Wednesday, May 12, 2004

bad I don't know, I like the internet.  I think the internet makes me smarter, in some sense. At least better informed.  I like reading book and record reviews, weblogs, political commentary, etc. on the internet.  I look at nytimes.com or cnn.com, every day around lunch time, just to see if the world's ended while I've been attending to the business of my life.  I like amazon.com, because I'm all about deciding that I want - I don't know - AMM's Les Stances a Sophie, or The Congos' Blood of The Congos, or Esther Averill's long out of print Jenny's Birthday Book (for my niece) at the drop of the hat, and hey presto! there it is at my door, a few days later.  The three items I just mentioned are, by the way, obscure and previously near-inaccessible.  I learned about them on the internet, and I procured them there.  They are all good things, sweet and beautiful things, and my life is in some small way better for having them.  Here, now. But again - I don't know. Should I be able to watch a video of an American getting beheaded by five hooded Iraqis, or a reporter getting his throat sliced by Islamists?  I can watch these things, you know.  I don't watch, but I choose not to.  I wonder if these things should fall within the realm of choice.  But.  Here, now - things are wrong, things are going wrong.  The world is officially a bad, dark place, and the men and women we elected into office seem to be the harbingers of the here, now, of the moment bad. Honestly, I thought, when things went wrong in Fallujah - I thought, that's bad, but here we have four mercenaries who died doing their capitalist, for-money job.  Not to say that any singular human death doesn't represent some infinite, ineffable loss, but these men were not soldiers.  They were mercenaries.  I honestly don't feel that I can hold some deep moral opposition to say, Soldier of Fortune magazine, then wring my hands and weep over the men who make the life choice depicted within that particular publication's pages.  These men made the cold, capitalistic, profit/loss spreadsheet calculation, and they happened to come up in the red.  That's very deeply too bad, but nothing more, really, in the larger scheme of things.  I'm sorry, and I'm saddened.  But, as my grandfather used to say, it just don't signify.  If you make the conscious career choice to go over to a war zone and stand around in a flak jacket holding a gun - well. But that's me.  I wasn't born in some shithole mountain town in West Virginia, and I never contemplated joining the US armed forces, or a private "security force," because I never had to.  Such a thing would never have crossed my mind, ever.  So yes, I speak from a position of absolute privilege.  I know exactly one person in the armed forces, and he's so brainy that he's got a desk job in DC for the duration, doing computer security work.  He's just not expendable.  Well, I'm rambling. I guess I'm trying to say that I feel it deeply wrong that these high-mountain, uneducated privates are being court-martialed for dragging Iraqi prisoners around on a leash, etc.  The pictures of that torture (and I strongly believe that the media should call it torture, rather than abuse - I considered cancelling my New York Times subscription over this) sickened me, but I think it's endemic, and goes all the way to the top. I'm not too smart about this stuff.  Last Friday, my mom had a party for her boss, who's a high-powered attorney here in Texas.  We were talking about this stuff, and I mentioned that Rumsfeld had apologized for not taking the issue of the torture of Iraqi POWs all the way up to the President.  This very smart man just laughed at me - I mean laughed right in my face - and said "plausible deniability!"  We'd had a drink or two, but I still felt like an idiot.  Of course Rumsfeld is the fall guy here, protecting his boss from culpability.  Why doesn't the media call him on this; why doesn't Congress call him on this?!   Maybe I should just go off and watch these videos.  Maybe I should just stuff myself with the immediacy of sudden, violent death.  Maybe I should just get used to it.  You know? 8:34:39 PM