The New Ugly Americans

The urban bourgeoisie are in a state of severe anguish.

Sometimes I really hate living in Seattle. The signs pop up everywhere these days. On telephone poles, outside homes, and even in storefront windows, these cardboard rectangles that stare at me throughout the day. Their red white and blue design, some kind of appeal to what little resurgent patriotism exists in Seattleites post 9-11, jar against the grey concrete, ashen sky, and emerald foliage that makes up the city's landscape.

"No Iraq War" is their pithy little message. The concentration of signs lead inevitably to the many small protests which are gaining in popularity. The signs are a call to arms for the pacifist faithful, and a stunning example of mindless herd-think, made material in double sided paper stock.

Even in the quiet, residential neighborhood where I live, the protesters gather in small groups, blocking the sidewalks and snarling already unpleasant rush hour traffic. These gatherings, never consisting of more than a half-dozen participants, are usually not staffed by unwashed, rough looking, dreadlock sporting 19 year olds, or even by elderly hippie burnouts, but instead by handsome late-20s-early-30s Gen Xers with conservative clothes and stylish preppy haircuts.

Undeterred by the Northwest's punishing January downpours, these cheerful looking people carry their signs with a look of intense smugness and joyous self-righteousness, giving exuberant thumbs up and waving when a rare passing car honks in support. The whole thing is like some high school football team's car wash. Occasionally they shout one of their beloved phrases; "no Iraq war!" Or "say no to Bush's war!" Or "no war for oil!" They never seem to forget that oil part. And of course you can't forget that Bush's greedy war will lead to the inevitable deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi Women and children. I mean, that's the point of war, to target civilians, right?

I walk though them on my way home from work. In years past I would normally stop and at least heckle them a little, but I can't do it now. Their willful ignorance simply infuriates me too much.

Back in my college days I had to deal with protests groups all the time on campus, and I was Mr. Heckler. Never did a distributor of the World Worker Weekly, or any other socialist pamphleteer, pass my sight without a bellowing, "Go back to Boston ya pinko," or "If you love socialism so much, move to Canada you red bastard." (In fairness, the Young Republicans always got a loving, "Go to Hell, ya damned God-boy!") Surprisingly, I'd often find a few people joining in after I'd yelled a few times (usually stupid, drunken frat boys, whose one great value, bless their brainless hearts, was in heckling). It was all great fun.

A part of that fun lay in the fact that these yahoos were harmless. I wasn't necessarily angry with the poor sods. Irritated, sure, but pity for their defeated worldview and their impotence prevented any rage. I'm sure the objects of my scorn were a little intimidated by a 6'1", 220 lbs, often intoxicated, Hawaiian shirt wearing man with wild ass-length hair (yes, I was a damned, dirty longhair during school) screaming McCarthyite slogans at them, but, fortunately, I am a peaceable man, and never had any violent intentions.

However, there is no fun to be had with these latest rounds of protestors. These are serious times, and they require thoughtful points of view. The best these yuppie wannabe Gandhis (I would call them useful idiots, but they wouldn't get past the base insult to understand the Leninist meaning of the phrase) can offer in the way of thoughtfulness is invective thrown at Bush, and tired pacifist slogans. The smarter ones might be able to quote some tripe they pulled out of one of our two nearly identical incestuous sister newspapers, or some even more insipid bits of information from one of the city's two equally similar alt-weeklies (Dan Savage in The Stranger seems to be a rare exception).

My fury grows as these same people who, in there great hipness, followed the cause of liberation for the oppressed people of Tibet, now join the latest cause celeb, allowing Saddam Hussein's viscous oppression of the people of Iraq to continue. I could confront them on their hypocrisy and probe the depths of their thoughts, however shallow that might be. So what, I could ask them, if inspectors haven't found any of Saddam's hidden weapons? He denies ever having the ones the UN inspectors knows about from earlier rounds of inspections. So what if oil is involved in the war equation? If oil is all we wanted we could just make a deal with Saddam. So what if we backed Saddam in the 70's and 80's? Any of our past foreign policy decisions, however immoral or stupid, can't erase the fact that Hussein's Iraq is one of the world's most brutal police states?

"But think of the women and children that will die if we attack!" they would reply with doe eyes. Well, unfortunately, I can't deny that civilians will inevitably die in any attack. Terrible as that may be, the numbers will be small, far smaller than if Hussein's regime is allowed to starve segments of the Iraqi populace disloyal to him for another five years, all the while building new palaces and weapons with UN oil for food money. And they will also be smaller than the number of Israelis killed when Hussein gives the Palestinians the weapons to destroy Tel-Aviv. And smaller again than the number of Arabs that would die when Israel retaliates by glassing every major Arab city.

"But we can deter him," one of the brighter meatbots would say. There is some truth to this argument, as he cannot openly develop his weapons with UN Inspectors in country. Unfortunately, the inspectors will eventually leave, weapons-free Iraq or no. The UN will tire of the issue and forget about it, as happened through the 90's, and then we're facing the same threat. And, although we have no hard evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, the inspectors cannot prevent Saddam from transferring weapons he already has to unsavory agents of terror.

At this point, one of the protestors would call me a filthy Bush-loving Republican warmonger, and he and his friends would all look quite pleased with themselves. This would be followed by my fist encountering his face repeatedly, my subsequent arrest for assault and battery, and the possibility of having a large cellmate named Bubba who thinks my lips are 'purty'. This is why I must never engage these people in debate. Self control over my rage would be impossible to maintain.

Of course, all these affluent young "peace activists" grew up in a society where their idea of oppression was getting busted for smoking pot in a high school bathroom. On the oil front, they drive cars as big and inefficient as even the most gas-guzzling environment hating Republo-meany. They grew up in a nation protected from foreign aggressors by a mighty army, protected from banditry by police forces reined in by the rule of law, and protected from the ambition of ruthless politicians by a government designed from the ground up with checks and balances.

There hasn't been a government sponsored mass-slaughter of civilians in the United States since the end of the Indian wars. Those acts were abhorrent then, but they are simply unthinkable now. Government-sponsored discrimination has been outlawed since the 60's. No Americans have ever been silenced by a secret police system, regardless of what Noam Chomsky or Michael Moore might say. Perhaps these protestors are simply incapable of imagining anything worse than their boring, pointless, middle class existence. Perhaps they truly are capable of equating John Ashcroft with Osama Bin Laden, or George Bush with Saddam Hussein. If so, they are only worthy of my disgust and hatred.

I don't know what it's like to live under oppression. And unless you've immigrated from one of the world's hellholes, neither do you. I certainly can't imagine having friends or family members disappear into the secret police headquarters, never to be seen again. I don't have to experience that to know that, even though they're born in a shit heap of a country on the other side of the world, Iraqis still deserve a better life. And the US military can deliver it.

For both Right and Left, the humanitarian justification for a war on Saddam Hussein's regime should overwhelm any potential costs. If the values that American society stands for and has benefited so much from (individualism, freedom of thought and speech, etc...) aren't worth bringing to the people of Iraq, why bother protecting them here at home?

The pacifist trendoids and their celebrity gods argue, with Sheryl Crow style eloquence, that war is always evil, and peace always good. I will be accused of being a Bush lackey for quoting the president's SOTU speech, but, "a future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all." And peace with an oppressive regime still intent on regional conquest and armed with a growing arsenal of devastating weapons is unconscionable.

Rednecks are often derided in literature and foreign opinion as "Ugly Americans". Well, as ignorant and unsophisticated as the rural middle and lower classes may be, nothing beats the oh-so sophisticated urban middle and upper-middle classes, The New Ugly Americans as I shall call them from now on, for raw hypocrisy, pointless contrarianism, and true indifference towards the suffering of distant peoples. And they can all go to hell for all I care.

 

Posted by Captain Mojo at January 30, 2003 12:25 AM | TrackBack