Don’t feel a mixture of rage and deep despair? Then you probably haven’t been reading Riverbend lately. This report, also, featuring the phrase “He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross.” And beyond the obvious horror, let’s keep in mind that the soldiers themselves are being abused far beyond the purely physical. Anyone can become a monster. Anyone. You know in The Brothers Karamazov (Laura Bush’s favorite book!), where Ivan Fyodorovich is giving his ‘suffering of children’ monologue? With soldiers tossing up babies and skewering them on bayonets, and letting them play with the barrels of guns until they laugh with delight and then blowing their brains out? While the mothers are watching, of course? When I read that, I was forced to face up to the most disturbing aspect of it: that could be me. Under the right circumstances, I could easily become a human monster like that. A horrible thing to admit, yes, but I know that it’s true, and if you look hard and honestly enough at yourself, I think you’ll find that you could, too. So in addition to the nightmares unleashed upon Iraqis, we’re spiritually destroying our own troops. A necessary sacrifice, perhaps, in a necessary war. In an unnecessary one, the people who started it should be put on trial for war crimes. I cannot put into words the utter disgust that I feel towards my country at this point. My father keeps forwarding me emails from Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun preaching tolerance and understanding of bush voters, but it’s things like this that make that REALLY BLOODY HARD. You VOTED for this, you self-righteous fucking holy rollers. You voted for mass murder on a scale you’ve never seen because, let’s face it, those Iraqis live in a furrin country, so who can relate to their senseless deaths? and anyway it was them a-rabs what did 911 they’re all the same and besides, you find the idea of two men kissing either icky or disturbingly arousing, and either way, god knows it’s government’s job to legislate your oh-so-delicate feelings. Okay: if you really got in their faces about the atrocities being committed in their names—our names—all but the most far-gone would probably get all equivocal: yeah, it’s really sad that this had to happen, but sacrifices, freedom isn’t free, brutal dictator, rape rooms. Well gee. That’s so incredibly noble of you, sad but firm in the face of horror. That’s why you don’t start a war on a whim, you humanoids! It’s always like this. Wars are violent and nasty and physically and mentally and spiritually deadly and nobody is impressed by your principled willingness to sacrifice other people’s lives to “save” people whom you obviously don’t care about either. You sanctimonious goddamn hypocrites: you sit on your asses watching my big fat obnoxious boss and jerking off to internet porn and reading entertainment weekly and pretending to be shocked but secretly being oh-so-titillated by all the celebrity scandals but then every few years you stagger out off your recliners to go vote like the teevee told you to, mouthing pious nothingness about ‘values’—because god knows that not murdering untold thousands of people isn’t a ‘value’ or anything—and then you go back home feeling all warm and holy inside, having consigned god knows how many people to death, but you can feel good about it, because you’re a Christian. You have morals. And of course a special fuck you to James Dobson. You saw the clip of him they showed on The Daily Show? “Are you telling me how to be a good Christian?” He asked, fresh blood dripping from his hands. Lady Macbeth was a better Christian than you, Jim: at least she was able to see it. If we suffer another 911—well, we sure as hell will have earned it. Am I saying that aggrieved Iraqis have the right to something like that? Of course not: nobody has a “right” to kill anybody. But that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’re the ones who threw concept of justice out the window. They have every bit as much right to wreak untold bloody havoc on us as we do to do it to them. We would have no right to complain—but you just fucking watch us! Oh, how could anyone do this to us? We’re so good and strong and holy! How could anyone possibly hate us so much? We’re the goddamn fucking shining city on the hill! And of course we’re all guilty. I had hoped that we could start to turn things around with the election. That we could show the world, okay, sure, we do some really incredibly stupid things, guilty as charged, but in the end, we’re not completely oblivious or evil: the path may be a bumpy one, but we do the right thing in the end. Ha. Ha. Ha! Ha ha ha! Wasn’t I just the most adorably innocent thing? So almost half of us voted against eternal, senseless violence. Big deal! You expect the Middle East to make that distinction? It was our own damn country, and it was our responsibility to wrest it out of the hands of madmen, and we failed. Democracy failed. We did what we could, and it wasn’t enough. We didn’t cheat or rebel, because we apparently still have some sort of laughably misguided belief in democracy, even though the other side doesn’t, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, and now we have to be prepared to reap what we’ve sewn. Theoretically, I knew that all empires must fall. But I honestly never thought I’d live to see the day.
