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Thread 6065

Thread ID: 6065 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2003-04-09

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il ragno [OP]

2003-04-09 09:15 | User Profile

[url=http://www.nypress.com/16/15/news&columns/cage.cfm]http://www.nypress.com/16/15/news&columns/cage.cfm[/url]

[SIZE=3]Slow It Down[/SIZE] Everybody talks about the war, but nobody does anything about it.

**"The enemy we’re fighting is different than the one we’d war gamed against."

–General William Wallace**

There was a lot of talk about Gen. Wallace’s little blunder, but it seemed to me that everyone missed the real significance of it. Looking just below the surface, you could see revealed in the general’s comment a crucial, damning truth about the war. And that is this: The real reason the Bush administration did not expect the Iraqis to fight is that its entire experience with opposition has been with the American civilian.

There’s almost nothing you can’t get away with doing to an American. Take away his health insurance and he’s likely to fall to his knees in gratitude. You can tell him to his face that you’re pulling funding for his kids’ schools in order to bail out some millionaire stockbroker in Connecticut who overbet the peso–and he not only won’t get mad, he’ll swell up with pride and burst out singing the "Star-Spangled Banner." You can even steal his pension and gamble it away in Vegas, and the most he’ll do is sulk a little.

In those rare cases when an American gets mad, what he usually does is wait four years to vote for an identical candidate. Push him a little farther over the edge, and he may flirt with a hopeless third-party politician or write a sarcastic letter to the New York Times. And when he becomes disconsolate, when he finally decides to take to the streets, look out–because now he’s a real threat–standing in some park or other publicly sanctioned place, and chanting goofy slogans while carrying a poster of George Bush with a crayon-drawn forked tail.

The White House expected the Iraqis to line up like redcoats with their muskets drawn in single-rank formation because that’s what we do. [color=blue]Whatever they tell us the permissible means of protest is, that’s what we do. [/color]If the permit for the demonstration is at an abandoned drive-in fifty miles from the nearest town, we show up there, brows furrowed and banners waving, in huge numbers. While the generals point at high-tech maps on all the major networks, we sit there babbling into the crackly dissenter line on C-SPAN at two in the morning. There would probably still be kings playing croquet on the grounds of Versailles today if the tactics of the French revolution had been like this–better heed us peasants, messieurs, or we’ll send twice the usual amount of mail to our congressmen.

We’re so accustomed to following the "rules" of political engagement that when someone like Michael Moore breaches decorum for thirty seconds to sabotage his own Oscar acceptance, enormous numbers of us actually consider this a real act of brave defiance, and not the quixotic, colossally insufficient gesture it was.

The whole point of opposition is to make sure that the people who are making decisions know that there will be consequences if they go too far in ignoring the public, or at least a plurality of it. And I think it has to be said that for people like Bush and Rumsfeld, large marches of malcontents in New York and Washington are not a consequence. They’re an amusing bonus.

This little adventure in Iraq wouldn’t even be fun for people like Bush and Rumsfeld unless they could take a break from watching the missile-cam footage from time to time to look out the window and see 500,000 dirty hippies singing "Kumbaya" under the Washington monument. What’s life without a little comic relief?

I realize that "500,000 dirty hippies" is an unfair characterization. But that’s the whole point. [color=blue]That’s all it takes to dismiss 500,000 protesters–a characterization. [/color]The big three, CNN and FOX have succeeded in making every antiwar protest look like a gathering of bitter losers with too much time on their hands, and I would be shocked if it weren’t true that every time an earnest, polysyllabic protester made his way onto the air, Bush didn’t gain 10,000 votes for the next election.

People like me are part of the problem, too, which is why I’m even on the subject. I could make myself feel better about things by writing glibly about this or that government lie, but that’s really what it accomplishes–making me feel better.

In fact, [color=blue]the whole business of keeping track of media deceptions has become an unusually ridiculous exercise, and one would need a thousand pages a week to even begin to do a decent job of it. [/color]

You have to wonder after a while whether this is a good use of my or anyone else’s time, racing to keep track of the unceasing string of sensational headlines that turn out ten minutes later to be idiotic fabrications: the Basra uprising that wasn’t, the deployed Scud missile that wasn’t, the seizure of Basra that wasn’t, the uncovered secret chemical weapons factory that was damning proof of the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction–except that it wasn’t–the missiles that landed in Turkey and Iran that weren’t ours until they were, the civilians we didn’t bomb at two different marketplaces in Baghdad, the mass surrenders that weren’t, and so on.

Then there’s our benevolent solution to the humanitarian aid problem in Umm-Qasr: providing free water to Iraqis with tanker trucks, who would then be allowed to resell it to the thirsty for a "reasonable fee."

After a while, it’s simply not dignified to freak out over each of these things individually. The dignified thing to do is to recognize once and for all the essential nature of what we’re up against, and then fight it. Don’t write petitions or make appeals, don’t sing songs, don’t wait for someone up there to change their "minds." Just fight it. And make it hurt.

Wall Street supports this war. How do you think it would react if all 30 percent of the country that opposes the war decided one day to dump all of its stock? A self-defeating gesture, to be sure, but we didn’t get to drink the British tea, either. CNN and FOX are making a killing waving a flag for the Pentagon. Why not start boycotting their advertisers one at a time until they pull their spots? Does Dell really want that "Dude, you’re getting a Dell" kid to be turned into a symbol of the war machine on college campuses?

Hell, forget about boycotting just Dell. Boycott everything. If even this minority of the population could go a month without over-consuming, it would give corporate America an aneurysm. Just one month of no new cars, no new hoop shoes, no Atlantic records, no Kellogg’s Fruit Harvest, no nothing but the bare minimum.

For years, corporate America and the media have tried to convince us that buying things is a political act, a way of expressing our individuality (Fruitopia instead of flower power, Nikes sold to the tune of "Revolution," peace signs on the walls of Starbucks). Well, let’s call their bluff. Let’s non-participate. Let’s go on consumer strike. Pull a slowdown. We don’t have a lot of choices when it comes to voting for politicians, but when it comes to buying, where our existence is actually necessary, we have a thousand choices a day. It might be the only method we have of making the decision-making class pay attention to our concerns.

Hell, let’s try something, anyway. Because what we’re doing now is just what they expected–nothing.

Send comments to taibbi@nypress.com

[color=purple]Now this is a valid idea. In fact, it has potential applications for us beyond this war. 1776 was a long time ago...even if we had those kinds of white folks around these days, the modern State has restructured itself so that it is all but impregnable to its own citizens. Kent State and Philadelphia and Waco bear out the futility of confronting the State by conventional (read: overt) methods. But a national strike, or a national consumer-spending slowdown, would stab them in the heart.

Anger? Anger is nothing, when your opponent has rifles and tanks and airplanes and you have a peashooter and a noble cause: by all means, rant away,little man! But there's nothing that plants that first fatal seed of doubt in your enemy's brain like scaring him to death with an act or acts that let him know you're off-the-charts crazy....crazy enough to bring down the whole damn temple around his ears just to get him.

Hey, usually the govt and the bankers and the finance Jews bring the depressions and recessions to your door....then you starve and sell apples while they cut staff. I like the idea of the people snatching the truncheon of economic collapse and waving it at the bastards who look through us every day like a pane of dirty glass. Until we can literally tar and feather our sellout lawmakers and hang them from lampposts, Taibbi's idea is a utilitarian stopgap worth considering.[/color]

eric von zipper

2003-04-09 12:19 | User Profile

Yes, it is true.

It is truly amazing what people will put up with. It makes you realize that post industrial man, our latest incarnation, is no different than cro magnon man except that wearing animal skins is now de classe and today it is women who hit men over the head and drag them off for rough sex.

But those are just fads.

What is eternal is that society is hierarchal and that the mass of people regardless that they have a BS from Generic U. and make 35 an hour answering phones at the help desk are really deep down where they live still 16th century serfs subject to the whim of a ruling class whom they unquestionably submit to with maybe a little grumbling which is nothing more than like a chimp beating his chest cause some bigger chimp took his banana.

Here in good ole Baltimore the autopsy report on Bethlehem Steel is now in and buried deep in the back pages comes the little detail that all retirees under 65 no longer have health insurance. The ones over 65 don't either. So you have to admit that everybody got screwed equally. Ain't America grand?

Somewhere in, I think it is Chicago, there is a billionaire named Ross ((yes he is one of those people) who is quietly buying up all the failed steel companies and throwing the lifers overboard without Coast Guard approved flotation devices.

He now owns what used to be Beth Steel. The assets that is. He doesn't want the liabilities.

The screwees, of which there are tens of thousands, are ubiquitous on Baltimore TV, dragging their oxygen bottles behind them, appealing to, you guessed it, the state of Md to become their new nanny. The old nanny being deceased.

Not one of these WWII, Korean and Vietnam era vets has the stomach anymore to do the right thing and take a 30-06 to Chicago and instruct Mr Ross that sometimes things get personal and shall we say, extra legal.

Walter Yannis

2003-04-09 13:05 | User Profile

Great idea, actually.

I remember back in the early 70's there was a consumer action against inflation and rising food prices where everybody just said "we won't buy meat one day". It was informally organized, word of mouth. But somehow it worked. The effects didn't last long, but it shows that these things can happen spontaneously.

We should organize a "buy nothing but generics and second hand month". It would be great for Goodwill Industries and garage sale enthusiasts. And it would hit the our enemies on 5th Avenue where it hurts the most.

Good article by Taibbi, of whom I'm a long time fan.

Walter

MadScienceType

2003-04-09 19:09 | User Profile

**Not one of these WWII, Korean and Vietnam era vets has the stomach anymore to do the right thing and take a 30-06 to Chicago and instruct Mr Ross that sometimes things get personal and shall we say, extra legal. **

Yeah, I wondered why Ken Lay was still breathing until I figured out the above.

xmetalhead

2003-04-09 20:10 | User Profile

Great article, thanks Il Ragno. Taibbi presents a viable method of "redress of grievances" for the modern American serf that all free thinking people should undertake. The house of cards which consumerist America sits needs only a light but precise breeze to knock it down. I think an American boycott is in the works in many countries throughout the world. Nations are going to still have to deal with the United States Entity but they ain't gonna show no love, that's for sure. Mecca Cola anyone?

mwdallas

2003-04-09 20:16 | User Profile

I like this boycott idea a lot. Nothing but food and gas for a month. It's the type of thing that the Leftist opponents of the war would love.

bmullins

2003-04-11 07:48 | User Profile

Hi! I would like some feedback on an anti war website I am working on. You can view it [url=http://pages.prodigy.net/lexo]here[/url].

Thanks for any suggestions comments and mail. B. Mullins