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Contributor: banquosghost
Date: 2003-04-01 23:09:57
Link http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/ to this article. Note that this is an article in a US paper! San Francisco of course, home of all things suspect no doubt, but still a US paper!
BushCo Wants You Stupefied
Please remain mesmerized by grainy live footage, ignore appalling larger schemes. Thank you
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, March 28, 2003
This is not the time to get complacent and lazy and reactionary and wallow in ennui and sadness and bourbon-fueled fatalism, the sense that all is hurling down the road to hell in a hot Republican-drenched handbasket. Tempting as that is.
This is not the time to be all shrugging and dismissive and think whelp, that's it then, nothing we can really do anymore, just sit back and watch the carnage I guess, the switch has been thrown and the snarling war machine is churning in high gear and the mass herd is mewling and subdued and misled and aggro and stupefied.
And therefore you can only sit there and guzzle your scotch and go numb and sigh, flip around to see which frantic network has the best video of windblown reporters riding high on U.S. tanks and yelling about food shortages and lack of sleep as they rumble nobly through the desert.
This is not the time to get thoughtless and simpleminded. The trigger has indeed been tripped and we are right this minute slaughtering thousands in Iraq and dozens of US soldiers are being killed by Bush's "peaceful" order and ooh look, stray bullets and raging dust storms and bedraggled reporters tagging along, all wide-eyed and chaotic and no one really having any idea what, exactly, is really happening.
Shock and awe it ain't. Grunt and bluster and confuse and choke on dust and realize, bitterly, sadly, holy Christ with a Koran and a $300 billion national budget deficit, this is gonna be ugly, and violent, and long, and fruitless, it most definitely is.
The idea is that you will be more sympathetic. The idea is that by allowing all those stunned reporters such unprecedented access, by embedding them right smack in the middle of the action, amidst select squads of equally wide-eyed, barely-old-enough-to-drink soldiers, the reporters won't be able to help but be more pro-military, and goodly Americans will feel sympathy and support the troops and, by extension, the entire insane and unnecessary war. Is it working?
And thus Rummy and Shrub can smirk and nod to each other and, quite literally, get away with murder, their PR coup working beautifully, so far, because you don't see the real action. You no longer see the big picture. You are no longer paying attention.
And they most definitely do not want you to see. No actual dead bodies, no gutted buildings, no burned and decapitated children, no blood, no true bleak horrors of war, just tired soldiers and water trucks and big U.S. tanks rumbling patriotically through the dust toward Baghdad. Go team!
As meanwhile, just outside the purview of the reporter's grainy video phones, just beyond the jerky shots of video-game night skies and soldiers milling about, military supply contractors are gloating like leeches, Dick Cheney's old cronies over at Halliburton are cheering like pirates, as they shamelessly snag the multimillion-dollar gov't contracts to build big tent-cities for our troops and to put out all those nasty oil well fires in Iraq, just like they did in Iraq War I. Oh yes they did. Did you miss that little detail?
Or how about Bush's corporate pals, literally lining up at the trough for their share of nearly a billion dollars in semi-secret contracts (and as much as $25-100 billion, eventually) to "rebuild" Iraq, which you can hereby translate to mean: install nice puppet government, build a few thousand oil rigs, refurbish a few nice palaces for the twins. To begin with.
Then there's all those pesky CIA analysts, still grumbling aloud about how ShrubCo has been twisting intelligence reports on Iraq to bolster the war. Did you miss that one?
About how they were particularly mortified when Junior publicly claimed that Iraq was restarting its nuke program, trying to buy uranium from Niger? Claims which were based on, ahem, painfully bogus documents? Whoops. Can't have that making too many headlines. Hey look! Dust storms and cool tracer bullets over Baghdad! Look! Please?
What about the much-bandied term "coalition forces"? The networks love that term, and Bush loves them using it. Reminder: There are no coalition forces. It is the U.S., Britain, a handful of Aussies. That's it. That is not a coalition, that's a rogue clump. The only true coalition is on the anti-war side. Shhh.
This is exactly the time to watch very, very carefully. This is exactly the time to discuss further and passionately, with everyone and anyone, what it is you are really seeing, what it might mean, and, more importantly, what they are omitting.
This is the time to protest harder, to write letters and journals, to think deeply and carefully, to donate to Oxfam and Truthout and FAIR and the like, to rethink what it really means to be an American in the new draconian, power-mad, kill-em-all preemtive-death Bush world order.
This is exactly the time to pay closer attention. To filter and stay infomed and get your info from more than, say, the uber-patriotic, holy goddamn but we love our Shrubster Fox News. Look around. The perspective is there. Activate the filters. Read up.
This is the time to fully feel those karmic blows, the ethical sucker punches, as the ShrubCo doens't even bother to try and hide the obvious cronyism, the White House actually having the smirking gall to deny that Cheney's Halliburton connection -- and his lovely $1 mil per-annum stipend for simply being a former Iraq-loving oil exec of the company -- had any bearing on the aforementioned oil-fire contract. Right. Believe that one, do you? I've got some prime downtown Baghdad condos to sell you, cheap.
Feel the bludgeoning. Because they figure you won't even notice. Or care. Look honey, poor hardscrabble Iraqi children looking desperate, and goodly U.S. soldiers delivering fresh water to them. Isn't that patriotic? Tanking U.S. economy? Deep recession? Intense, almost universal anti-American rage roiling all over the world like a bitter virus? Pay no heed. Just look at the startling pictures. Be mezmerized. Don't you support our troops? Of course you do. Genius PR, is what it is. One big reality-TV recruitment video.
Remember, this is an administration who truly believes you are insanely stupid. A full week into the war, and still no sign of WMDs? No sign of SCUD missiles, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, or chemical weapons? Oh well.
This is why you cannot be overwhelmed by montage images. The shock and awe is not for Iraq. It's for you. The shock of all those dusty violent videophone images, awe at how you are seeing a mere raw sliver of the real-time action, live, straight from on the front lines. Are you stupefied yet? Are you waving your flag? ShrubCo certainly hopes so. Because if not, you might actually see what's really happening.
And god -- Bush's reborn righteous Christian God, that is -- knows, they can't have that.
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