Some Remedial Truths for A Nation of Liars
by Dr. John Dolan
The Sept. 11 attacks have been useful in displaying the utter
bankruptcy of public discourse in contemporary America. The alternative to stammered,
unconvincing attempts at primal vengefulness has been the Left's conviction
that somehow, in some way, it must be our own fault. Nietzsche was so very right
about the Left that it's discouraging even to restate his hypothesis that Christian
ethics would grow stronger in the century after Christian belief died out. This
is the world inhabited by "Progressives": Flannery O'Connor's "Church
of Christ without Christ."
And as good descendants of the Mathers, American Leftists must somehow wriggle
toward the notion that "We deserved it." The problem with the guilthypothesis
is that there's no evidence that any nation, anywhere, has ever been punished
for its crimes. If such justice existed England would be a glowing crater. When
evil nations are punished for what seem like moral reasons, a closer look reveals
mere tactical mistakes as the cause of the "punishment." Nazi Germany
paid a terrible price, not for racist extermination camps, but for deciding
to invade Russia. What will happen is the military equivalent of an American
election: a pointless muddle tilting toward money and away from any real resolution.
And the simplest way of explaining this is by proving that, contrary to popular
belief, America is a nation which has little or no military power, and no weapons
at all.
What is a weapon, anyway? The most honest and practical definition is this:
A weapon is what you're willing to use as a weapon. The heel of a woman'sshoe
is a weapon; a uniball pen is a weapon, a razorblade taped to a toothbrush is
a weapon. A Boeing airliner loaded with jet fuel is a weapon. God, what a weapon!
But nobody noticed that until one fell into the handsof people who want to fight.
By this standard--being willing to use the shoe, or 767, orbomber--America,
at the moment, has no weapons at all. America is an impotent nation, with no
military force at all.
Y'see, you've been had, folks. You've been had more ways than Courtney Love,
in fact--but the biggest wad you ever swallowed was the notion thatthe American
conservatives are patriots, and advocates of military force.
No, no, no! They are pacifists, far more pacifistic than the average hippie.
It's weird, how none of you seem to get it yet. You saw it with Reagan, the
most cowardly of any president; you're seeing it now with GWB; but you still
don't realize that the Republicans shrink from the prospect of real conflict
like a white jock trying to weasel out of a fight with a Latino half his size:
they simply don't see why they should have to risk their pretty faces in any
contest, no matter how much the odds are stacked in their favor. And besides,
he might have a knife!
Look at them! Do you see our wretched longing for a big bang in any of those
faces? Look at Rush Limbaugh, their cheerleader: a draft-dodging closet-case
waving his queeny pom-poms for profit, not for war. Look at George W. Bush,
the paradigmatic sexually-confident frat asshole who'd run miles to avoid a
real fight! Oh, my poor naive war-nerd brothers, how could you ever have dreamed
that Bush, or Limbaugh, or that second-rate CEO, that GM Board-of-Directors
second-stringer, Donald Rumsfeld, ever shared our dreams?
Just listen to their attempt at war rhetoric! They don't even
get the back, Churchill! Roll over, Adolf! Here's a real communicator! If I'd
been watching that speech from Taliban HQ, I'd've felt victorious already, listening
to this trembling frat asshole stumble over his lines, unable even to stammer
out the face-saving formulae frat boys use to wimp out of basketball-court fights:
"Y-y-y-ou b-better watch it, man! B-b-back off, man!...I mean...shit, y-y-you
can't, like, blow up our cities like th-that..." The German would-be-nihilist
whiners in Big Lebowski did a better attempt at street threat: "I vock
you opp! I vock you opp!"And don't tell me Bush just blew his lines because
he's stupid. Stupid people make superb warmongers! What, Hitler was a genius?
No, Bush screwedup his lines because they're completely alien to him and his
kind. He can't see it.
Just because the American right wingers push for inflated Defense
budgets, that doesn't mean they connect that spending with real war. They love
Defense spending because it allows them to withdraw money from the accounts
of non-wealthy nobodies without making a single item which would make lifebetter
for those losers. Take Reagan--Reagan was the most cowardly president in the
history of the US, unwilling to attack anything scarier than Grenada. Reagan
used the defense budgest to fund weapons which were NEVER DESIGNED TO WORK.
Please try to realize this. I speak as somone who spent years reading every
issue of Aviation Week and Armed Forces Journal, and I learned this against
my will: Reagan funded ONLY those weapons which were NEVER DESIGNED TO WORK.
His administration fought hardest for weapons which were known to be inoperable,
like the B1 bomber and Star Wars.
Take the B1: how many sorties did the B1, the most expensive plane in history,
fly in the Gulf War? Answer: zero. Zero! You know why? Because it couldn't fly
in weather over 75 degrees fahrenheit. Star Wars was even closer to Reagan's
heart (so to speak), because it was even more expensivethan the B1 and could
be launched into space, where no one would notice that it was utterly, absolutely
useless--the ectoplasmic extrapolation ofthe useless alarm systems around those
"gated retirement communities" which are the Re;pulicans' true dreamworld.
Thus the republicans have never funded any weapon capable of being used ina plausible war scenario. (The bizarre congressional history of the Osprey,one of the few useful weapons the US possesses, demonstrates this.) Why would they want to fund useable weapons? Those things might get into the wrong hands--hands willing to pull the trigger.
The best example of a real weapon is the RPG-7--because every minute of every day, somebody fires one at somebody else with the straightforward intention of killing the fucker. But the B1? That's not a weapon. And Star Wars? That's not even a pretend-weapon. So the Republicans fear more than anything in the world simple, useable weapons in the hands of men too dumb to know that they and their weapons are obsolete. What the Republicans fear more than anything in the world isa dozen grimy losers with AKs on a Toyota pickup truck loaded with RPG-7 rounds and fitted with an old Soviet 14.5mm antiaircraft gun--because those weapons get used.
The American arsenal now consists of unuseable apocalypse weapons--weapons designed for a nuclear world war, from the B-52 to the cruise missiles--which have been expensively refitted with small, ineffectual conventional warheads.And these hugely expensive weapons, designed to wipe nations from the map, are being sent sneaking across the landscape, begging everyone's pardon as they go, in order to detonate apologetically, hopefully without hurting anyone, on some mud huts. This is how we "send a message." We send a message, all right; as one of the few honest spooks said, "It sends a message--a message of impotence." A nation which would rather throw away a fifty-million dollar cruise missile than risk the life of its few soldiers, let alone the lives of the people in the neighborhood of the targeted mud huts--is a nation with no effectual military power at all. Would you fear a cruise missile if you lived in Afghanistan? It's like the bumper stickers you see on old Plymouths: "Hit me, I need the money!"
Please "pound" me with your expensive cruise missiles!
Please make my mud hut feel important for a few days! And the message of impotence
is getting through loud and clear. Afghans are brave people, but behind the
times; they thought, up to this week, that America was a big, strong nation,
so they thought the American raids would make ordinary Kabul mortar-barrages
seem like a rubberband fight. They fled the cities in millions, heading for
the ancestral caves. But then they learned that this mad America was trying
to attack Afghanistan without hurting anyone. Now, after three days of bombardment,
the Afghans havelearned how very weak America is--so, inevitably, the latest
photos of life in Kabul show a population already returning to what it calls
normal,slowly awakening to the fact that America is afraid to hurt anyone. Astounding,
really, that the Reaganites who are so bloodthirsty in hiring assassins to kill
Mayan villagers should be so terrified of hurting other mud-hut people. But
you do see the difference between the Guatemalan villagers the Bush clan loved
to murder and the Afghans, don't you? It's simple: Afghans can fight. Republicans
love killing the helpless, but will run screaming from any opponent who shows
signs of fighting back. He might have a knife! Americans have so thoroughly
accepted their impotence that their newscasters now take for granted that only
the bin Laden or the Taliban will use serious weaponry. What if bin Laden's
people got hold of a nuclear weapon? Dear God, they might....USE IT! What if
they had biochemical weapons? They might USE THEM! What if they had a sharpened
screwdriver? They might USE IT on us! Nobody seems to have noticed that we have
a near-monopoly on useable nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry. It seems
to go without saying that we don't, in reality, have any of these weapons--because,
to repeat: a weapon is what you'll use as a weapon, and we don't have the courage
or thewill to use ours. You know: the ones you and your loser middleclass parents
have been paying for for the past half-century, while the shareholders of the
Defense-contractor companies laughed all the way to the bank.
In fact, there is only one nuclear power in the world, and it is Israel.
Israel has nuclear weapons and would use them without hesitation.
Imagine what would happen to the demographic map of the Middle East if bin Laden'speople
were dumb enough to pilot a 767 into the center of Tel Aviv. Next morning there
would be big, glowing craters where Damascus, Baghdad and Riyadh used to be,
and the West Bank would be a mustard-gassed wasteland. That is what it is to
have nuclear and chemical weapons; and by this standard, the US has no nuclear,
biological or chemical weapons at all. Of course there are little men, little
third-rate physicists on hire to the Rand Corporation, who have drawn up diagrams
with big circles indicating the effect of our nuclear arsenal on every city
in the world. I'm sure that somewhere in the Pentagon there's a map of what
Rejkjavik would look like after a small, medium or XL MIRV attack. Or maybe
those documents aren't there any more. Maybe they were in that wing of the Pentagon
which got burned up by a low-tech weapon, a 767 in the hands of people who didn't
get into a frat and don't have golden retrievers at home. I bet the Rand Corp
boys didn't see that one coming--not til the jet landed right in their offices,
an unscheduled stop, a clear violation of the rules of the game. Those Rand
Corp boy must be bursting with indignation about now, just like the cowboy in
that Far Side cartoon, outraged by the Indians' flaming arrows, who asks his
pard, "Hey! Can they DO that?" They can because they did; and we could
too...if we dared. Either we continue sending conventionally-armed cruise missiles
to blow up mud huts--which makes about as much sense as taking Microsoft's yearly
output, piling it up near Kabul, and then bombing it to smithereens--or we take
up the available means of persuasion: the nukes, the chems, the bios, the jammers--the
works.
We have things you healthy people have never dreamed of. I didn't
waste my time down in the basement reading those war mags! The things I learned,while
your kind was out on dates! We have things that make my kind drool. You don't
like killing people? We have non-lethal weapons you can't imagine. Take the
worst drug experience you ever had and multiply it by a thousand; we have gases
which can give every inhabitant of Kabul that unforgettable experience. We have
bacteria which will keep everyone in Afghanistan wiping their asses with their
prophet-decreed left hand from now til we give them the antidote. We have any
mental state you choose, in endless supply: terror, rage, sleep, despair....
We can make the entire country itch uncontrollably, til they beg to deliver
bin Laden on a plate to the nearest KFC deep fryer. If that smacks of violence
(oh, we can't have that!), then we can do the sort of passive aggressive torture
squeamish folk prefer: for example, we can make it impossible for anyone in
Afghanistan to use a telephone or radio or television every again--without having
to kill a single one of the pesky primates. We are God, if we will dare to be.
But would God--you know, Allah-is-my-copilot, that God--would He be so squeamish? Only an Episcopalian God would be, and if nothing else, the lastfew weeks should have convinced us that God Is Not An Episcopalian. Christ? Even Falwell admitted that Christ is out of it, gone to live in Aspen andmake goat cheese or something. God, let's face it, is either a Jew of Gush Emunim leanings or a classic Muslim stabber, a desert dervish with a daggerin his teeth. So let's ask the un-askable: What Would Yahweh do? What would Allah do?
He would cleanse the world. As we could, and still can. The
world is our garden, and we are too cowardly to prune it. Blake would understand
this, if only he were not in the possession of mere academics. Blake would tell
us, as Yahweh and Allah would tell us: act! Cleanse the world!We stand at the
first moment of history, not the last. (Fuk yu, Fukuyama!)
We have a choice of two scenarios:
1. We can let the world demographic trend continue. In a century the population
will be 14 billion devout imbeciles (a nice volatile mix of Hindu and Muslim--what
fun Saturday nights will be!). These headless mobs will sooner or later (bet
on "sooner") extirpate whatever remains of the techno cultures that
created them, then die back from plague and war--but only after exterminating
the truly valuable beings of this planet: the big cats, the birds of prey, the
cetaceans, the canids, the mustelidae.
2. We can prune now, using the weapons we possess: nuclear, biological and/or
chemical; and make of the world what we wish. So thorough has beenmisconceptions
about these weapons. "What about fallout?" Fallout is a choice. It
could be used to depopulate areas downwind of the target; but itis also possible
to extirpate whole populations with little or no fallout. All that is required
is an increase in production of neutron warheads, which could be done in less
than a year. Imagine the changes in the world, a week after we grasp the thistle
and work our will on the world! Think of the menus, the choice of landscapes,
we could make:
(A) Kill Jesus, Yahweh and Allah in one stroke, by nuking the entire Middle
East (except Turkey. Turks are cool). Jerusalem, the most fecund source ofvicious
delusions in human geography, is transformed into a lake of glass which can
never again infect a soul--as is Mecca, Medina and Bethlehem.Everything from
the Mediterranean to the Ganges, becomes, after a few decades of cooling, a
wildlife sanctuary: the Asian lion, now all butextinct, and the Tiger, a zoo
curiosity, roam free for thousands of miles. (Bikini atoll is now the finest
wildlife refuge in the Pacific.
(B) Suez to Burma, Chop-Chop: The demographic situation now is simple: South
Asia is a demographic tumor growing out of control. South Asiacontains 2 billion
people who show no sign of controlling their birthrate on their own. This tumor
must be removed. We wipe out every humanhabitation from the Mediterranean to
Burma, cutting the world population by one-third and producing an ash cloud
which will instantly eliminate global
warming.
(C) Dixie Fried on the Side: Some sticklers might feel that the plans outlined
above are unfair in that the US does all the culling withoutsacrificing any
of its own. This is a reasonable objection, and one which most intelligent Americans
will find it a pleasure to accomodate, simply byextirpating the human (using
the term loosely) population of all those states which seceded in 1861, along
with the sunbelt states which wastescarce water on mean old farts who deserve
instant death. Let's do our part! Let the South secede, not just from the Union
but from life itself! These states will be our contribution when we depopulate
South Asia and the Middle East. Think of the fascinating religious arguments
that SouthernBaptist fundamentalists can have in the Afterlife, where they will
meet Muslim and Hindu imbeciles with the same range of interests and IQ! It'sthe
right thing to do--and a pleasure, too! These options represent the moderate,
restrained uses of our available weaponry. There are two other options which
some might find extreme, but which must be mentioned, if only so that all of
us may choose freely:
(D) MacArthur and Patton's Revenge: This one is simple: we take out not only
the Middle East and South Asia but Western Europe and China as well.Asia becomes
one big tiger preserve. Destroying China cannot be justified on moral grounds,
because Chinese people are great and deserve a chance tosucceed...but you know
how bitter Europeans always tell Americans, "Your century is over! The
21st century will be the Chinese century"? You knowhow annoying it gets?
Well, we could, um, put a stop to that kind of talk pretty quickly by destroying
both the West Europeans and the Chinese.Unlike the Chinese, the Europeans deserve
it a million times over. The only real objection is that they're already so
dead, with no birthrate or reasonto go on living, that there's no need to kill
them. But remember: this is as much an aesthetic as a practical program! And
the world would be so much cleaner with them gone.
(E) Winter, Once and for All. This is the rigorous choice. Too rigorous for most of you, perhaps. It's simple: we unleash every warhead we have andbring nuclear winter, depopulating the entire planet. If you don't feel, in your heart, the justice of such a plan, then I can't explain it to you. All I can suggest is that you read about the Kakapo, the Tasmanians, the Famine, the Thylocene, the Cave Bear, the Smilodon....we have already killed our betters. The least we can do is make a belated amends. And if you still lack the courage to act, think of this: Elton John is in fashion again. Now, brothers: strike, and fear not!