Thursday, April 14, 2005
Please don't speak about the wars in the past tenseLast night I watched Bill Maher's Real Time
on HBO, an episode from last week that featured the anachronistic Joe
Watkins, a black conservative from Crossfire, Arianna Huffington, and
Ian McShane, an actor from the acclaimed HBO seriesDeadwood.
He had two video guests, Mario Cuomo and Richard Perle, who Maher
called the "Prince of Darkness." Over and over again, Maher insisted
that the invasion of Iraq will be worth it if it brings democracy to
the region and that already Iraq is stabilized and democratized, which
proves that Bush, Perle, and the other neocons were right, at least on
this one point. He talked about the war in the past tense, and made no
mention whatsoever of Afghanistan, which has been pushed so far into
the background I fear it has already been lost in the fog of memory. 9:30:27 AM | Regardless of what Bill Maher and the pundits tell you, Iraq has not been "democratized" yet and the war is not over. In fact, every day there is violence and to date 1549Americans have died, including 15 this month alone. Most vehicles are still not properly armored, even though the GAO continues to criticize the Pentagon for supply problems and other errors. I assume that Maher talks about Iraq in the past tense because, like many liberals, he is an optimist and wants to believe so badly that things are going well that whenever there's a lull in the coverage of the violence he exclaims success. (There has never been a lull in the violence, by the way, only the coverage.) The neocons are presented by the press as idealists, optimists to the extreme, but I've already talked about how that's not true. They may appear as idealists when their actions are taken at face value ("they must be optimists to believe we'd be welcomed with flowers, not bullets!") but not when we delve a centimeter deeper and see the motivations, execution, and consequences of their actions. Optimists, who care about soldiers, don't send them into battle with no armor, bad intelligence, inadequate supplies, and lies. They see a future and therefore act properly today in order to take care of the future. Neocons don't give a damn about today, let alone tomorrow. I'm reminded of Andrei Codrescu's Ay Cuba!, a book about his trip to Cuba in the 1990s. Since Codrescu grew up in Romania under a totalitarian "communist" regime, he read the daily Havana paper with his deciphering glasses to see through the "Commie Speak" and find the truth hidden beneath the propaganda. We need our own deciphering glasses (and hearing aids) now to sift through the miriad of lies and deceptions that are presented to us every day. If we pay attention, we'll see the "idealists" for what they are: greedy pessimists who only care about their own well-being and future. They do not give a damn about anybody else. In this way they are no different than their totalitarian, Stalinist counterparts who saw the party as a tool to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority. They warned us that they "create our own reality"and that those of us who live in the "reality-based community" are only here to study the realities they create. It makes sense then that every soldier's death, every civilian's death, every injury ( most grave, including brain damage, blindness, deafness, and literally thousands of lost limbs) is ignored in our new reality, the one made for us by Perle et al and perpetuated by pundits (and now Bill Maher). I forgive you, Bill, because I assume you reached for the rose-tinted glasses instead of the deciphering ones, and you want to believe so badly you've convinced yourself regardless of the overwhelming evidence presented to you. But please, don't speak about the wars in the past tense. These are real human beings, not numbered abstractions. They are our husbands, wives, sons, daughters, dads, and moms. They are real! And every death, every injury, means another family irrevocably harmed here in the present. To speak of them in the past tense is to dismiss them and render them invisible, to throw them down the fire-lust memory hole. If we're not careful, the entire war will be lost to our desire to forget, creating a surreal landscape of occasional flickering war images on evening newscasts in the background, with smiling pundits surrounded with flowers in the foreground. We can't let this happen! Please, don't speak about the wars in the past tense! 
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Last update: 8/24/05; 8:15:28 PM .
