...........well, actually, the figure of Christ himself has become this tiny little speck, his importance forgotten.

Notice how the various rationales offered by the Bush administration for this war - WMD, colluding with Al Qaeda, bringing democracy to oppressed peoples - each proferred and then forgotten; because each was as important as Christ in his Brussels' parade, merely the pretext for what is now seemingly taken as the ultimate victory in the culture wars - the supremacy of unrestrained worldly power, of the denigration of thoughtfulness and the intellect, of 'leadership.'

The brute truth of the Bush administration, if there had previously been any doubt, was revealed in Rumsfeld's remarks on the looting of the Iraqi Museum of Antiquities. Western Civilization? He could give a flying fuck. Just a bunch of vases.

(But perhaps witlessness has its limits. A BBC story I heard during the war had a British officer commenting on the differing styles of his army and the American's. 'There's a saying - Americans man the equipment, we equip the man.' And if our tech-heavy approach to everything also results in a certain brain-deadedness, a future classic example will be how we allowed the looting and destruction of everything except what was related to oil, causing many groups to step into the power vacuum, most notably the Shiite clerics who most likely won't give this power up in the name of 'democracy.')

A couple of years before her passing, my dear ladyfriend C. took over an abandoned community garden with the vision of turning it into a rose garden everyone could enjoy. After the news broke on 9/11, we spent some hours there working, grateful for the respite from the madness. It's become my favorite place to spend time. A few months before she left, her 80-yr old father came out for a last visit. He felt the need for confession to me, for some reason. I knew C. had suffered some awful child abuse, but I had thought it was mainly from her mentally imbalanced mother, but I guess that wasn't the entire story. He had been in the Marines fighting in the South Pacific, he said, and the experience had filled him with a brutality that he had turned on his family in civilian life. He was so very sorry, he said. He died of a heart attack within a week of C.'s passing.

These things do happen. My grandfather buried the dead in WW1, which no doubt had something to do with the emotional distance he maintained from his family. He lost his second son in a B-26 a month before VE day, which tipped my grandmother into something close to madness, with repurcussions for the family for decades. My old galfriend V.'s father was a tanker in Patton's army, and within a couple years of his return put his head in an oven.

These are the real war stories, if you ask me. Already, some newspaper stories tell of young American soldiers who don't know how to account for the savagery they've caused. Not that the Bush administration or Fox News cares, of course. The truth isn't what they're selling. --04.22.03

When Lies Are A National Policy, Patriotism Is Amnesia

A while back I was driving to work in my virtually vintage Toyota two-seater, taking the coast highway up through the trophy-wife ghetto of Laguna, when a large, black Mercedes sedan affixed itself to my rear bumper - I mean all I could see in the rear view mirror was grill. As the road opened up out of town he stayed right there, and as we were surrounded with traffic I didn't see what I was supposed to do; or what his point was, except to be pissy. With the Mercedes following to the turnoff to the road over the coastal hills, I saw I had a clear shot ahead, and as I'm a driving legend in my own mind I took the corner aggressively yet knowledgeably and put maybe 75 yards on him.

'Ha!' I said to myself, and then maybe a moment and a half later, the Mercedes came boiling by doing at least 110 and still accelerating hard up the steep incline, the driver and his wife staring stonily ahead. As the car went past, I caught a glimpse of the emblem on the B-pillar: V-12. Ah, the V-12. Well, like I'm always saying, $130,000 (msrp) should get you something.

You might say the same principle applies to our nation's defense spending; when, if not this year then next, we spend as much on our military as the entire rest of the world combined, then you pretty much obviate the need to be either courteous or clever in your conduct in the world. It means that it doesn't really matter if your battle plan rivals Custer's at the Little Big Horn, leaving the Iraqi invasion force stranded without fuel, ammo, food or water for a couple of days. Imagine the disaster that could have accrued if Iraq had been capable of mounting an effective counter-attack at that moment, like the Germans did at the Battle of the Bulge. It's an indication of how unequal this war has been that to date Iraq hasn't put a single airplane in the air to either defend or attack. Even in the Falklands War, little Argentina managed to get up a couple of fast jets equipped with Exocet ship-killing missiles that inflicted serious damage to the British Navy, but in this war we have something like half a dozen carrier battle groups double-parked in the area and in their down time the crews have pool parties.

All of which speaks rather eloquently to the conspicuous lack of a "gathering threat" and "weapons of mass destruction" from Iraq, the reason why George W. Bush brought this war. Or at least that was last month's reason, currently the stated justification apparently is something to do with 'terrorism,' which fits into the new narrative taking us to Iran and Syria.

Did you know that as many as 80% of the thermostats in offices are dummies, fakes to give the employees the impression they have some control over their environment? This is a reflection of our dominant American management theory, that posits that the little people can be mollified by merely pretending to pay attention to them. Another aspect of this management style is that the reasons you give the little people for any particular action today, do not have to agree with the reasons you gave yesterday, with the implicit understanding that their amnesia about yesterday is required for their continued employment.

Perhaps no aspect of the Bush administration's 'running the government like a business' is more pernicious than this complete and categorical denial of yesterday's reality. But if their actions cannot be justified by yesterday's statements, nevertheless we've been taken to where they wanted to go, where fresh justifications await us to take us yet further, to where the little people know not where. And those of us not cursed with short attention spans are proclaimed 'unpatriotic' for our lack of amnesia.

A large part of our predicament lies in that whereas our culture tends to be such a literal one, that when our media does tell the truth about Bush, it does so with such a subtly, if not fragile timorousness, it allows the loudly hammered lie to hold sway. Last summer the ABC News 'The Note' web feature ran this observation after Bush's press conference on his Harkin business dealings: they noted that while Bush was obviously 'weak and evasive' in his response to substantive questions about these deals of dubious legality, the mainstream media's 'conventions prohibited them from saying so.' Perhaps you've noticed this yourself, how the media's descriptions of George W. Bush's demeanor invariably read 'confident and up-beat,' 'calm and measured,' 'composed and purposeful,' when the man you've just seen looks variously like a smirking feral fratboy, that same fratboy awakened from a nap in class and saying 'what was the question?' to a man who, by the fear and wild and evil light in his eyes, gives every indication of having gerbils up his ass.

I liked what Andy Rooney had to say tonight, that he'd lived a long time but this was the most unpleasant time in his entire life. Rooney was as explicit as the media conventions apparently allow, but I got the strong sense he was in agreement that we have a government that insists on its right to lie to us, an administration contemptuous of our entire American history and tradition, of secret ambtions matched with unchecked military power. 04.07.03

The Plan That Everything's Going According To Is Not The Plan You Think

So I get this phone call from an AM radio station, asking if only I will listen in at such and such times, I may hear my name read and by quickly calling in I will win seven hundred dollars. Sounds better than a kick in the head, so I say sure, fine, but then the chirpy young thing hangs up without telling me where I can find her station on the radio dial. See, I haven't paid much attention to AM radio since the heyday of Top 40, which is to say the Johnson administration, and so the landscape of AM radio is something that in these days I remain gratefully unfamiliar. (Limbaugh, you can't avoid even if you don't listen it seems, no more than you can avoid traffic or brain dead white males.)

So I'm rooting around in the static trying to find this famous station, and where I think it maybe should be (win $700, maybe it's at 700 on the dial?) and instead I find a very strong 'Christian' station. I'd run across this station once before, sitting in an office where it was the only signal that came in, shortly after little Tim McVeigh blew up half of downtown Oklahoma City. Tim had been identified as a member of the 'Patriot Militia' movement, and Clinton hatred was in full bloom, and so it was perhaps instructive that in the brief moment of listening to this station all the above would be encapsulated in their 'Christian' message.

The theme of the hour seemed to be what constituted a Christian's proper response to our government, and a caller asked if though bombing the government was indeed legitimate, it nevertheless called for some serious praying beforehand? Yes, the host sonorously replied, this was a grave issue, requiring serious prayer beforehand.

I swear, I'm not making this up.

So, fast-forward eight years, and I drop in again for a moment on this same station - today's learned sermon is on the legitimacy of government. Apparently, according to the Bible all governments are legitimate, because government is 'of God.' God puts all leaders in place, even evil and bad ones which are signs of God's displeasure with the people of those nations. Only 'anarchy' is not 'of God,' and cannot be allowed. To obey the government is to obey God.

Well, it would seem the evangelicals had done a 180 in their attitude towards our government and gee, it wouldn't have anything to do with the change in administrations, would it? D'ya think? But putting theological inconsistency aside, I would like to recall what White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said in an interview a few weeks back - when asked if by invading Iraq we might be inviting more terrorism at home, Card replied 'The president will not allow anarchy, the terrorists seek to create anarchy, and the president will not allow anarchy.' Not that the president was making every effort to prevent terrorist attacks in the first place, but that he 'won't allow anarchy.'

So folks, it seems what I stumbled upon was part of the effort to condition the evangelicals, Bush's largest and most devout loyalists, to accept the coming dissolution of democracy - for Bush was installed by God, to disobey him is to disobey Him, and if we have to do away with democracy and the constitution in order to prevent 'anarchy' in Bush's estimation, then that is God's will. And anyway, as Bush's favorite Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, has already said, "Democracy obscures the Divine authority of government."

In other news, American troops are stranded in the middle of the Iraqi desert, running out of gas and ammo and reduced to one meal and one bottle of water a day, while our helicopters can't fly over a simple farmhouse in the middle of nowhere without getting shot at. ('I really don't think they want us here,' the Apache pilot said.) And yet, the administration maintains 'all is going according to plan.'

It would seem obvious that the clever children of the PNAC who had been planning this reckless war for many years, the kickoff to their campaign to rule the world, had planned an equally reckless battle plan, whose wheels all fell off simultaneously. Anyone aware of the PNAC agenda for Middle East domination might be wondering how after such a lousy start they were going to justify the military campaigns to follow? After all, Undersecretary of State John Boulton (another PNAC'er) promised Ariel Sharon just a few weeks ago that 'Iran and Syria are next.'

I had wondered how invasions of Iran and Syria were to be sold to the American public - after all Saddam Hussein was a brand-name bad guy, even if he had fallen in recent years to the status of a character on South Park as Satan's gay lover. I imagined that 'Support the Troops' might get a little old in garnering support for yet another bloody invasion.

But then this week Donald Rumsfeld, and then Colin Powell, made public warnings to Iran and Syria about 'hostile actions' they were supposedly involved in, allegedly aiding Iraq, aid even Iraq apparently denies. So, oh, I see now, the plan is to simply expand the present war when convenient, on the pretext that Iran and Syria were already making war on us.

So see, things are going according to plan - the whole Middle East will be in flames, which will reliably wreak some awful domestic terrorist calamity (and even if it somehow doesn't, there's that Operation Northwoods scenario in the back of the mind), at which point George W. Bush will declare martial law, to prevent 'anarchy,' and his evangelical base will accept all this as God's will.

God help us. --04.01.03

Bush Is America's Mid-Life Crisis

Well, it seems that the three day rule holds for war as well as for fish, for as Bush's crisp new crusade entered the weekend, things were starting to stink. Rather than reiterate the increasing litany of discomforts, perhaps this might be a good time to remember how this war was originally envisioned by one of its primary architects - in Richard Perle's estimation, the total number of troops needed for the Iraq wouldn't exceed 40,000 (and as for the Pentagon's claim that a few hundred thousand were needed: "Those Army guys don't know anything") and that Iraqis would dance joyously in the streets.

So far, not so good for Mr. Perle's powers of prophecy; so it wasn't at all uncharacteristic that Mr. Perle got a little ahead of his own curve at the American Enterprise Institute on Friday, not just gloating over the apparently effortless invasion of Iraq and the destruction of the U.N., but bragging about the next targets of 'regime change' - Iran and Syria, with 'containment' targeted for France and Germany. (Though how Mr. Perle's neighbors at his summer home in Provence will react to this, he didn't mention.)

The impact of the weekend's developments I think seems to arise as much as anything from Mr. Perle's vision of an effortless invasion, for this vision seems to sadly accord with rather too much of American fashion these days. Too much of American style consists of working very hard to present the appearance of effortless affluence; that we've entered into that state of grace occupied by the imperial CEO, where reality itself is created by our personal fiat. And to this state of mind, George W. Bush would be the perfect president, representing as he does a man who has never worked or applied himself to anything, and yet to whom seemingly all the world's earthly power has accrued. It's the promise of consumerism applied to every aspect of life - every need or appetite easily satisfied, paid for with easy credit.

Today, when virtually the whole newspaper seemed an obituary, there appeared an interesting one, of 'Elliott Jaques, 86: Made Map of Midlife Crisis.' Jacques was a psychoanalyst and management consultant whose first major theory was that industrial pay levels are scaled to the length of the worker's or executive's attention span. When entering his 40's, his optimism and self-confidence darkened, and he investigated why.

"The compulsive attempts, in many men and women reaching middle age, to remain young, the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life....are familiar patterns."

I don't think I'm alone in noticing a pronounced 'hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life' in America, and instead of acknowledging the problem, we ever-more fiercely embrace consumerism's promises - ever bigger SUV's and fast food portions, etc., creating an environment where empty calories has become the national standard in everything.

I don't think it's just a conceptual conceit to point out that the baby boomers have reached middle age, and at the same time you could say the same for consumer culture and even America as a country. And so perhaps it should be no surprise that as a country we might be susceptible to facile sales talk that promises easy wars that will return us to our days of youthful vigor and unreflective self-confidence - because this is all the Bush administration is, and all it has done.

So, to the world, I would like to apologize on behalf of those Americans listening to the better angels of our nature, and who possess due respect for the opinions of mankind. It's a stupid thing we're doing right now, and hopefully, like the mid-life crisis man waking up with a hangover in a Tijuana whorehouse with his wallet stolen, we'll soon see the error of our ways and return to sanity. 03.24.03

Bush Durham, Disney Talk, And The PNAC:
Once Again, Conspiracy Theory Has Become Mainstream Reality

The hardest thing about talking to people these days is that as often as not, it seems you're the only one that's been paying attention. It's easy to understand why - the compact the great middle class seemed to sign decades ago was that if we were to spend our lives fairly far down the decision making chain in a society now entirely organized around corporate hierarchies, then our lack of knowledge and power would be compensated by an enlightened and responsible managing elite that was looking out for our best interests - and would in the main tell us the truth.

And so it developed that most people maintain some small fraction of their attention for the pronouncements of government, mostly for the big speeches which are taken mostly at face value. Not exactly Jefferson's ideal of democracy resting on a foundation of a well-educated and informed populace, but it's been the post-WW2 reality. More than anything, this is what the continuing culture war of the 60's comes to - those who discovered that the government was in fact lying, and found echoes of that deception and abuse throughout the corporate world and sought to take a stand for individual thought and responsibility; and those who maintain an unquestioning and pliant loyalty.

It's gratifying, I guess, that CBS Sunday Morning, Maureen Dowd, and others are finally discovering the PNAC - now that it's about twelve minutes before the war starts. A lot of us 'conspiracists' on the web have been writing about it for a year or two; noting for instance, that Bush's speech to West Point was an announcement of the 'pre-emptive strike' policy outlined by the PNAC'ers - all the pointers towards a war on Iraq were there in public a year ago. Such speeches to non-mainstream audiences receive little attention by the general public though, which is why the Bush crowd uses them to speak to their true intentions (his major speeches are confections of Disney-talk that leave everyone feeling they're indeed a special child.)

Bush gave a couple of those non-mainstream speeches recently, speeches that received little attention but which spoke clearly as to where Bush is taking the country. At the American Enterprise Institute, Bush said the 'rest of human history will be made only by us' - which is pure American Imperium, and pure PNAC. In the other, to a gathering of his preferred christian fundamentalists, he said that 'the government cannot offer hope, only churches can do that.'

A little history - my grandfather, J.B. Hurst, was of the first generation of Agricultural Agents in that program put together by FDR in response to the calamity of the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl of the Great Plains occurred when farmers, unaware of scientific farming methods, overworked and abused the land so that it could not resist a period of draught and literally blew away. The Ag Agents were created to teach the American family farmer proper methods of farming - and in Garfield County, Oklahoma my grandfather was hugely successful at this, earning the respect and affection of the community. I remember as a small child riding with him around Enid after retirement, the warm welcomes he met everywhere. The Dust Bowl was turned around, and the now successful family farmers joined into the famous co-ops, a kind of voluntary socialism which gave the independent farmer a fighting chance in the markets. The program was a welcome benefit to my grandfather and his family as well, as a tractor had rolled over him and left him unable to farm himself.

I would like to point out that the 'private sector' did not come to the rescue of the stricken farmers of the Great Plains; 'market forces' did not magically relieve the situation - and never-mind the sideshow tent evangelicals. It would seem that government was capable of producing 'hope' after all.

I know about all this because these were the family stories I grew up with, but then George W. Bush grew up with different ones. Who can forget the account of his mother being scolded during those same years of the depression, for leaving her tennis rackets out in the rain? Though, personally, I like the one where Bar was identified by her high school girlfriends as the one who would organize who would be frozen out that day - it would seem that meanness is simply genetic in this family.

But again, this was a little speech by Bush that shows where he's really going - the abdication of all responsibility by the government towards the people.

But I'd really like to talk about movies - did you ever see Bull Durham? Funny, funny, intelligent movie, full of classic lines (Learn your clichés, make them your friends). At the moment, the apropos scene is where the full-of-himself young pitcher played by Tim Robbins is facing a new batter for the first time and waves off Kevin Costner's signals - 'I wanna throw heat' - 'This batter's a first-ball, fast-ball hitter, why do you want to throw heat?' 'I want to announce my presence with authority.' And so then the batter dings it out of the park. And what is the Iraq invasion, but Bush 'announcing his presence with authority?'

If Bush's trademark characteristics are cockiness and 'moral clarity,' and they do seem to be, what gives the world such pause is that this combination has been seen before. Just out on DVD is 'Europa, Europa' - the incredible true story of a teenage German Jew who survived the war by passing as simply German, in the process becoming an inadvertent hero on the Russian front, then sent to a Hitler Youth academy. The scenes of the German Army in Russia and of the Hitler Youth are truly remarkable, because they show what we Americans maybe have forgotten about the Nazis - that they were full of intense and fervent 'moral clarity,' about the 'filth' of both the Jews and the Russians, and of their own blessed superiority. The Nazis were also supremely arrogant - kicking ass and taking names as they rolled across Russia and feeling great about the whole thing.

It was always the American understanding that cockiness and true moral clarity tend to be mutually exclusive qualities - we know that moral clarity is a sober thing, and not the kind of pinched face Dana Carvey 'Church Lady' sober that Bush does either. The easy cockiness of the kind that Bush resorted to at the Azores press conference shows that even at this grave hour, he has no appreciation of what he's doing. The American Republic was founded on the laws of 'nature, and of nature's God,' laws that provided for the maximum individual freedom that did not infringe on another's. The awareness of this boundary has been the main work of our own 'moral clarity,' the origin of our native caution in inflicting our will on others. It would seem George W. Bush understands none of this, for he has set out to destroy everything this country has ever stood for. --Kent Southard, 03.18.03

George W. Bush Is A Manifestly Inadequate Fraud

Did you catch that 60 Minutes segment a couple of weeks back, the one with the Iraqi nuclear scientist? Refused to build the Bomb for Saddam, so spent more than a decade in prison, being tortured, listening to children being tortured; escaped during the bombing of the Gulf War, and has spent the years since making secret trips back to help as he can? You would think that he would be the poster child for Bush's invasion of Iraq - but no. 'Bush's motives aren't trusted,' he said. 'And we remember how we were betrayed by his father. And the absolute worst thing for Iraq would be a military occupation by the U.S.'

'Bush's motives aren't trusted.' Well, yeah. On any level you could care to mention. Oil, military domination of same, military enforcement of American corporate hegemony, the whole PNAC Mein Kampf. Then there's the whole issue of Bush's individual psychology; perhaps summed up in the whole 'Gentleman's C' thing.

I was introduced to the concept and reality of the Gentleman's C by the person of one A. Gardner spring quarter of my freshman year. This fellow sat in front of me in 19thc American History, or least that's where his assigned seat was. He drove a brand new Porsche 911E Targa, in that burnt orange that looked so good then, with 'S' mags, Koni's, free-flow exhaust; and he drove it on a lot of road trips, and I mean a lot of road trips, as he was gone for weeks at a time. It was all the guy did. On the day of the final exam, he hadn't been to class for something like a month, yet he ambled in, and as he collapsed in his seat he said loudly, and not without charm, "Awright, gimme my C and let me outa here!"

It was said he came from serious money, and so this was yet another lesson in that, despite our school being both 'conservative' and 'christian,' if not in the current vernacular, still this fellow seemed to do as he pleased. Which goes to show that the true meaning of 'conservative' is that money can always do as it pleases.

Which brings to the life of our George W. Childhood friends relate that little Georgie would always change the rules of games if he wasn't winning, so that he would. As a young teenager, when taken for a round of golf at the club by his mother, if he wasn't winning right away he would throw his clubs around, curse his mother and walk off. He got into his elite prep school as a legacy. He got into college as a legacy. During Vietnam, he got into the Air National Guard by being jumped over a waiting list of several hundred; he got into pilot training by officially scoring the lowest permissible score, 25%, on the pilot aptitude test.

When his flying duties became inconvenient for him, coincidentally at the same time the Air Force started testing pilots for drugs, Bush requested transfer to a Postal Unit. When this was refused, all evidence available indicates that he simply wandered off entirely, neglecting to finish his final two years of service. I was in the Air Guard myself then, and believe me, they would get seriously pissed if you missed a weekend. Anyone with serious attendance problems got 'activated,' that is sent up to the full time regular service where bullshit like that wasn't put up with. But this didn't happen to Bush.

Bush's business career consisted wholly of being bailed out by friends of his fathers, Saudi Royals, the Harvard Fund, and the Texas taxpayers who bought him a baseball stadium. (Which stadium deal also included using eminent domain to simply take desirable land useful for the retail environment of the stadium, but not needed for the stadium itself. Which goes to show that 'property rights' are those rights that accrue to those with the most property.)

And when Bush ran for president, the office was not delivered by the vote, nor any means provided by the Constitution, but rather by the personal preference of 5 Supreme Court justices.

So.....the pattern of George W. Bush's life would seem to be that he has never, ever, actually achieved anything on his own; but he has always cheated so that he would seem to have 'won' anyway. And most importantly, he remains justified in his own mind.....that none of this was wrong. The drinking, yeah, that was wrong, and he has been 'saved' from that - but the deeper fundamental dishonesty of his character that expressed itself in the alcoholism remains unaddressed: in fact it is now both cloaked even further, and simultaneously emboldened, by the over-weaning self-righteousness that he finds in his fundamentalist 'faith' - childish entitlement becomes self-righteous certitude.

The essence of George W. Bush is that just as is impossible for him to squarely and honestly face responsibility, at the same time he believes that he can do no wrong, in fact believes he is God's chosen agent of history. Narcissistic Disorder, I think they call it.

Did you hear what Bush said to the American Enterprise Institute, that 'while history in the past has been made by several, in the future history will be made only by us!' This didn't make any newspaper or broadcast that I saw, I only learned about it from watching the Chris Matthews Show. Personally, I think this little announcement, if printed in bold headlines in all the nation's newspapers: 'IN THE FUTURE, HISTORY WILL BE MADE ONLY BY US, SAYS BUSH!' I think more than a few people would have scratched their heads, and gone 'huh?' This is sounding very 1000-year Reich, nicht vahr?

Did you catch that Condi Rice comment a while back, that 'the administration's proudest accomplishment is the hardening of the American people'? Like Condi Rice knows from hard, eh? Perhaps she was referring to all those ever-more aggressively styled and ever-larger SUV's, their drivers practicing hard glares as they sit on glove leather while cueing up the DVD player. (Oh, but wait, Condi has said she wants to be commissioner of the NFL, so I guess as a football fan she thinks she knows hard - hey Condi, do us all a favor, instead of starting WWIII, why not just go sign up for fantasy camp? But then again, this whole administration is like a fantasy camp for the extra-chromosome conservatives, to use the phrase of someone's daddy.)

I frankly don't have a lot of respect (ok, any) for the glaring SUV crowd, however hard they may imagine themselves. (Though in the right light, a lineup of SUV's going down the road does bring to mind a regiment of SS Panzer King Tigers.) But I would submit that without a doubt, the Bush administration's greatest accomplishment has been the wakeup call to consciousness and citizenship of all those true Americans who stand deeply shaken, as they suddenly realize exactly how far wrong our country has gone. It's not just the war on Iraq, unprovoked as it is, with ever-shifting rationales - it's perhaps most shatteringly the media, which with very few exceptions studiously refuses to address the Bush administration's manifold lies, deceptions, evasions, and acts of high treason. Studiously, adamantly, refuses. In fact, acts as little else but a government propaganda ministry.

And then there's the total envelope the Bush administration is pushing - the simultaneous dismantling of the federal government while driving it into bankruptcy; the destruction of constitutional checks and balances, the destruction of the civic sphere itself - with its civil rights and liberties, and responsibilities - replaced with a society of law by corporate fiat, where 'private property' has all the rights but none of the responsibilities; where the only succor is provided by organized religion.

This isn't just the plan, it's the imminent reality. The Bush administration acts thus, and will continue to do so, because it fundamentally doesn't believe in democracy, in fact considers our last two hundred years of history mistaken. As Christian Reconstructionists, they believe our government should be replaced by Deuteronomic rule. As Hamiltonian Federalists, they believe our country should be a dictatorship run for the benefit for the rich. The PNAC had their desired 'Pearl Harbor' to get the ball rolling, any future attacks by terrorists and/or North Korea will bring martial law, under which all of the above will be implemented and enforced.

Did you see that op-ed piece in the NY Times advocating the American equivalent of the French Foreign Legion? See, it's not going to matter if Americans don't want to fight for corporate global empire; we're about to be reduced to mere colonial subjects ourselves, so nationality is little importance anyway, any rent-a-thug will do.

Did you see that news item from State Farm Insurance, that they will no longer cover your car in case of nuclear attack or fallout? I think they call that 'the smart money getting ahead of the curve.'

But you want to know why I think George W. Bush himself has signed on to this? I favor the Oedipal tale as interpreted by Jim Morrison - 'The killer awoke before dawn.....he put his boots on, he took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall......And he came to a door, and he looked inside -
'Father'
'Yes son'
'I want to kill you'
'Mother, I want to.....'
I think George W. Bush is such a manifestly inadequate fraud as an individual, that indeed this is his essential self, that it drives him crazy, and he must kill his seemingly successful father - or at least kill his reputation by killing the outcome of his father's war, and then he will be the dominant male in the family. It's the only way he sees out of his insanity. Lucky us, huh?

Kent Southard, 03.10.03

Lies, Oil, Duck And Cover Tape

I was a boy when our country became embroiled in Vietnam, a conflict that would last long enough for me to earn a draft number of 14 in 1971. I have a clear boyhood memory of a magazine feature, in probably either Time or Life, showing in vivid color illustration the Gulf of Tonkin incident - the number of North Vietnamese torpedo boats, the names of the U.S. warships involved, the precise times and chronology of the attacks. (It was alleged that North Vietnamese PT boats made a series of attacks on the American navy in the Gulf of Tonkin. As a result of these reports, Congress voted to give Lyndon Johnson essentially a declaration of war without the actual declaration. But the attacks never took place.) It took many years for us to learn that this was entirely fictional: our government had lied to us, wholecloth, in order to justify escalating that war.

What took years for the Gulf of Tonkin has taken mere days, or even hours, in the case of Colin Powell's charges before the United Nations. A British 'Intelligence Dossier' turns out in fact to have been Googled up by Tony Blair's P.R. people, the main body of which refers to Iraq 12 years ago, regardless. The 'chemical weapons factory operated in concert by Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda' turns out to be a few cinderblock shacks without running water or electricity, the camp of Islamic extremists who Hussein has attacked in the past, and would probably do so again if not prevented from doing so by the no-fly zone. There's even apparently an Iraqi defector who says the audiotapes are five to six years old. And now Hans Blix says the satellite photos of so-called 'chemical munitions dumps' were taken weeks apart, they've been there several times, and Powell's 'evidence' means nothing.

Colin Powell has reportedly said that the Bush administration keeps him in the refrigerator, only to bring him out once in a while to benefit from his perceived credibility. At this point, it would seem they've lost any such benefit.

Why bash France because Powell fell on his face? The French contributed the largest number of troops to the Gulf War of 1991 other than the U.S., they eagerly offered military help in Afghanistan (and were rudely rebuffed), and French troops were the ones who saved American missionaries in the Ivory Coast just a few months ago. Maybe France, and the rest of the world, has a point - Bush's judgment on Iraq is wrong.

It wouldn't be the first time - we might remember that when the Bush administration came into office, it brushed aside warnings from the outgoing Clinton administration on the threat from Al Qaeda because its focus was already on Iraq. 'I don't remember that briefing....(on Al Qaeda)' says Condi Rice - her exact words, I'm not making this up, and what's her job again - director of the NSC, Bush's closest national security advisor? She doesn't remember Sandy Berger telling her that 'Al Qaeda would be the biggest threat we were facing'?

It's a curious lapse of memory, because even though the FBI confirmed within a week of the inaugural that Al Qaeda was responsible for the USS Cole bombing, the Bush administration immediately dismantled the military response capability that Bill Clinton had assembled to take out bin Laden - Bush took away the Predator drone surveillance, reassigned the two cruise-missile equiped subs on station, took away the AC-130 gunships on 6-hour scramble, took away the Special Ops teams already on the ground.

A pattern that continues as the administration refuses to follow through on its promises of funding and equipment for 'homeland' security, even as it plans a military occupation of Iraq, playing straight into bin Laden's vision of a war of civilizations.

Why Iraq? Fundamentally, because Dick Cheney and the rest who do the 'thinking' in this adminstration seek total American dominance of the world's economies by controlling the world's oil. (Cheney, etc., have written about it in detail - they call themselves the PNAC, the Project for a New American Century.) And most immediately, because their old Reagan era scheme of encouraging Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalism in order to contain the Soviet Union has succeeded rather too well - the Islamic radicals have now turned against the U.S. because we won't take our military bases out of their Holy Land (they were the ones who attacked us on 9/11, after all) and the Wahhabis show every likelihood of overthrowing the House of Saud.

To lose Saudi Arabia to Islamic fundamentalists would/will mean we lose our reliable source of cheap oil. To occupy Iraq will ensure us an alternate reliable supply of cheap oil. To occupy Iraq will also ensure a continuing supply of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism forever until the end of time, amen.

Got duct tape? Kent Southard, 02.17.03

Fighting The Good War, One TV Show At A Time

My tv choices are limited these days to what can be picked up on my rabbit ears (a $50 dollar a month cable bill was about the first thing to go after the layoff) and boy, the networks sure don't seem to be spending much money on programming anymore. Used to be, daytime was where you could find some pleasant sit-com classics, now there seems to be a dozen different 'judge' shows which seem to exist to publicly humiliate the inarticulate poor and their petty problems. Same with Jerry Springer, in a more over-the-top format; same with Dr. Phil, with the difference being the humiliation is performed on middle-class people wearing ties. Several 'dating' shows have couples, not-quite-yet couples, and yet more fluid arrangements, where the participants turn on each other with a savagery that would seem to me to be rather the opposite of romance. Some future historian might take a look at this seeming need to dominate others through humiliation.

In the evening, it's much the same - a lot of new 'reality' shows wherein the participants practice their corporate in-fighting skills. A couple of shows where the networks actually seem to be spending money on old-fashioned production values, are the dramas 'The West Wing' and 'JAG.' It's curious, as well, because these two shows are historical dramas that are really exercises in fantasy wish-fulfillment, creating alternate realities for their viewers.

The West Wing of course is a depiction of how current events might be handled if someone fairly like Al Gore was in the White House. (Like I said, a fantasy show.) In The West Wing, we see the liberal Democrats best vision of themselves - highly intelligent and capable, hard working to the point of exhaustion, not without faults including the occasional stiff hubris, but still working good-heartedly to get the peoples' business done.

In JAG, current events are filtered through the prism of how the hard-right GOP base sees itself - basically as pre-sexual Sunday School students in an all-white world that hasn't changed since about 1958, where every story is a morality tale designed to show the innocence of God's chosen people. What this means for JAG's audience, is that the U.S. military is never wrong, ever, about anything. Which results in some rather extreme moral distortions when events are filtered through that prism.

Take the case of the American Air Guard F-16 pilots in Afghanistan who disobeyed their AWACs controller and dropped their bombs without authorization - dropping them on Canadian troops as it turned out. In the alternate universe of JAG, this is how that issue gets re-played: American fighter pilots are refused permission to bomb by their AWACs controller - and Al Qaeda gets away! (Or at least some towel-heads on horseback, as it's the middle of the night, and they didn't display their driver's license.) You see the JAG version - American fighter pilots are never wrong! (And should never be restrained or questioned!)

Or take the situation at Fort Bragg recently, where several wives were murdered by their husbands just returned from special-ops in Afghanistan. The show opens with a soldier at home shooting his wife. But by the time we get to the courtroom, the 'truth' is finally revealed - it was self-defense! (See, she deserved it!) (And as for the courtroom scenes - choosing the Navy as the branch of service for JAG, I imagine was done for the Navy dress whites the officers get to wear in court, making them the whitest white people you've ever seen.)

Or take the Palestinian uprising - for some reason, there's American officers riding along with Israeli armored vehicles as they smash through a Palestinian town. The Israelis show off a new hi-tech device that can see through walls - and we see another towel-head sinisterly crouching behind a second story window with his AK-47. (Note to the producers - um, I don't think the Palestinians typically wear those tall turbans.) The vehicle's turret turns and elevates, and blam! No more towel-head!

It's a central aspect of mass-media consumer culture that it seems to be a conscious effort to differentiate what's actually ours, what's actually reality, from the bombardment of suggested reality that inundates us. Some people perhaps can't articulate the problem or the effort, and so seek to erase the boundaries and accept the suggested reality as the real thing. You can see this in adults who are too fond of Disneyland, the Star Trek fans who seem to have lost track of their own identities entirely, people who can't wear anything that doesn't have a little polo pony on it.

And I guess we see it most thoroughly with so-called conservatives, for as JAG illustrates, their comfort zone demands the very denial of the truth in favor of a comforting and self-justifying lie. Which is why the Bush administration is such a perfect fit for them, because that's all Bush does. He ignores reality at every turn: from the lack of threat in Iraq to the actual threat in Korea, to global climate change, to widespread economic malaise - the only thing offered is an on-going narrative of 'moral clarity' tailored to keep Bush's right-wing base in its comfort zone. A narrative that's characterized by the same moral inversion as JAG. The secret to the narrative's continued success seems to lie in its listeners' continued childish suggestibility; but as there's a decided obdurate willfulness involved, it's hard to hope for much there.

Which is how we have a government waging wars of global empire, militarily abroad and by executive and judicial fiat at home (there would be your themes of humiliation and domination again); while its strongest supporters ignore the newspapers, waiting to watch their preferred version of events on the likes of JAG. --02.16.03