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Cruel and Usual I have written this column in one form or another for five years without resorting to a single expletive. But to quote Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, we are in a world of shit. Thanks to Abu-Ghraib, the pseudo-conservative subculture that blew a gasket over Janet Jackson’s right nipple has gotten a harsh lesson in real obscenity. Compared to the US, the Catholic Church has a small, manageable PR problem. This is what happens when you let Tonya Harding in the army. If Lynndie England needed work as a dominatrix, she could have just come to the East Village. And where there’s a Tonya Harding, a Jeff Gillooly can’t be far behind. If this is the volunteer army, it’s high time for a draft. Unbelievably, a bunch of beauty school dropouts and high school bullies were supposed to be the one and only safety net between the Pentagon’s Jihad and the CIA’s human rights violations. You might as well leave Anna Nicole Smith in charge of the Sara Lee stockpile. And therein lies the crux of the administration’s hypocrisy, the likes of which haven’t been seen since Jimmy Swaggart shed crocodile tears on national television. While his entire term of office has been dedicated to ignoring, evading, and ultimately laughing off international law, George W. Bush expresses shock and awe over a Jiffy Lube assistant manager’s failure to identify, report, and thwart violations of the Geneva Convention. Then, with Swiss timing, Donald Rumsfeld issues a mea culpa more disingenuous than OJ’s when he said perhaps he was guilty of loving Nicole Brown too much. We’re told the problem is not one of directives from the top or a trickling down of attitudes. The real problem is, it’s so hard to get good help these days. And we’re going to see more fingers pointed at the help in the coming weeks than we have since Watergate. Jeremy Sivits cut a deal and got a year in the brig in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Law and Order. Meanwhile, right wing talk show host apologists for the unseemly acts committed at Abu-Ghraib routinely compare them to hazing. It’s reassuring to know that our regular army, reservists, and military intelligence units were trained by Sigma Chi. Brewsky, dude? I feel safer from terrorism already. The only thing more embarrassing to me as an American than the Abu-Ghraib photos was listening to Senator James Inhofe trying to justify them. But Inhofe and friends are the same people who asked us to mistake a few empty canisters for a sophisticated WMD program. Most recently, the discovery in Baghdad of barely enough sarin to give Calista Flockhart an upset stomach is being touted as the Holy Grail. You could drive an M1 Abrams tank through the current credibility gap, and the primary intelligence problem we face is its utter absence at the top. The Bush White House should follow George Tenet out the door single file. If the folks who decided to recycle Abu-Ghraib ran the Allied invasion of Europe, they would have used Buchenwald to hold Tae-Bo classes. Back in the good old days of 2003, we traded playing cards with the names and faces of the most wanted Baathists. Today’s playing cards feature American trailer trash at the Hussein Hilton taunting and violating whoever got picked up in yesterday’s sweep. Fifty-two of them won’t even get you past Lynndie England’s screensaver. This is the first war in history documented by a military Kama Sutra. There is enough unreleased material to put out a box set every six months till the public debt from this war has been retired. Abu-Ghraib is the Grateful Dead of American military prisons. For the sickest, most cynical minds within the US ruling class, the savage murder of Nick Berg served as a convenient counterexample of horror to help balance out American war crimes in Abu-Ghraib. But when it’s down to comparing ourselves favorably against terrorists, you know the battle for hearts and minds is over. Click here to rant back. |