The Aerie
Wow. I'm a hard one to apall, but I've managed it today.
Apparently the mercenaries that the U.S. is hiring in Iraq are going on killing sprees among innocent people according to the British Telegraph which reported the story. I won't hold my breath to see the video on U.S. television. of course. Not with our so-called "free press*" ("*free press" is a registered trademark of Rupert Murdoch, not to be used without the written permission of Fox Broadcasting").
Outlandish you say? Unbelievable? Yes it is, it's as unbelievable as the video that the mercenaries posted on the Internet!
[insert gape-jawed stare here]
This video, for those of you who don't wish to view it, shows the view out the back window of a truck as it drives down various busy roads in Iraq. The shot looks disturbingly like any suburban freeway in the United States. Then the clatter of automatic weapon fire accompanies puffs of smoke from just off camera, and the cars following the camera swerve and crash as their drivers are shot!
[insert flabbergasted obscenities of rage]
What? What? What is going on here!? I pay my taxes so that Halliburton an hire mercenaries to do this?
Meanwhile back in the U.S., the unravelling of the corrupt cronyist kleptocracy running this country continues. You may not know who Jack Abramoff or "Duke" Cunningham are right now, but believe me, by this time next year you will be so tired of hearing their names you'll want to puke. And if you already know who they are, you already want to puke.
These guys are the edges of the corruption in our capitol city - the guys too hamfisted and stupid to keep their nasty activities quiet. Like cockroaches, for every Abramoff or Duke you see, there are a dozen beady-eyed schemers taking money under the table. And I realized that's a mixed metaphor, but one CAN have cockroaches under a table, so it kind of works.
The only good part is that these greedy, craven morons are cowards. The reason Cunningham pled guilty is because he's agreed to give evidence against the other participants in his crooked deals. And so it will go, and so it will go, all the way to the top. President Bush is going to be handing out so many pardons that Avery will come out with a line of stationery just for the purpose.
Have you ever had your house burn down? I know that I haven't. But assuming everybody is out safe, I can imagine it's a terribly helpless feeling, watching it burn and trying to encompass what the next steps are. I imagine that's how it feels, and if so it is similar to how many Americans feel watching our nation these days.
To those of you not from this nation, believe me, from inside here it doesn't seem to make any more sense. I get the notion that the culture of Washington D.C. has become so detached from the day-to-day reality of the average citizen that they simply have no idea of how bad this looks from the outside. And in many cases, the participants in this madness have deluded themselves into believing that they are above and separate from the mundane needs of the United States. I think many of them are so blinkered and blind that they can't even encompass the idea that what they are doing could actually destroy the nation, or cripple the world.
So we're committing war atrocities in Iraq, war crimes at torture centers elsewhere, and we've made the First Classic Blunder of getting involved in a land war in, well, if not Asia, the Mid East. At home our electoral system is compromised (Google "Diebold" for more), our economy has been squandered, corporations are running the government, and our congress is divided between angry, brutal little men and cowards.
That's what it seems like to me, at least - that Washington D.C. has gone mad with power, privilege, and self-importance. Ideology, privilege, entitlement, denial, delusion, self-aggrandizement, rationalization, war, and madness seem to have infected our national capitol. Like watching one's house burn down, the rest of us can only gape at the spectacle and wonder what will be left when it finishes consuming itself.
Hopefully we'll survive this paroxysm of self-destruction. And if we do I'm sure that history will look back at these days when "Intelligent Design" is being taught in our schools and whole towns are still living in tents three months after Hurricane Katrina, and history will wonder just what the heck was wrong with people back in 2005.
Posted by Albatross at November 28, 2005 7:57 PM | TrackBack