Sparsely, Sage and Timely
A gunship diplomacy of fools
By David V. Mitchell
Even mainstream newspapers periodically get accused of sensationalistic headlines, but seldom have I seen a more striking, albeit unintended, example than appeared in the Sept. 25 Marin Independent Journal. I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader shocked by a headline that appeared to predict the end of life on earth. Over a story datelined "Washington," The IJ wrote, "Report: No streams unpolluted; animals, plants face extinction."
But then, I have seldom seen Washington as out of touch with the American people as it is at present. The risk of the United States rushing into war in Iraq is a clear and present danger yet the idea is so preposterous that many of us citizens can’t believe our government would really do it without more provocation.
President Bush this past week tried to portray himself as another John F. Kennedy willing to taking on the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bush would have us believe that threat of Saddam Hussein acquiring "weapons of mass destruction" is similar to the threat the United States faced when the USSR tried to deliver nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro.
But it’s a phony comparison. Soviet ships bound for Cuba really were carrying nuclear missiles. Our government once claimed that Iraq might also have nuclear missiles but has now dropped the claim and merely insists Hussein would like to get some. And you know what Hussein is like, smirks Bush. Hussein’s crazy.
Is Hussein evil? No doubt about it? Is he crazy? I’m not so sure. In fact, it sometimes appears that President Bush is trying to out-crazy Hussein. I can imagine Hussein’s advisors huddled in Baghdad muttering, you can’t trust Bush. He’s berserk.
As The American Heritage Dictionary notes, "Our adjective [berserk] comes from the...Old Norse word berserkr, ‘a wild warrior or champion’....These berserkers became frenzied in battle, howling like animals, foaming at the mouth, and biting the edges of their iron shields." Sounds like the Bush Administration, doesn’t it?
Hussein obviously thinks the Bush Administration wants to go to war; that’s why he keeps making one compromise after another to avoid it. But every time he does, Bush responds that anyone who accepts the compromise is another Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who mistakenly believed that if Hitler were appeased, World War II could be averted. As usual, however, Bush garbles the language to where he expresses himself exactly backwards. It’s Hussein who’s trying to appease us, not the other way around.
As folksinging great John Stewart, formerly with the Kingston Trio, put it Sunday in Nicasio, "The government isn’t the nation. The people are the nation." And I don’t hear many people in this great nation clamoring for war. In fact, public opinion polls show Americans are strongly against it; even conservative columnist Cynthia Tucker has taken to castigating Democrats for kowtowing to the Republicans.
Of course, the Bay Area’s rightwing radio-talkshow hosts are trying to goad us into fighting. Otherwise they’re stuck gabbing about the Oakland A’s being knocked out of the baseball playoffs, whether the Golden Gate Bridge should have a center barrier to prevent head-ons, or whether lesbians should be allowed to adopt children. (You can tell it’s a slow news day whenever that old chestnut gets roasted again.)
Meanwhile, we have workers on the Interior Department payroll risking their lives to pluck colorful ice plants off the face of cliffs beside the lighthouse because the flowers, albeit beautiful, aren’t native. Well, isn’t that precious! Mind you, this is the same Interior Department that wants to open up the Arctic wilderness to oil drilling and to "thin" 190 million acres of national forests.
A few weeks ago I told Point Reyes National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher, whom I like, that we’ve reached the point where national parks are the velvet glove over the iron fist of the Interior Department. Neubacher was diplomatically noncommittal.
But it’s all insanity. There’s a deputy sheriff, a good man who’s no longer assigned to West Marin, who used to cruise Bolinas the night of Halloween, knowing that kids hiding downtown would pelt his patrolcar with eggs. The deputy realized that after he’d made a few passes through town, the kids would have used up all their eggs, and the rest of Bolinas would be spared.
Deliberately becoming a target so as deflect possible harm to others may be good police policy in a small town, but the Bush Administration has apparently decided to play that role internationally. On Tuesday, terrorists shot two unarmed Marines stationed in Kuwait merely because the Marines were there. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have been there, but the more we deploy troops around the globe to fight terrorism, the more likely it is that we will attract acts of terrorism à la the deputy in Bolinas.
Many of us in West Marin feel we’ve had a president, who wasn’t elected, foisted upon us. His fradulency was selected by Supreme Court justices (one of whom was married to a campaign manager for Bush) even though Al Gore received more votes than any president in US history other than Ronald Reagan. With every passing day, it is becoming more clear what the Supreme Court put in office: a den of rapacious, rightwing goofballs.