Inspired by several discussions here and elsewhere, I started to reply to some comments, the replies got long, and were redundant, so I decided to just make it a diary.
We have no way of knowing, if your ten friends and a couple of hundred million other folks knuckled down and spent three or four years reading all the history and documents and white papers that you have, and a gazillion newspapers from as many countries every day, or nearly so, but what their conclusion might be somewhat out of the mainstream too.
Washington would prefer, however, that you and everybody else confine your current affairs reading to US corporate media, and that US corporate media confine its reporting to centcom news briefings and refrain from FOIA requests until it is repealed in the interest of national security and the war on terror, and your history reading to glowing accounts of grateful savages welcoming the friendly Pilgrims who wanted nothing more than religious freedom for themselves and anyone else who shared their religious beliefs, and how America cast off slavery with disgust as if it were a shat-upon garment as soon as they found out it was wrong in 1865, and from there proceeded to bring more light to more dark corners everywhere, spreading freedom and manifesting destiny with a bountiful hand from desert sands to palm-dotted isles.
That’s because they have no way of knowing either, just how much Joe the NASCAR dad will support those troops if he is not given the wiggle room to discount as exaggerations and tinfoil hat conspiracy theories just which details of which of their activities.
One of the things you learn if you are lucky enough to live long enough and know enough of the world, is that people are not that different from each other whether they live in a mud-wallled compound, a thatched hut, or a stunning 4 bedroom colonial w/basement, even a magnificent palace, or a houseboat, or under a cardboard box in an alley.
Regardless of all that, there will be a certain percentage of them who are fine, upstanding amiable people, some who are jerks, some who are very religious, some who are not religious at all, some who think they should be religious, some who are gay, some who are ignorant, and ignorant of that fact, and some who are ignorant by choice, and proud of that fact.
But the ones who are willing to do the intellectual and rhetorical and philosophical dirty work are one of the smallest groups in the bunch.
The folks who are willing to dive into the swirling, stinking unwholesome stew of past and present and pull out a gobbet of rotting offal to hold it up to the sun and analyze it, heedless of the maggoty drops that fall on their shoes, the revolting grease whose stench clings to their hands and nostrils forever after, are few and far between. I cannot express how much I cherish this blog’s brave dumpster divers.
It is natural to seek the path of least resistance, to want to believe the best about those one is taught to view as one’s leaders and protectors, and when that is not possible, it is natural to hold a preference for the demon one knows.
Forest-viewing is not the norm, most folks tend to stay focused on the trees. As someone, I think it was BooMan, if not, sorry, once pointed out, one of the reasons you don’t see much outrage in the US is that people do not perceive things like foreign policy, however malevolent, as something that affects them.
The US as a nation is an infant, a fetus, really, and so it is not surprising that Americans do not as a rule do not think in terms of centuries and millennia. Those who are affluent enough to do so engage in some personal finance planning that stretches into decades, but for the most part, people focus on today, next week, next year. That’s why so many of the ostensibly affluent are not really so at all – the luxurious homes and shiny cars are owned by the banks, and the designer clothes their “renters” wear are charged on credit cards, their affluence is a few paychecks and that retirement account minus the taxes away from poverty. They live in an illusive cloud of “lifestyle immortality” well into middle age, in much the same way as teenagers do dangerous and stupid things because death just seems like something that cannot happen to them.
Cognitive dissonance is not a conspiracy theory, it is a very real psychological phenomenon, and one of the things that sets Americans apart is that they have been exposed, for generations, to a constant diet of it.
With even ephemeral affluence comes the ability to insulate oneself even further from reality; with the exception of slaughterhouse workers, policemen and medical personnel, affluent Americans are protected from blood. Meat comes wrapped in plastic, neat bloodless cubes and rectangles, TV stations warn sensitive viewers before showing a bloodstain on the concrete where a 3 car accident leaving 7 dead and 3 decapitated occurred. Those who are familiar with TV coverage even as close as Spanish language channels in the US will know that is not normal.
Against this backdrop, what should Americans believe? Whom should they believe? Their politicians, their media, yes, even their pollsters 🙂 – all have their own financial interests – interests which are quite different from those of either Joe the NASCAR Dad or Erin the Soccer Mom whose tires Joe rotated today. And the interests of all those corporations are certainly not the same as those of Rosa from Guatemala who bathed and fed Erin’s little boy while she took the Escalade to Joe’s shop, or Joe’s daughter Cheryl, trying to raise her own little boy by herself on two shifts of minwage.
How can each of them reconcile the impossible moebius twirls of logic that require them to support and oppose, trust and dismiss, wage war for peace, tape peoples’ mouths shut for freedom, spread democracy with napalm?
They support the policies because if they don’t, they become the enemy of their own nation, yet by supporting them, they disgrace their own nation, which is looking less like a nation every day, but to dwell on that is to align themselves with the terrorists, destroy the village to save it, they cannot win, and if they did, just what would their prize be?
Is it any wonder then, that Anomalous talked to ten intelligent people who did not know who John Bolton is? One might argue that their successful avoidance of the subject is proof that they are indeed intelligent.
Maybe you have seen one of those cheesy old horror movies where the monster is smashing through the door, and the mothers cover their children’s eyes, and in broken, halting voices, begin to sing lullabies or whisper happy tales of magical castles and beautiful princesses.
What would be gained by yanking the mothers’ hands away?
