Law professors, masters of argument and influence, are of course assholes (i.e., servants of corporate power and/or practicers of deliberate diversion from confronting corporate power). But the art of their particular asshole-ism is interesting. Because, metaphorically speaking, and surely from ostensibly ‘progressive’ law professors, we would expect to find bright swirling veils of rhetoric covering their bloody assholes.
An example is Stephen Holmes, whose new progressive masterpiece is The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror. It is reviewed by Chalmers Johnson today (yesterday?) in Asia Times. Of course I haven’t read the book but will review it anyway and call Holmes an asshole because I’m an asshole too and ya get what ya pay for. (By the way, the review (and apparently the book too) is excellent and insightful).
Holmes argues that the ideas and ideologies behind the ‘war on terror’ are the root of that war’s incompetence and failure. And without breaking a sweat he spends an entire book dismantling and disparaging the lame, stupid fuck ideologues who’ve got the U.S. into the Middle East mess it’s in.
Well, du-uh, Stephen! Tell us something we don’t know, man! Readers actually would rather know WHY, after reading all those neo-con disasterpieces, you think we really, at bottom, invaded Iraq. Do you actually still (officially at least) buy that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld believed Saddam had WMD? You write:
If Saddam Hussein had actually possessed the tons of chemical and biological weapons that, in the president’s talking points, constituted the casus belli for the invasion, Rumsfeld’s slimmed-down force would have abetted the greatest proliferation disaster in world history.
Don’t get your underpants in a bunch, Stevey! Relax, dude, they KNEW Saddam didn’t have WMD, so they KNEW they would not be abetting the greatest wtf ‘in world history’. Du-uh!
The question is now, asshole law professor, why aren’t you interested in getting to the bottom of the story? Still on the fence for tenure? Taboos got you tongue-tied? But don’t you still really want to tell us why you think the Bush gang invaded? What was the true ‘casus belli’? After all that you and the rest of us have learned do you still think WMD was a ‘believed’ by Bush/Cheney/Rummy reason for the invasion? You threaten to dance with taboo here, but not really:
Because Americans … have sunk so much of their national treasure into a military establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an enemy that has now disappeared, they have an almost irresistible inclination to exaggerate the centrality of rogue states, excellent targets for military destruction, [above] the overall terrorist threat. They overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected) and underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as instruments of American power.
Americans’ inclinations? Bullshit! Get your understanding on matters of power halfway rational: it’s not about people. An army of very large and very influential corporations want to raise profits and for years they’ve influenced their mouthpieces to construct and advance (lame-brained) ideologies that just happen to call for huge military expenditures for decades to come. It’s a relatively minor matter, but corporations can’t just go to Congress and say, ‘Give us ever larger military budgets because you’re bought and paid for and we want to make more and more money every year.” So they ‘have to’ make up ideologies like neoconservatism that you ‘progressive’ professors then (when it’s safe, of course) knock down.
But you never pull up by its roots and show us the basic problem. That makes you useless asshole! Show us the military-industrial complex MONEY dominating our political system, that’s what our problem is, not its latest lame-ass ideological product. Holmes, there are huge forces at work in America that need to be confronted not danced around. All you did in your book is hammer some of the mediocrities who’ve globbed onto the fact that, no matter how dumbfuck it is, if an ideology includes a demand for huge expenditures on the military it can become politically dominant in the U.S.
So — and I’m sure you know but I’ll just put it on the record — the big elephant in the room is a political system controlled by and driven by the needs of our gianormous military-industrial complex. Du-uh! And this goes unmentioned in your friggin’ book on the whys and wherefores of our idiotic, destructive and tragic Middle East policy? Get your ass out of taboo-land, man! Otherwise you’re less than useless for helping the U.S. and its victims escape tragedy.
Chalmers Johnson much more kindly sums up the problem with Holmes’s book:
In my opinion, however, [Holmes] underplays the roles of American imperialism and militarism in exploiting the 9/11 crisis to serve vested interests in the military-industrial complex, the petroleum industry, and the military establishment. Holmes leaves the false impression that the political system of the United States is capable of a successful course correction. But, as Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, puts it: “None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of checks and balances … The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.”
Johnson then states the task ahead for America, made nearly impossible by the (aided and abetted by Holmes) taboo status of the problem:
There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic – becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force. To take up these subjects, however, moves the discussion into largely unexplored territory.
So a little optimism, it’s been done before, Great Britain did it. But first we have to start talking about it.
Also at http://politicalfleshfeast.com/editDiary.do?diaryId=936