Do you ever feel like we’re standing on the brink of a cliff looking over the edge into something ghastly? Something like the valley of the shadow of death, something like German people must have felt when Hitler came to power?
Lately I have been feeling this feeling more and more. I see the brash and overt corruption of the US and UK governments, as I see the transparent veil of lies knitting together the collective dialogue of the “coalition against terror”, the pathetic excuses offered in the face of blatant war crimes committed in Iraq and Guantanamo. It was never about anything but oil and race.
America was supposed to be the example to us all – according to the James T. Kirk model of the universe. America was supposed to be neutral, powerful, benign, the model of democracy setting example to the rest of the world, the peak of civilisation against which all others could be measured. America was a wise ruler who interfered only at the appropriate times, interfered for the right reasons, with the right authority, for humanitarian reasons. Was this dialogue ever true? This ideal we were brought up on, that the media coaxed us into believing? No. Never. But that myth is crumbling fast and what it is exposing is not something we want to see – it is nihilism, that underneath all previous certainty, all confidence, all civilisation, we are left with bad parents, savages fighting over a carcass, children fighting over toys.
Now America abuses people like those “terrible dictatorships in the Middle East” – now America throws away lives and commits atrocities like the Chinese. The corruption so obviously riddling American government, from congress to the madmen who run the White House, and their close ties to the oil and other powerful industries, this corruption is reminiscent of the Mafia. America has become what it has so vilified, and now we are seeing that America has always been this way, we are remembering Vietnam in a different light, Korea in a different light, remembering how the Second World War was already won, that Enola Gay should never have flown, that those atrocities in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exactly that. Atrocities. America has never been punished, because there is no one there to punish it. America is to the UN what a criminal is to a state of anarchy – a happy abuser running riot without fear of reprisal.
In Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore touches on what is known as the dialogue of fear. It is the American media that dictates this dialogue of fear. The media whips up a frenzy of fear – of black people, of shootings, of crime. It dwells on these subjects, exaggerates these subjects, makes people afraid in their own homes, makes them feel they need to keep guns. The black man is a shadowy figure – a mugger on the street corner, a criminal waiting for the right moment to attack.
A similar dialogue sprang up with the events of September 11th. Of course what happened was wrong. A lot of people died. Who could watch those images and not be moved – horrified, angry, questioning? But to watch them again and again? To listen to the constant news: Al Qaeda Al Qaeda Al Qaeda! These shadowy terrorists who hate America – for no particular reason – unless it is jealousy of civilisation, of superiority, these barbarians and animals who veil their women (and here America suffers one of many cases of amnesia, forgets, perhaps, Mormon polygyny, attacks on abortion clinics, Christian fundamentalism, the makeup of congress, the continued plight of the Afghani women whom it did not bother to consider in the new Afghani government, forgets even the slave trade and the racial makeup of its prisons, forgets its own ghettos).
America does not understand why it is so hated, it does not have that level of insight. A large section of America’s people are now mostly overweight, pre-diabetic, and no longer rational. As long as the coca-cola and the fast food keep flowing, they can be led like the proles in 1984. America is a nation of hypoglycaemics, and the dialogue coming out of America is the dialogue of someone with low blood sugar. It is overly paranoid, it is panicked, it is angry and aggressive. It isn’t interested in reasoned thought, it will attack anyone who gets in the way without any thought or reason or excuse. Soon, America will be too confused to attack anything. It will wander around tapping its fingers and mumbling and trying to remember what this was all about. It will surf the web but not read the pages. It will stare at the television, and believe the television without really taking anything in. It will reach for another soda and hope someone else will bring in the corn chips.
Riverbend is an Iraqi girl educated and raised away from Iraq but now back home. Until the war she was a computer programmer. In Iraq. Iraq was a modern nation before the war. Now she sits at home and writes about the war. She is politically enlightened, thoughtful, articulate and intelligent. Each day she receives emails from paranoid and aggressive Americans who tell her she should be grateful for being liberated, who call her a Baathist and a Saddam supporter because she doesn’t support the occupation. Riverbend isn’t a Baathist, she’s just a democrat (remember those?). Riverbend doesn’t feel she should be grateful for all of the deaths of friends and abuses and destruction she’s witnessed.
I look around and everywhere I see a degeneration. I see the human body distorted and sickened to the point of grotesquery by the profits of global food corporations. I know far too many people who have cancer, who should not have cancer. I see babies in Africa being killed off by the formula Nestle is still allowed to hand out. I see addicts everywhere – junk food addicts, drug addicts, alcoholics, gamblers, people with empty lives. I see asylum seekers scapegoated for the failings of government. I see stupid people – stupid because capitalism has left them undernourished and they have never reached their full potential – and these stupid people are voting other stupid people into power. I see corruption and selfishness everywhere. I see Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, and America smiling and holding Saudi Arabia’s hand. I see no Al Qaeda in Iraq. But then, those Muslims are all the same, aren’t they?
Sometimes, the more I open my eyes, the more I want to close them. When those planes hit the World Trade Center the world went mad. America had been going under for some time, but at that point it truly snapped. Osama cannot have had any idea of what he was unleashing upon himself and the rest of the world. He wanted to cause the downfall of America. In a way he has succeeded. I am not the only person whose faith has gone. He has shown us all what America is really made of.
