Band Aids for Machine Gun Wounds

01/18/12 • -1 min

Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining

Band Aids for Machine Gun Wounds There has been widespread outrage in response to a video showing US Marines urinating on the corpses of their dead Taliban adversaries. I’m not sure how much of the indignation is genuine and how much is pro-forma, but it’s all hypocrisy. Don’t misunderstand: I do not find the desecration of the dead to be a trivial affair. I just feel the irony of the canard that war can be inherently civilized to be nauseating. I could point out that the Taliban, who were among those outraged, have engaged in beheadings, torture, and other appalling acts – but that would mean that I’m justifying this behavior by comparing it to our enemy’s – a moral dead end if there ever was one. I am not justifying this behavior; I am attempting to put it into perspective. The sad, shameful truth is, American military and intelligence personnel have not only practiced torture, but our government has actually taught it to generations of Latin American military men at the infamous ‘School of the Americas’. So, is urinating on a dead body really more reprehensible than institutionalized torture? Another point of perspective: Our men and women in uniform are shot at by snipers and blown up by IEDS. Their dead bodies have been dragged through streets and hung from bridges. They are inculcated into a warrior culture that glorifies violence and dehumanizes the enemy. It is absurd to think that some abstract concept of ‘honor’ will always rule the day in this stewpot of violence and desensitization. These abuses have happened throughout our history. I’ve seen photographs from 1900 of US Marines gleefully waving the severed heads of Filipinos like Al Queda terrorists. Look up a timeline of the United States Military Operations on Wikipedia – this country has been in wars and skirmishes almost non-stop since its inception. Our soldiers have engaged in bloody, murderous campaigns, mostly to subdue freedom fighters, around the globe, from the Philippines to Guatemala to China to Russia. We epitomize a society of violence, not, as pro-lifers like to say, ‘a culture of life’. We are taught that we should recoil in horror at war’s excesses, like the My Lai Massacre and Abu Gharaib torture, but to accept war itself as honorable and gallant. I’m sorry, but it’s all excessive, all morally reprehensible. I recoil at the sight of the severed limbs of dead children scattered in the streets after one of our drone strikes. The mayhem unleashed by these drones, flown from armchairs via joysticks, is once-removed, displayed on a small screen, a silent movie as seen from the air – not down on the ground with the smell of blood, feces, and urine and the screams of the dying and the maimed. The combatant is spared the visceral, first-hand knowledge of what they have done. Their killing becomes partially abstracted, sanitized, and therefore easier to perpetrate. What could be more obscene? There is a wonderfully telling scene in the movie Apocalypse Now when a solder panics and he and his compatriots machinegun an entire family in a sampan. One woman survives, though she is grievously wounded. The main protagonist, who had not fired a shot, remorselessly shoots her, much to the shock of the rest of the solders – who had just massacred her entire family. He laments about the hypocrisy of war, the barbaric cruelty combined with moralistic hand-wringing, saying “We’d cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie.” It is a lie. It’s a lie to think that war can be moral or honorable. Making it cleaner or more antiseptic for some of its participants through technology only makes it easier, not harder for them to partake in the most bestial carnage. And those involved on the ground are desensitized by the things they see and do in a different, more time-honored way. We wonder when some vet kills his family or a park ranger – what made them snap? It’s obvious: a system that turns a human being into a killing machine, that glorifies violence, is inhumane and inherently uncivilized. And participants in that system almost inevitably become less humane, less civilized themselves. You worry about urine on a dead body? What about the child who still lives, though he is burned beyond recognition and limbless? What about the father who has lost his entire family? The wedding party shredded by aircraft fire? The girl gang-raped by our soldiers? You think that war in the 21st century is materially different from what it was in the 12th? The obscenity is not only that this is not so, but that we pretend it is, and we shield ourselves, through media self-censorship and euphemism, from the truth. We do not see the photos of American bloodshed of civilians that the rest of the world sees. And NPR still calls American waterboarding an ‘Enhanced Interrogation Technique’ even though we actually executed Japanese soldiers as war criminals for the very same practice. There is no hesitation when speaking of Iranian or Taliban ...

Previous Episode

This is What a Police State Looks Like

This is what a police state looks like.
I am mad as hell. The images of police brutalizing peaceful demonstrators with batons, concussion grenades, teargas, and pepper spray has engendered an all-consuming rage within me. I detest bullies. I detest brutality. I detest the complacency that most Americans seem to feel when someone with whom they disagree with politically is deprived of their constitutional rights. For many, it goes beyond complacency – many actually approve of the brutalization and censorship of those of a different political persuasion. They seem to forget, or perhaps never knew, what America is supposed to stand for.
But more than anything, I detest hypocrisy. I see tent cities on street corners for the consumer High Mass that is Black Friday tacitly supported by local authorities while the tents, books, and medical supplies of those who believe that the guilty who crashed the world economy should pay for their crimes, are torn up and thrown into dumpsters. I hear no soaring outrage from our president’s bully pulpit when an Iraq veteran is grievously wounded by highly-militarized police run amok. Or when a grandmother in her 80’s is basically tortured with pepper spray. Or when vindictive, abusive police wantonly assault peaceful women who are penned like cattle while trying to express their rights.
Mr. Obama was quick to arrange a photo-op beer drinking session for a professor and a cop who had an altercation, but has done nothing about rogue cop Anthony Bologna, who indiscriminately pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors, nor about the Egyptian police style assault of protesters in Oakland, nor the similar assault in New York, which took place under cover of darkness with a total air and ground blockade of the media, a shockingly grievous violation of the Constitution.
While the press, our legislators, and our president laud those who occupy places like Tahrir Square, they mostly turn a blind eye, or level an accusatory one, at those who use similar tactics to promote justice and challenge a corrupt system here at home. The president is MIA and the Republicans call the unarmed Occupy Wall Street crowd thugs and rapists while praising the armed to the teeth Tea Partiers, who have been known to spit on congressmen and carry not-so-subtle signs calling for bloodletting and revolution.
Well, I support the Tea party’s right to demonstrate. I support the right of those odious ‘God hates Fags’ miscreants to demonstrate. I support your right to express yourself, and your right to free assembly, even if I hate your message.
You may point out that the occupiers are doing one thing different from all of these other domestic groups: they are occupying public and semi-public spaces. It’s true. So are homeless people, and those Black Friday zealots. And I think it’s also true that this wouldn’t be happening all over the US had the Arab Spring not happened, and had the media not praised occupiers and demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Syria and elsewhere. Occupy is a global flowering of the same consciousness, the same rebellion against a system of neo-serfdom that is built to insure the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.
In some countries, the iron hand is more overt – you have no right to speak, you are jailed and beaten for the most minor dissent, far from the freedom of speech we enjoy here in America. But, the difference is increasingly one of style, not substance, for here in America, we have an even wider income disparity than in China. Our elites (and I’m not talking Susan Sarandon here, but folks like the Koch brothers) already own us – they have sold us a hollow American Dream that has pacified and splintered us, and so do not have to resort to the iron hand that is ubiquitous in places like Egypt, Syria and China.
But when a movement that challenges the relationship of serfs to lords in any meaningful way arises here, believe me, it will be crushed just as heavily, if need be, as anything you’ve seen in Tienamin or Tahrir Squares. If we, the people, ever truly challenge the status quo, we will be assaulted, beaten, tortured, killed. It’s already happening! You see the groundwork laid for it now: the virtual silence of our ostensibly liberal president and his Justice Department, the gradual numbing to brutality amongst the general populace as police violence is slowly ratcheted up in concert with a campaign of disparagement and dehumanization of the occupiers, who’ve even been called traitors, why I cannot fathom, except that those in power will tell any lie, make any threat, and break any person who threatens them. And they will also divide and conquer, artfully setting the tea partiers and the occupiers, who have much more in common than either camp appears to realize, against one another.
The future is here, America, and freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose...

Po...

Next Episode

The Minefield of Abortion

I waded into a discussion on abortion on Facebook and got slammed. I was called a ‘republican troll’ a misogynist, a Neanderthal, and worse. What was my sin? Was I promoting abortion’s abolition? Was I spouting pseudo-scientific apocrypha that women who are raped secrete a special chemical that prevents pregnancy? No, I was speaking honestly about my unease with late-term abortions.
Between thrown insults, one young woman said: my decision whether and when to have an abortion is between me and my doctor, period. It is not society’s business. I will fight to the death to keep that right unabridged. I asked: what if you decided to have an abortion on the date you were due? Would that be OK? I was accused of hyperbole, and of course, I was speaking hyperbolically, to make the point: there is not some magical ‘state change’ that takes place between a baby about to be delivered and one already born, so... when does that change take place, and why are abortion rights advocates so reluctant to define that line?
I was essentially asking people in the discussion to ask themselves: when does late become too late, for you, and why? What internal measures do you use to determine that for yourself? If we can all agree that infanticide is wrong, and that killing an unborn baby at term is wrong, at what point backwards in gestation does it cease being wrong to those of use who support abortion rights? And why?
I am not bothering with those who are completely opposed to abortion, often with no exceptions, even if the life of the woman is in jeopardy – as if, somehow, an unborn child is worth more than a grown woman, a moral calculus I find impenetrably immoral and viscerally repugnant. There is a divide there that I will not attempt to bridge.
I asked questions in this discussion like, could we possibly judge when a fetus’s brain wave patterns start to resemble a newborns? When they start to dream, to experience REM sleep etc?
Note that I did not ask when the fetus’s brain starts firing off electrical impulses, which is supposedly at about 2 months – this “brain wave” issue is a canard that abortion foes tout – as if a few neurons firing is equivalent to thinking. Of course the animals that many of these abortion foes eat have far, far more complex and cohesive brain activity than a 2-month-old fetus. These animals think, dream, feel fear and pleasure, and yet, these people slaughter and eat them without giving any thought to morality.
I was speaking to fellow pro-choicers, and I was trying to have a civil, logical discussion regarding how we decide when late is too late for an abortion. Everything I said to this group of liberal women was met with a level of vitriol that astounded me. It was as nasty and personal as anything I’ve seen from the Tea Partiers. It was, most sadly, utterly devoid of reasonable discourse.
In my mind, the biggest mistake of the abortion rights movement is that it has insisted on a ‘slippery slope’ argument against the abridgement of any abortion rights. This turns a blind eye to any moral evaluation, and, frankly, weakens the argument. I understand it, of course: any abridgement can lead to abolition, a strategy that anti-abortion forces are utilizing with great success across the country right now. However, drawing a scientifically valid line would buttress the abortion rights position for thinking people, and remove a lot of the squeamishness that many feel with the no holds barred approach that most abortion rights advocates seem to support as a default, often unspoken given.
Supporters of late-term abortions complain that the increasingly-restricted access to all women’s health services, the result largely of right-wing Republican efforts, actually force more women into late-term abortions. I say, we as a society have to help them get their abortions earlier then, not wait until we too feel that what is happening is, at best, in a moral gray area. Just supporting late term abortions because abortions are hard to get in some places is not logically acceptable.
The very angry young feminist notwithstanding, I also think that we as a society do have some say in the matter, though this position seems to enrage most of the feminists I know. I actually supported the pro-choice ‘no slippery slope’, no exceptions, party line myself until quite recently. But it has started to haunt me. Though it may be unfortunate, a woman carrying a late-term fetus may be seen as carrying a thinking, feeling human not unlike a newborn baby – that inconvenient truth forces us, as a society, to enforce some kind of moral code, as a society does against murder, rape, and many other taboos.
I would much prefer some kind of biologically logical model for abortion rights. This model would not be based on viability: because I have no doubt that eventually we will have technology that allows a 1 month old fetus to survive, ex-utero. Viability is not the issue, humanity ...