Abandon Mythology

Throughout the nine days since Michelle’s husband began getting his Surge^® on in Afghanistan, I’ve been bouncing around the intertoobz reading everything I could find about the operation. The problem is there’s just not much to find because one of dubya’s restrictions on freedom of the press is still in effect. Only journalists embedded with coalition military units are allowed in the Marja area while the offensive is under way. It would appear that this commander-in-chief likes to control the message as much as his predecessor.

From all the accounts I have been able to read, we appear to be implementing a simple three-step plan: Step one is to seize and hold portions of Afghanistan that have never in history been under the control of any central government, and place these areas under the control of Afghanistan’s weak and largely corrupt central government.

No problem. Alexander the Great and the Greeks couldn’t pull it off, nor could the British Empire or the former Soviet Union, but I’m sure it’ll be different this time. (‘Cause we’re Amurkins goddammit!)

Step two is to help the Afghani people begin to “rebuild” a country that was never “built” in the first place. Check out this photo I stole from this New York Times story.

In addition to the complete lack of greenery that always catches my eye, I can’t help noticing that in Marja, a “city” of some 75,000 inhabitants, a meeting between village elders and US Marine commanders is held sitting in a dirt street.

Only about 7% of Afghanistan’s population has access to electricity, with most of those being concentrated in the capital, Kabul. The vast majority of Afghanis live in mud huts and shit in holes in the ground. By my estimate, it would take a zillion billion trillion dollars to even begin “rebuilding” a country for a people who would almost certainly remain far too poor to maintain what we built.

Which brings me to step three; Cut off funding to the Taliban by getting these dirt, dirt poor Afghani farmers to stop growing opium poppies, the only crop that brings any profit into their otherwise dismal existence. This is beyond stupid. The only way to pull it off is to hand out cash by the bucket loads, and as soon as we stop doing so the Afghanis will go right back to doing what is necessary to survive, just as they have for centuries. Just as all humans do.

Meanwhile the Taliban are doing what guerilla fighters do. Sporadic, hit and run attacks aimed not so much at inflicting serious damage, but more as a constant reminder to our troops and the civilian population that the victories we garner now blowing up mud houses with $100,000 missiles are ultimately unsatisfactory and temporary. It is a foregone conclusion that the Taliban will still be there when we leave.

I am reminded of an old saying; If all you have is a hammer, all the world’s a nail. The very ability to impose our will on other nations has an effect on our decision to do so. Michelle’s husband appears to have fallen into the same trap as all his modern predecessors. Wielding the reins of a superpower renders one unable to look at the rest of the world in non-coercive terms, leading to conflations of naked aggression with “defense” and US economic stability (superiority) with peace.

Until we get a government that is willing to start the conversation about scaling back the empire, it will be ever thus.

That’s so true. But it won’t stop me from adding a few of my own anyway.  I stole this from somewhere while bopping around the intertoobz one day. It really does sum up for me the level to which our national discourse has sunk. Sigh.

An old friend I hadn’t seen in two decades came to visit and we spent an afternoon catching up. We talked about all sorts of things past, present and future, and eventually our conversation circled around to politics.

It is a topic I often avoid in everyday conversation because most of my friends, co-workers and neighbors are conservative and I’ve just grown weary of arguing with them. Nothing saps my energy more than an argument with a friend.

So I was pleasantly surprised — particularly since he lives in an even redder part of red-state Misery than I — to learn my old friend is every bit as liberal as myself, if not more so. I was very nearly giddy when, for several minutes, we were practically completing each other’s sentences as we discussed the problems with modern conservatism.

One of the many subjects we touched on during our impromptu progressive summit conference was the bizarre ability of conservatives to believe the most outlandish lies about our preznit, and liberals in general, regardless of any contradictory facts.

My friend blamed the echo chamber of the right-wing noise-machine, and while I agree that it is certainly the source of most disinformation, the existence of this network of liars does not explain the willingness — eagerness even — of it’s target audience to unquestioningly accept falsity as truth.

It is an infliction that George Orwell returned to again and again in his writings. He called it nationalism:

I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

Sounds a lot like American neo-conservative ideology, doesn’t it? It is a point I can’t make often enough. Flag waving and screeching about the world’s only superpower’s need to “protect” itself does not make you a patriot. Genuine patriotism does not require enemies. Full stop.

I’ve wandered off track again. I was talking about why people choose to believe bullshit. More Orwell:

The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization….

I love that phrase. It seems impossible to me that any thinking person could reach middle age in America without acquiring a visceral understanding of what Orwell means by ”the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization.” He follows with a bit of optimism that frankly I don’t share.

I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.

One can do that only if one is honest about one’s own ignorance, is in fact willing to accept the possibility that one could be wrong in one’s beliefs. That is an acceptance beyond the ken of your average Misery redneck listening to Rush Limbaugh for three hours a day.

Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Still, none of this gets to the why of it all. I blame religion. (That is, after all, what I do here. I originally started this site with some form of evangelical atheism in mind, but quickly found I didn’t have the energy to fight those battles.) I see two things in particular shared by religion and conservatism; contrived persecution and anthropocentrism.

They both thrive on persecution to the point where they often create their own. Witness the persistent howling from the eighty-some percent Christian majority in the US that their religion is being oppressed or the right-wing paranoia that Michelle’s husband plans to take away their guns and put conservatives in re-education camps. It is as if they feel most alive when threatened. A religion without conflict is dying. So too with a political ideology.

Religion provides the human exceptionalism necessary for a belief in eternal life based solely on a longing for it to be true. But the concept of believing anything simply because you want it to be true is a slippery slope. If you already believe the world revolves around you — was, in fact, created for you — the greed and selfishness of modern conservatism become mere extensions of those beliefs.

From there, you can be led to believe all manner of stupid shit. Things like intelligence is dangerous because to be educated is to be elitist, or cutting taxes increases government revenue, or your preznit is a closet Muslim who plans to implement Sharia Law any minute now, or health insurance for every citizen spells destruction for your country, or … well, you get my drift.

From my vantage point, religion and conservatism carry the same definition: A toxic stew of ridiculous nonsense designed to render reality debatable.

For two days my comments section has been under sustained attack by a low-down, dirty Czechoslovakian spam-bot. At least I assume it’s Czechoslovakian. When I inadvertently clicked on one of the links in one of the hundreds of spam comments I’ve received, the four naked girls I saw there were advertised as being from the Czech Republic. Lena, Marina, Sveta and Viktoria. Oh my.

Apparently this thing figured out a way around my resident spam killer, so I had to find another. It has since been installed and has been terminating link-spam at a rate of 10-12 per hour since last evening, with a 100% success rate thus far. We’ve turned the corner in the War on Terra naked Czechoslovakian girls with vowels at the end of their names. {/darth cheney}

While I was searching the intertoobz for a new spamulator, I somehow stumbled onto this blog, written by a take-no-shit Texas feminist with about as much respect for religion as I have. In one post she referred to jeebus as “the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick.” That’s so good it makes me want to steal it. I contemplated popping into her comments section to tell her so, but I chickened out. She and her readers have a very low tolerance for the penis-burdened and their opinions. I’m still trying to work up the courage to put her in my favorites list.