An Afghanistan Analogy

 

Public opinion is split on Afghanistan: slightly over half the population thinks it’s a bad idea to send more troops to Afghanistan; the rest were on Twitter posting pictures of themselves puking in a trashcan and never finished the survey. A select few – who I like to call the No Fucking Ways – actually believe the following: 1) That we are in a “war” against something or somebody 2) That we can “win” this war 3) That John Wayne could fly – and 4) That democrats want to turn tail and quit like a bunch of pansies… Unfortunately this group is either in Congress or on Fox News.

It’s not going to happen. The Afghans will never have Starbucks and malls and millions of mindless drones that go to work and go home and watch television and drink beer and watch football. It’s not going to happen.

Don’t believe me? Well I’m going to prove it with this here analogy:

Let’s say – and this could totally happen, and I frankly would encourage it – a big and mighty superpower, like China or the old scary Russia or, considering the current state of affairs, Estonia – demanded that we turn Rush Limbaugh over to an International tribunal of intellectuals for crimes against the global good. But we refused, claiming he was a United States citizen and the U.S. didn’t turn over it’s citizens – even Texans! – no matter how flatulent they were. Then, let’s say China bombed Texas and invaded it. Then let’s say they tried to instill Communism on Texans and make it illegal to hunt rattlesnakes or execute innocent people. Then let’s say, if they refused to cooperate, they were rounded up and forced to live in Oklahoma and watch Sooner games.

Wouldn’t work, would it? Shit no it wouldn’t! Sunburned would-be cowboys in wife-beaters – driving pick up trucks and wielding shotguns and swinging lariats – would come out of the woodwork to fight back – Republicans and Democrats alike! – banding together to fight against an occupation by communists. (Rush Limbaugh, for his part, would be safely ensconced in Idaho – a state long partial to bigots and hypocrites and potatoes.) Patriots from other states would sneak across the border with molotov cocktails and propaganda (Sarah Palin memoir); weapons from the United States that were smuggled into Mexico to fight U.S. drug enforcement agents would be smuggled back; insurgencies of all stripes – both big and small – would crop up everywhere – most of whom, if cornered in a bar, would freely admit to a palpable loathing of the man who started the whole thing.

Well, that’s Afghanistan: it’s Texas without the TEXAS-SIZE FLY SWATTERS! No amount of money and lives and political careers and fiercely lobbied privatized mercenary forces and torture chambers is going to turn the Middle East into Las Vegas. After all, that’s what Las Vegas is for.

Changes everything, doesn’t it? Probably not. Otherwise I wouldn’t be building a bunker. With the No Fucking Ways in charge of things, it might just be too little too late.

 

Beware The False Profit

 

Wall Street – the epicenter of what is now being called The Great Recession (even though it’s a depression) – that worldwide phenomenon best summed up with Holy Shit! – is patting itself on the back and giving itself outlandish tax-payer supplied bonuses. Why? Because our economy is overly reliant on the stock market as an indicator of the economy’s health. Which is a travesty. Because it’s not really an indicator of economic health. Nobody is economically healthy right now. But the dow is over 10,000 points anyway. Why? Because corporations are making money, which is good news for investors and shareholders. Shareholders, for those of you who don’t know, is a term used to describe an extremely heavy group of naked sweaty gentlemen – and by heavy I don’t mean deep or profound, but grossly overweight – who meet once a week high above New York and make phone calls to different corporations letting them know that, despite the economy, they fully expect – not the same profit they got last year, but more. This starts a relentless cycle of short-term stupidity that drags the economy down further and adds to the unemployment line. Companies, who are expected to give the shareholders their money, have to lay off their workforce to cut down on overhead, and thus increase profit. Which does two things: one, it adds more people without income to the large group of people who aren’t going to buy anything that costs more than 99 cents. And two, it makes these companies incapable of sustaining themselves: they lose the manpower and ability to meet their obligations – and their output suffers. Then the whole thing starts all over again. An endless loop of corporate nihilism: Sales plummet. Workers get laid off. And shareholders demand ever more money while the government spends billions paying for protracted unemployment.

Further compounding the problem is who is getting laid off. Companies are more likely to lay off ten just out of school workers than one useless chickenhawk who does nothing but play golf with the boss once a week and fondle interns. There seems to be two types of workers in corporate America: those who actually do work, and those who don’t do any work but are very adept at office politics. Which is fine for short recessions. But for a prolonged recession, like this one, you end up with a whole host of companies across the landscape filled with overpriced perverts who don’t know how to do anything but tell fond yet tedious “stories” about the old days.

Profits are good. But sustainable profits are better. Shareholders and those whose souls they own, would do best to understand this. Because, if this thing keeps going the way it is, these companies will eventually cannibalize themselves; they will shrink and shrink and then nobody will profit – not even the shareholders. That’s right fat guys – that means you.

 

Note: I’m no economist, so this could be totally wrong. But I doubt it. I’ve seen it first hand in two recessions now and it boggles my mind. But feel free to set me straight…

Dick Cheney Tortures Still…

Not since Torquemada has a hunchbacked evil bastard caused so many so much pain so consistently. Forget stabbing friends in the back; he’ll just up and shoot them in the face. (There have been plenty of evil bastards, of course; but they all had better posture.) Anyway, today a court in Italy found 23 CIA agents guilty of kidnapping stemming from their practice of Extraordinary Rendition of people the United States were suspicious of. They were sentenced to prison. Not that they will actually go to prison, as they have asylum here in the United States – which is THE place to live these days for those who answered the demands of the Bush Junta. Kidnapping was the least of their crimes. That was just the first step. Next these people who simply vanished from the sovereign countries in which they lived would find themselves in various “sites” around the world, where a whole host of nefarious deeds would be done to them in an effort to extract information from them. Sort of like the infamous scene in Marathon Man, where Dick Cheney is drilling holes in Dustin Hoffman’s teeth. He played a Nazi in that movie – and the parallels between that Dick Cheney and the real one are striking. But I digress. Mark Twain knew a hundred years ago what I know and what any sentient being knows: torture doesn’t work. Unless your goal is to thoroughly break someone’s psyche and ruin them as people, that is; if your goal is to actually get information from someone, it’s not remotely effective. Unless you want a whole bunch of made up bullshit. I know myself. And I know I wouldn’t even have to be tortured to make up all sorts of ill deeds if I thought it would make the pain go away. It’s no wonder that there was such a rash of false warnings about shopping malls being targeted. Either it was based off false information extracted from innocent people or it was ginned up fear from an administration that ran on lies and bullying.

Dick Cheney likes to go on and on about how torturing people is great and a wonderful way to foil plots and catch bad guys. When pressed for any sort of evidence, he instantly retreats to the tired old theory that to divulge such a thing would make us weaker or some nonsense. What I’m sure it does is make our soldiers – not prisoners of war – but targets of revenge. If we can’t honor our own propaganda, how can we expect others to? Exactly.

The most frustrating aspects of the behavior of the Bush administration is that they did all of the things they did even despite the fact that it defied any sort of logic or reason or research or knowledge of human behavior. We make the same mistakes over and over again expecting a different outcome: which is the definition of  - well, so much for that. Each new generation does something that has been done before – and failed before – but like Mickey Rooney – they try again anyway – because they’re better! Or different! And then: whoops! I married my mom again!!!

I can’t help but think that if Al Gore had been just a little less boring, this country wouldn’t be trillions of dollars in the hole funding quagmires oceans away in a desert among groups and fiefdoms and cultures we seem hopeless to understand. We wouldn’t be apologizing for torture while denying we ever did it; and we wouldn’t be closing a prison that isn’t closing anytime soon. Instead, 0ur money would be safely ensconced with treasury secretary Bernie Madoff on Capitol Hill near the Green House.