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July
16, 2003
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Donahue
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9, 2003
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Lee Sustar
The Great Medicare Fraud
John
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They Tell Lies to Nodders
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Jones
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4 / 6, 2003
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Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July
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Honey
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Madsen
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John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War
Jim
Lobe
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John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
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Thomas
W. Croft
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Thoreau
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July
17, 2003
Bush Country
The
Adulation and Venom of Ignorance
By LISA WALSH THOMAS
"If some can sacrifice their lives,
then surely the rest of us can give our attention."
James DePreist
Oregon Symphony Orchestra conductor
from a June 14th commencement address speech
I often travel these roads up and down and across
Texas, up into the mountainscapes of Northern Arkansas, over
forgotten roads that wind into the Ozarks, across to Little Rock,
occasionally down into Louisiana, stopping sometimes at country
stores that no longer have cokes in glass bottles but that still,
occasionally, produce oldtimers wanting to kill a little time,
squint into the hot sun, and chew the fat with a stranger.
I sometimes tell them how I passed through
here a half century ago, my father's small companion as he looked
for land to buy, as his forebears had done, how our people had
come from the old country and settled here where the soil was
fertile, even though none of them had ever farmed.
My own ancestors' migration down from
New York or up from New Orleans, later pondered, made no sense.
The country they chose now makes no sense, but I keep that to
myself as a strong, elderly Arkansan who eyed me suspiciously
as I paid for a bag of cashews inside now swigs the last drops
from an aluminum can of Mountain Dew, tosses the can toward a
metal trashcan and misses, then points at my chest, where "Free
Iraq" cries out from the blackness of my tee-shirt. Certainty
in his worldview keeps his forehead unfurrowed.
"What's that mean?" he asks,
his finger rigid. "We freed them."
The more we free them, the more we need
reinforcements, I think to myself. I hesitate, usually a mistake.
"You think it's time we bring the troops home now?"
I then ask aloud, determined not to step into a fighting ring
but wanting a bit of conversation with some relevance to the
nightmare that a pre-empted invasion has levied upon us.
He stares at me, and for a moment I am
thoroughly confused until I digest the fact that my artificial,
seemingly safe question has baffled him completely.
"We lost a boy come from up north
of here a bit," he finally says, then tugs at his right
ear. I wonder what the tug means, reflect for a split second
on how human gestures are as elusive as human nature.
"I'm sorry to hear that," I
say. How many Iraqi boys just north of how many places were lost?
"Maybe Bush will bring the guys home now and the killing
can stop." That's as far as I go. I feel my error but can't
define it. He stares at me a moment, looks as if he might spit
but decides against it, perhaps because I'm female, then turns
and heads on out toward a yellow truck with a long-legged dog
in the back, no parting word. I realize that our brief exchange
was as different from the memories of my father and smalltown
strangers gabbing as canned Mountain Dew is from a cold glass
bottle of coke. Times are different. A few words, and he has
tagged me as one of "them." A few gestures, and I have
tagged HIM as one of "them." We are on different sides
of a stone wall, and the top of the wall is jagged with shards
of broken glass, like the walls you see in Central America.
* *
*
"Us versus Them" casts a heavy
pall across all the vastness of Bush country. There are the "haves"
versus the "have-nots" with an absurdly large number
of the have-nots believing they are the haves. (A recent poll
showed that a noticeable percentage of people making $39,000
a year thought they were in the upper one percent of the country.)
These delusional haves, who think the new tax breaks are designed
for THEM, are more disdainful of the poor than the rich are.
Bush country is rigid and brittle. It's
an unending disconnect from a true picture, like a crude imitation
of a Georges Seurat painting where the dots are so emphasized
that they strangle the landscape. What should be an endless scattering
of fine points that emerges into a solid, unequivocal mass remains
simply a tired pile of dots.
Us vs. Them. Those are the dots, and
they're ubiquitous. Rich vs. poor. Black vs. white. Patriots
vs. "left-wing wackos." The "saved" vs. heathens.
Christians vs. Muslims. Catholics vs. Christians. Good vs. evil.
Red states vs. blue states.
The dots don't serve a greater good,
will never give us a Seurat, because there is no acceptance of
nuance. "Nuance" would be considered suspect in this
black and white world so intolerant of gray, so frightened of
anything off the beaten path.
"You're either with us or against
us." That thought, absurd to so many of us, is embraced,
is admired for its lack of nuance. Its starkness opens the window
for heads that nod in lockstep agreement when they hear that
the other side "hates freedom," is "evil,"
is a danger to God-fearing men.
Last April, driving through the center
of Texas on one of the back roads, I passed a huge yard sign
that said, "Iraq today; France tomorrow." YOU'RE EITHER
WITH US OR AGAINST US. Bumper stickers whiz past me on the dusty
roads: "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it."
Nuances are challenging; grayness is
threatening. In this land of fierce fundamentalism, people don't
want to think that a god-fearing leader could be wrong or, worse,
would lie. They went through it with Clinton and accepted that
a president COULD lie, because sex is still closely connected
to sin in many of these areas. But one president who lied is
all the cup can hold. The glue will melt if they have two in
a row, and stuck on that one dot, many of the people in Bush
country refuse to discuss the difference between lying over a
sexual matter that hurt no one and lying to lead a nation into
war, where defense contractors and corporations would make millions
while thousands of innocents would die.
IF they discuss such things, they are
diving into water that is deeper than they might expect. They
could lose the air in their lungs before returning to the surface.
If they say Clinton's lie was harmless in comparison to those
coming from the current administration, they are saying that
the Rhodes Scholar was a better man than the good old boy, the
one that many still think of as a beer-swigging fellow putting
in a hard day's work in an oilfield, a man who doesn't "put
on airs" or use long words or make them feel mentally inferior.
The work ethic down here is powerful,
but there's fallout from judging a person's worth by how hard
he works: constant work leaves little time for thinking. I found
myself in an argument with a relative a few years ago, wherein
I suggested that most of the advances of Western civilization
existed because the men of Greece had the leisure to wander through
the agora, to contemplate, wonder, and converse. My relative
asked me, "Didn't they have anything better to do?"
Intellectuality is not trusted in these
parts. Sticking to your gainful employment, counting progress
by its material make-up, and conforming to what you've been taught
from childhood on is considered strong character. When I first
returned to this area many years ago, one of the salient intros
was bumping into an old classmate at the Piggly Wiggly and having
him ask whatever happened to a mutual acquaintance we'd known
in school. With pride, I told him about my artistic friend, who
was (and is) a painter in Manhattan. The old classmate asked,
with sincerity, "What's he paint? Buildings?" If my
friend painted buildings and made a good hourly wage, he would
be labeled a success. But because he paints soft geometric canvases
and lives in a loft, he's suspect. I saw it that day, that moment.
The admiration for non-intellectuality
can be tolerated. We should certainly have the freedom to choose
what we admire. But it doesn't stop there, and the rigidity of
a country where judgment is so prevalent turns the admiration
into hate, that emotion kept readied for the enemy.
It's in the history. YOU'RE EITHER WITH
US OR AGAINST US.
George W. Bush, who has a problem with
"the vision thing" that causes his father's confusion
over the matter to pale in comparison, is the man of these people.
They didn't mind his inability to name the leaders of foreign
countries when he was put into office, and now they don't mind
the way he whips up frenzies through an incessant talk of "evil."
Now, though, the country, or at least
its integrity, seems to be falling apart at the seams as lie
after lie is uncovered. The test of loyalty comes next, and the
scores made on the test will probably determine the future resilience
of our nation. Even the people in the reddest of the red states
are eventually going to have to name the crime for which history
will judge George Bush.
Was it that he was simply kept out of
the loop, failed to do his homework, check his own information?
If so, then either ineptitude or ignorance becomes a crime. If
the CIA, or the State Department, or Cheney, failed to tell Bush
that there was no evidence of Iraq posing a serious threat to
our country (they were all clearly informed), does that let the
Commander off the hook? We all cut our teeth on the adage that
ignorance of the law is no excuse. Is ignorance of the facts
forgiveable when over two hundred trusting young soldiers lie
dead as a result?
Or was the crime the assumption that
Dick Cheney would keep him apprised of any danger to the country?
Was he truly unaware that the role of president is made up of
more demanding requirements than grinning for photo ops in a
flight suit or reading to elementary school children even after
being told that there had been a terrorist attack? Didn't he
know that he took an oath to learn what was happening in the
world instead of waiting for Cheney to tell him, activity beyond
"smoke 'em out" or "get 'em dead or alive"
or "Bring 'em on" sound bites?
Or was the crime made of harder material?
Did the leader of the country, in short, tell a bold-face lie
in order to get a foothold in the Mideast for the eventual control
of the world's most precious resources?
Is it prefereable to be ignorant, even
if it peels back the skin and shows little responsibility for
the people whose lives would pay for such ignorance? Or is it
preferable to lie in order to gain control of the Caspian Sea
pipeline and the Iraqi oil and a stepping stone to Iran, and
then Saudi Arabia, all in the march to control the world?
I want to go to those country stores
as a pollster. I want to ask the man in the yellow truck and
a woman in Dallas who called me an obscene name for wearing a
pin that said "No blood for oil" to answer a couple
of questions. I want to go back and ask the family who has the
"Iraq today, France tomorrow" sign in their front yard
to participate in the poll. I want to pull in the man who mows
my lawn, who recently argued with me while laughing, "Those
liberals may call him a cowboy, but one thing they can't deny.
He's a helluva straight shooter."
Simple poll. A or B. He acted out of
ignorance or he lied. Which is it, I want to ask them. The fact
is that when a young man is shot because of ignorance, his blood
drains from his body at exactly the same speed as it does when
he is shot because of a lie.
One of the darkest incidences in American
history has occurred. Deceit was involved, probably more heavily
than we now guess. According to Iraqbodycount.net,
approximately 7,000 innocent civilians were killed. Demographically,
that would mean over 3,000 of those innocents were children.
As of today 147 young American servicepeople who put their trust
and their lives into the hands of their Commander-in-Chief are
dead. We will never know how many thousands, or tens of thousands,
of nearly defenseless young Iraqi soldiers died trying to protect
their homeland from a foreign invader whose military might was
unmatched in human history. And an Iraqi resistance is growing,
a steady force that will keep killing American soldiers one by
one until they leave.
The Greeks use a phrase, "The king
must die." They mean it in the sense that the king must
ultimately take responsibility for everything that happens. Harry
Truman said the same thing when he told us that "the buck
stops here."
Our country lost much of its integrity
when it invaded a sovereign nation against the wishes of the
world last spring. The fact that a despot ruled Iraq in no way
legitimized such an invasion, unequivocally forbidden by international
law. What integrity survived is now fading as the people in the
White House take turns pointing fingers while the president says
the matter is now closed. The matter is NOT closed; the crime
must be identified.
While Bush is guilty, whether he was
duped or deliberately and cold-bloodedly lied, the greater crime
lies in the ignorance and apathy that allows inept and immoral
leaders to stay in power. The ultimate crime lies with all the
Mountain Dew-swigging men in the yellow trucks who believed what
appeared on cable news without questioning it.
A few days ago Rahad Septi of Fallujah,
age 10, was shot by frightened young American soldiers as she
played hide-and-seek with her friends. Her blood is smeared into
the gasoline being pumped across the nation by people who never
had the intelligence or curiosity to question evidence that was
not accepted by the rest of the world, people who seemed to believe
that waving tattered flags from their windows met all the requirements
for being good citizens and good people.
We shrug off the good old boys of Bush
country as innocent and ignorant. Perhaps it is only when our
own sons lie dead at our feet that we can see the venom in the
ignorance that too many of our countrymen find harmless.
Tommy Franks says "We don't do body
counts," but we know that untolled thousands of young people
lie dead, killed indirectly by the hands of a few people who
counted on ignorance to give them power. And hundreds of thousands
of voting Americans will sleep like babies tonight, never knowing
that they themselves are the real killers.
Lisa Walsh Thomas is a former arts columnist and gifted education
specialist, a lifelong political activist, poet and writer. Her
second book, "The
Girl with Yellow Flowers in Her Hair" is available
online through Pitchfork Publishing. She can be reached at: saavedra1979@yahoo.com
Weekend Edition Features for July 12/13, 2003
Arthur
Mitzman
The Double Wall Before the Future
Standard
Schaefer
The Coming Financial Reality: an
Interview with Michael Hudson
John Feffer
A Fearful Symmetry: Washington and Pyongyang
Ron
Jacobs
Shades of Gray in Iran
Elaine
Cassel
Judicial Terrorism Against the Bill of Rights
Tom
Stephens
Civil Liberties After 9/11
David Lindorff
New White House Slogan: "Case Closed. Just Move On"
Jason
Leopold
The Mini-War Against Iraq Prior to 9/11
Lee Sustar
What's Behind the Crisis in Liberia?
Mickey
Z.
AIDS Dissent and Africa
Sam Hamod
Semitic is a Language Group, Not a Race or Ethnic Group
Ramzy
Baroud
Awaiting Justice on an Old Blanket
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller
Adam
Engel
Parable of the Lobbyist
Robert
Sanders
A Review of Ralph Lopez's American Dream
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Witherup, Guthrie
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