But tonight I’m going to bed in a vicious mood, with a stomach so full of contempt for this poisoned republic and its brain-dead citizens that I can taste it in my mouth, like bile.
Back to Main
September 24, 2005
WB: Karma
Comments
The gleet of the body social.
Springer’s obscene little spectacles of people as objects may not have started it, but he gave things a push in this direction. His audience chose not to notice it was they who were being debauched.
Posted by: eftsoons | Sep 24 2005 6:41 utc | 1
3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine
Three former members of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves.
…
In one incident, the Human Rights Watch report states, an off-duty cook broke a detainee’s leg with a metal baseball bat. Detainees were also stacked, fully clothed, in human pyramids and forced to hold five-gallon water jugs with arms outstretched or do jumping jacks until they passed out, the report says. “We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them,” one sergeant told Human Rights Watch researchers during one of four interviews in July and August. “This happened every day.”
The sergeant continued: “Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did it for amusement.”
I am glad that Billmon is picking up this story. I linked to it on a few site a couple of months ago, with no reaction what-so-ever. I can’t find the link anymore, but the story was on a Iraqi site, either Raed in the middle or one of the others – so the Iraqi have know about this for quite a while.
Posted by: Fran | Sep 24 2005 7:00 utc | 3
I have to stop myself from thinking of who to get rid of! I start out with the obvious ones and then I’m throwing in people who back into parking spaces! Then I go back and say “Hell! Everybody who has a cell-phone”! In 5 minutes I’m down to maybe 1,000 people out of 6,000,000,000. Then I start thinking that I just know that some of that 1,000 would do something to annoy me so I just quit until the next time! I never have a headache or upset stomach!………..I drink a lot on occasion though!………………….Good Luck to anyone in Rita’s path!
Posted by: R.L. | Sep 24 2005 7:16 utc | 4
“It is no sign of mental health to be well adjusted to a sick society.”
– J. Krishnamurti
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 24 2005 7:32 utc | 5
“It is no sign of mental health to be well adjusted to a sick society.”
– J. Krishnamurti
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 24 2005 7:33 utc | 6
“The Sociopath Next Door”
“The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us”
By Martha Stout
From the Book Jacket:
“Who is the devil you know?
Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was
not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and
colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in
The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that
a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people – one in twenty-five – has an
often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that
person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to
feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans,
therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your
neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel
absolutely no guilt.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 24 2005 7:44 utc | 8
There is no way of knowing for certain who is innocent and who is wicked.
Why did you look at the photos?
This is not just American. It is human nature everywhere. There is a prurient streak that runs through human nature and an irresistible inability to resist looking at what is deemed taboo. The lust for the torture photos was as shocking as the behavior itself to me. And now the desire to see more, as if the public has missed something really satisfying. The repeated peering at human horror… once is not enough I’ve noticed… feeds these atrocities even more.
people look at sex, torture, surgery, accidents, with an iron fisted fascination. When those images aren’t there, they watch horror and crime movies.
As long as all of us have this appetite and insist on looking repeatedly at these things, we will never attain the self mastery that will rid us of this primitive, sociological, psychological, religion induced battles of shame, lust, and taboo within the human creature.
We’ve got to turn away. Or find some way to deal with it better. And its in the hand of all of us.
Posted by: jm | Sep 24 2005 7:58 utc | 9
Actually one does not, because It. Is. Not. Done.
Uncle S. I would bet anything that a good number of Dr. Stout’s colleagues and at least one or two ex-consort is a psychopath by her measures.
Posted by: eftsoons | Sep 24 2005 8:30 utc | 10
words fails me…
HOUSTON, United States (AFP) – As the first winds of Hurricane Rita whipped at the power lines across the street, Virginia Lewis Mansfield huddled in a doorway with all her earthly possessions within arm’s reach.
Homeless for the past three years, Mansfield found herself on the streets of Houston Friday night as many of her usual shelters were closed ahead of the hurricane.
Police officers parked a few blocks away had few suggestions: there was one women’s shelter that might be open, or else she could ask at the police station nearby if it would be okay to sit in the lobby until the storm subsided.
But Mansfield had already tried the Salvation Army shelter.
“It’s full,” she said as she brushed her hair in front a soup kitchen door painted with the words “no trespassing or sleeping in doorway” in red capital letters.
“There’s nothing I can do,” the 44-year-old schizophrenic said, adding that she hadn’t eaten in two days.
Mansfield was one of scores of homeless people left to brave Hurricane Rita on the streets because of a lack of communication, coordination and shelter space. City officials said they did their best to help the city’s most vulnerable evacuate by bus or air but to many left on the street in the rain, they hadn’t tried hard enough.
Some people found shelter in parking garages. Others tucked themselves under the upper banks of freeway overpasses. Dozens more stayed in their usual spots on the side of roadways and the doorways of shuttered downtown businesses.
A man named Charles sat in a chair on Chartres Street under the I-45 freeway.
“There’s no help. Nobody’s got any money. Nobody’s got anything to eat,” he said as two of his friends nodded their heads. “The men’s shelter is closed but they won’t let us in at the women’s shelter.”
Charles said he didn’t want to get on the evacuation busses because he didn’t want to leave Houston.
“There’s a big baseball stadium right there how come they didn’t open it up?” he asked, pointing across the road. “They opened the Astrodome to help the people from Katrina, how come they won’t open it up for us?”
City officials said they chose not to open any shelters in Houston because they did not think it was safe to do so in a hurricane zone. Instead, they asked residents to evacuate on their own or to call a hotline if they needed help getting out of town.
The Red Cross and several schools opened around 40 shelters of last resort within the city for people who needed a safe place to go to avoid the wind. But city officials chose not to publicly announce the locations of those shelters, leaving it instead to police and emergency workers to determine who needed to be taken there.
“If you announced a shelter, what we would have had is people who were fearful would have rushed to the shelter and they would have been overwhelmed and the people on the streets would be crowded out,” Frank Michel, the communication director for the mayor’s office told AFP.
Michel said there had been a number of complaints about the way the evacuation plan had proceeded. But he thinks the city did everything it could to help residents prepare for the storm.
“We are a city of four million people. Did we take care of everyone? Probably not. Are there homeless people with mental difficulties we couldn’t help? Yes,” Michel said. “We’ve made an effort to help. In our disaster planning do we cure the problem of homelessness? No.”
link
Posted by: charmicarmicat | Sep 24 2005 8:32 utc | 11
Billmon baby, you owe us big time for subjecting us to this. Better be some beautiful stuff up tomorrow!
Which is worse – that site & the trash it attracts, or this comment from the Brass:
But Centcom spokesman Matt McLaughlin said that, in general, “Centcom recognizes DoD regulations and the Geneva Convention prohibit photographing detainees or mutilating and/or degrading dead bodies.” He added, “Centcom has no specific policy on taking pictures of the deceased as long as those pictures do not violate the aforementioned prohibitions.”
…
Christopher Conway, a Defense Department spokesman, noted that Internet technology has been beneficial for combat troops; according to Conway, troops link up via the Internet to share information about “lessons learned” on the battlefield.
Here is my offering, to help cleanse fellow barflies. May it return you to the land of the living w/dignity & love. Joan Didion wrote a book on the trauma she went through the year after her husband died. It’s excerpted in the Guardian today.
“Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.”
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file (“Notes on change.doc”) reads “May 20, 2004, 11:11pm,” but that would be a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.
Article continues
For a long time I wrote nothing else.
“Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.”
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant”. I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary”, because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognise now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the hard shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. “He was on his way home from work – happy, healthy – and then, gone,” I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident.
In outline. At approximately 9 o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue more commonly known as “Beth Israel North”, where what had seemed a case of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock. This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. link
(B- sorry excerpt longer than usual, but it took a lot to wash away the festering filth.)
Posted by: jj | Sep 24 2005 8:37 utc | 12
When I was in Vietnam, some people carried pictures of dead Vietcong/NVA, not really popular viewing, see my vacation (please no) pictures notwithstanding — but hey, we had music, we had drugs, we had sex, we had major slacking on the ground, and we had the resistance back home. In Iraq they got nothin but a death fetish for transcendence, which by comparison, to home town values of sex, drugs, and rock and roll — is nefarious and full tilt masochism, that not unlike the (W)hat now president ? is the personification of. This particular personality lusts in death at once as the will to live only to conclude that what one wins is only death — a classic death wish — unvarnished, and uncomprised by the normal self destruction instinct found in domestic vice. This will only get worse.
Posted by: anna missed | Sep 24 2005 9:29 utc | 13
The Unforgiven
Little Bill Daggett: I don’t deserve this… to die like this. I was building a house.
Bill Munny: Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.
[aims gun]
Little Bill Daggett: I’ll see you in hell, William Munny.
Bill Munny: Yeah.
Posted by: manowar | Sep 24 2005 11:17 utc | 15
The country’s mood changes with its politics. When Bush was elected you just knew we were going back to the cruel, asshole days of Reagan and Bush I. On the streets, on the sidewalks, in public places, asshole behavior comes in with this bunch.
Posted by: ken melvin | Sep 24 2005 12:24 utc | 16
“I’m not sure even the Nazis would have thought up something like that — they generally tried to keep their war crimes hidden from the volks back home.”
On the other hand, the Nazis’ pals in Croatia, the Ustashe, were quite fond of photographing their atrocities. In their case it was a religious fanaticism about the rightness of the genocide they were conducting.
With the American troops, I think it might be more the need to dehumanize the ememy in order to make what their doing seem justifiable. Less charitably, it might just be a feeling of pleasure that comes from creating a distance between perpetrator and vicitim. The more totally the one is dominated the more the fantasy of power, domination and superiority in the other is fueled. Of course it is not the enemy that ultimately gets dehumanized by this.
As far as Texas goes, it reminds me of the murder by dragging of James Byrd in Japser a few years ago and the still quite active klan culture that pervades parts of east Texas. As a Texile myself, I must admit to some mixed feelings about the destruction of my hated childhood home. But clearly the people who will suffer most are not the ones who deserve it.
There is no god or justice.
from
THE LITTLE FASCIST
“What Do You Say After You Say Hello?”
by Eric Berne
Every human being seems to have a small fascist in his head. This is derived from the deepest layers of the personality (the Child in the Child). In civilized people it is usually deeply buried beneath a platform of social ideals and training, but with proper permissions and directives, as history has shown again and again, it can be liberated into full bloom. In the less civilized portion of the population, it is openly exposed and nurtured, and awaits only proper opportunities for periodic expression. In both cases it is a strong force in advancing the script [a life plan based on a decision made in childhood, reinforced by the parents, justified by subsequent events, and culminating in a chosen alternative]; in the first case, secretly, subtly, and denied; in the second case, crudely or even proudly acknowledged.
But it may be said that whoever is not aware of this force in his personality has lost control of it. He has not confronted himself, and cannot know where he is headed.
A good example of this occurred at a meeting of “conservationists,” where Conservo remarked how much he admired a certain tribe in Asia for taking such good care of their natural resources, “much better than we do.” A humanist countered, “Yes, but they have a terrible infant-mortality rate.” “Ho, ho,” said Conservo, and several others joined in. “That’s all to the good, now, isn’t it? There are too many babies as it is.”
There’s plenty more in the out of print book.
thanks for bearing witness and sharing your response. it’s important not to turn away — isn’t that mamma bush not wanting slime her beautiful brain?.
now, after awareness, what to do so that your humanity & truth survives? it’s the history of the planet.
[this same author stunningly contends that joy [my word] is even more powerful than authority — here:
THE ILLUSION OF AUTONOMY
Eric Berne
“The road to freedom is through laughter, and until he learns that, man will be enslaved, either subservient to his masters or fighting to serve under a new master. The masters know this very well and that is why they are masters. The last thing they will allow is unseemly laughter. In freer countries, every college has its humor magazine, but there are no such jokes in slave-holding nations like Nazi Germany or Arabia. Authority cannot be killed by force for wherever one head is cut off, another springs up in its place. It can only be laughed away, as Sun Tzu knew when he founded the science of military discipline. He first demonstrated this to the Emperor by using girls from the harem, but they giggled when he gave his orders. He knew that as long as they were laughing, discipline wouldn’t work. So he stopped their laughing by executing two of them, and after that the rest did as they were told–solemnly and indignantly. Conversely, no comedian has ever been the head of a state for very long; the people might stand it, but he couldn’t.”
Maybe this would explain the power of a Jon Stewart.
I’m off to consider how to laugh at the apes until they cry.
Posted by: whale shaman | Sep 24 2005 16:20 utc | 18
I got to call a bit of bullshit on the bartender here, or at least on The Nation for reporting the story incorrectly. Solders get free access to the site if they post any pictures from Iraq, in the gory or the non-gory section, so basically the owner of the site gives soldiers free porn for the images of Iraq that the mainstream media isn’t willing to let the public see.
Sure the board attracts a lot of sadistic fucks and it seems that the operators are little green football operators. But if you can put that behind you there is such raw realism there that I find it incredibly compelling. Though it does make me feel sick reading the comments.
I also think that the bartender has been deliberately ignoring large parts of the internet if he is surprised about this.
Posted by: alf | Sep 24 2005 16:38 utc | 19
This is not a surprise; being a soldier is not an attractive job option. When the army is volunteer-only and being a soldier is basically just a job, soldiers will be disproportionately those who can’t avoid it (the poor, people who joined to pay for college, etc.) and those who enjoy soldier activity, which, when push comes to shove, means killing people. (The more so for recent recruits.) The latter group are basically sociopaths. Aside from the pressures of being an American soldier in Iraq, which would probably make anyone weird in the head, I would guess that the number of sociopaths in the U.S. army is much higher than in the population at large, even in places like east Texas.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid this effect, without a draft. If you try to introduce rules against this sort of thing, you just drive the behavior underground—to say nothing of the problem of enforcement, especially when the army is under someone like Bush. (After all, there are already rules against this sort of thing!)
Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 24 2005 16:45 utc | 20
Umm, isn’t this along the lines of news media not showing dead bodies because it’s “too disturbing”? The best way to get rid of gross pictures of blown up bodies is to stop blowing up bodies…
Posted by: doug r | Sep 24 2005 16:50 utc | 21
You know, something we — I’ve been thinking a lot about how America has responded, and it’s clear to me that Americans value human life, and value every person as important. And that stands in stark contrast, by the way, to the terrorists we have to deal with. You see, we look at the destruction caused by Katrina, and our hearts break. They’re the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people. It’s a war on terror. These are evil men who target the suffering. They killed 3,000 people on September the 11th, 2001. And they’ve continued to kill. See, sometimes we forget about the evil deeds of these people. They’ve killed in Madrid, and Istanbul, and Baghdad, and Bali, and London, and Sharm el-Sheikh, and Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Around the world they continue to kill.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Posted by: Steve Jones | Sep 24 2005 17:07 utc | 22
Praise wet snow
falling early.
Praise the shadow
my neighbor’s chimney casts on the tile roof
even this gray October day that should, they say,
have been golden.
Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney’s shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,
that which imagined us, which stays
our hand,
our murderous hand,
and give us
still,
in the shadow of death,
our daily life,
and the dream still
of goodwill, of peace on earth.
Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.
-Denise Levertov
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
—William Carlos Williams
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
Posted by: catlady | Sep 24 2005 17:16 utc | 23
@eftsoons: Thanks for “gleet,” a word I decided long ago was one of the most disgusting in the English language.
@Whale Shaman: speaking of laughter, how ’bout…
Dick, Dubya, Rummy, and Condi walk into a talent agent’s office. Dick sez “We’ve got this great act you gotta see; it’s a family act. First Dubya and Condi….”
(circa 523 words omitted, use your imagination. Be sure to include “gleet.”)
Talent agent, shaking his head, “That’s some act, what do you call it?”
Dick, with a clever gesture: “The Aristocrats!”
Posted by: catlady | Sep 24 2005 17:25 utc | 24
I too saw that site a while ago – either because Fran posted it or it was mentioned on an Iraqi site.
(Geneva conventions, anyone?)
What is new is directly exchanging gore for porn, though the exchange business is not a serious – it is more “like, like” we’ll just share interests….
Generally:
1) gore, death, snuff movies
2) cute or clumsy porno pictures of real non-professional sex trade women, who thereby become goods for sale/exchange, photographed and owned by their husbands or lovers
were separate genres..
But the necrophiliac, sadistic, frat boy mentality of many, creates a primitive tribe mentality: eviscerated, destroyed, rotting enemies, and XXX shots of owned women are part of the same ball park – dead or living flesh, quivering or not.
I watched Tv yesterday. A US soldier told bout playin football with Iraqi heads.
How anyone can imagine that War is the noble business of clean boys is completely beyond me. Modern cams and the internet just provide new avenues.
Posted by: Noisette | Sep 24 2005 17:49 utc | 25
remember .. it was leaked trophy photos that brought to public light the satanic monkey business of abu graib, and its the truly nc-17 stuff that is being held back for fear of the further erosion of pro forma support.
the more cameras in the field, the more photos, the more warporn sites — the more fact.
.. and thereby hopefully causing more punctures in the Fox hypno-jive, and more hotseats and flak for the steven cambone motherfuckers of this dark age we’re suffering.
btw stan goff pointed out that site weeks ago.
Posted by: bianco | Sep 24 2005 18:03 utc | 26
Now we know why people have always made such a freaking big deal about honor and truth and all that other stuff.
In poison there is physic; and these news,
Having been well, that would have made us sick,
Being sick, will in some measure make us well …
Posted by: eftsoons | Sep 24 2005 18:14 utc | 27
Thanks, Billmon, I’ll work on those bleeding ulcers now.
Luckily or not I’m in a country today that prohibits easy access to firearms.
The avian flu would keep us from working through a lot of difficult problems or a lot of inconvenient karma.
If I’m chased down the streets in Germany or the Netherlands this week, I’ll let you know. Hopefully I can write in from Massachusetts next weekend. Will we make it?
Posted by: christofay | Sep 24 2005 18:48 utc | 28
It may be good that people get to see how horrifying war really is instead of the sanitized Rambo version we get from the media. After seeing the true inhumanity of war, they may not be so eager to support and send their children to that horror.
Posted by: Urban Sombrero | Sep 24 2005 18:59 utc | 29
I had thought I would pass by that site and those like it without comment because none of us can truly know what sick shit is going on in someone’s head when they reduce something that was thinking moving shitting laughing to a pile of ground meat.
But when people react with “what else do you expect get over it” then the site has done the work that Rumsfeld, Cheney and the other besuited sickos couldn’t.
Aberrant behaviour (ie killing someone and glorifying their death) has become normalised to the point where even those who loath this war shrug their shoulders and move on.
I have a feeling that many of the killers that post on sites such as this aren’t sociopaths and it is because they can’t deal with the conflicting thoughts that their killing has brought up that they have posted their trophies.
I’ll try and explain. By posting these photos the posters are in effect denying the victims’ humanity.
The killers are saying “I’m a reasonable person who doesn’t kill people. I kill ragheads who aren’t people which is why I have posted this. If that corpse had belonged to a human I wouldn’t be able to laugh and mock this death the way I do”.
“If this was the body of a human there wouldn’t be a site where I can swap images of this meat for images of other blokes’ wives.”
So when we shrug our shoulders and move on we are complicit with the killers in seeing victims as non people.
As for the brass allegedly ‘turning a blind eye’ to this they know exactly what they are doing. They want to keep the killers killing and if this site assists that then go for it.
Of course long term it’s not going to be very good for the killers because once they get some distance between themselves and Iraq many of them will be forced to acknowledge to themselves that Iraqis are people and they not only killed people they also tried to humiliate them in death. Those killers will have a hard row to hoe but Rummy and co will have washed their hands of them long before.
Others will be unable to let themselves come to terms with what happened. Many will be like the Vietnam vets who when they look over their garden fence don’t see Tran Nguyen they see just another ‘Gook’.
Whichever type these killers become both the site and their bosses have done them a great disservice by encouraging this sort of ersatz catharsis.
For me I’m not going to spend too much time worrying about them though. My cares are for the people they are trying to dehumanise. However if I lived anywhere near the place these killers were coming back to I would be doing everything I could to get sites such as this closed. And I don’t mean by trying to pass a law that by the time it comes into play will be redundant and useful only for further repressing the population.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 24 2005 22:08 utc | 30
Speaking of karma, the last of the Budda’s Five Remembrances is: “My actions are my only true possessions. I cannot escape the consequences of my own actions.”
Put another way, it is to say: “What we do to them, we do to ourselves.”
We cannot create peace by continuing the war. We don’t have to withdraw from Iraq, but we have to stop inflicting violence. It would take some very creative thinking to see how we can begin to undo the damage we have done, and it will have to begin with a confession that we have made a terrible mistake starting this war.
The consequences have already begun to come back to us by not having all the Guard in Louisiana, by having soldiers so traumatized that they mistake New Orleans for Baghdad and think they are going into the city to fight insurgents instead of rescuing their people, by spending FEMA and Corp of Engineers money on terrorism and the war.
And what is going on in individual homes where veterans have come home bearing this violence in them to their wives and children?
What we do to them, we do to ourselves.
Posted by: pragmatic realist | Sep 25 2005 0:21 utc | 31
I wish Billmon’s realization would break out in Congress and in the higher echelons of the Democratic party as a whole.
Clintons. Kerry. I’m talkin’ to you.
All your policies and stratagems about the Middle East are self-serving delusion.
The Djinn of Chaos has been released, and our only chance of survival is to ask nothing of him, guardedly turn around, and walk away.
If we are very lucky, the sands of time and the desert will bury his bottle deep.
why is there this surprise
violence is as american as apple pie
america exports violence – literally, ideologically, culturally
it celebrates the extinction of humanity behind its false celebration of the individualists collosus
the united states is the home of terror – it cultivates it – it nurtures it, it arms it
it is a country that has not only instigated murder but has initiated partnerships of murder throughout the world
what you see on that site – you could see in any vietnamese laotian or cambodian village, you could seeit all over the indonesia & the phillipines, you could even witness it in the jails of portugal & greece – in central & latin america – the earth is covered in the blood of innocents – every inch as savage sad & sordid as that exposed on that site
when i see the explosed head of an iraqi – i see the exploding head & mouth of bill o’reilly
when i see the bodies covering the paths & roads – i see the boardroom of newscorp & it eveil henchmen – rupert chief amongst them. they are not innocents. the know their words are covered in blood & they have every intent of widening the circle of blood
they do not care an ounce for the aerican blood – not at all – for it is poor black & marginal or all three at the same time
it is murder incorporated that an albert anastasia would have been proud of – rumsfield – the diseased & syphlitic lepke
the anarchist durutti dreamed of the cities of the bourgeoisie being surrounded by proletarian forces – unfortuantely all that surrounds the bourgeois metropolis – is the nightmares of their own creaion
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 25 2005 1:05 utc | 33
i have been silent thus far on this thread because i was so uncomfortable, agonized, not trusting my words. a few hrs prior to this karma post i opened vikdums link on the neocults thread. shocked doesn’t begin to describe my reaction. the face, the horror. i closed it very afraid and for the first time emailed b. subject:help. make it go away, disappear it. i just thought it was so unfair to have it thrust apon us w/no warning. in all its gruesomness. the implication, the reality, way too much. i am weak, i am a total wimp, the glorification of death, the conquest, the disgust. a couple hrs later there was billmon addressing it. oooh do i have to see this, face it. in my heart i must believe for every atrocity, every horror, every misfortune, there is a balance in this universe. maybe these images will show us the evil lurking behind the guise of patriotism. the scrappings of the bottom of the barrel are carrying out this injustice, and we are all complicit. this is in our name. i went to the protest today in seattle. walked in front of a brass marching band playing saints come marching in. we need saints now. i pray with all my heart. let us heal. i am so sorry. so very sorry. all day i cry. tears on my face. i am so afraid.
Posted by: annie | Sep 25 2005 1:32 utc | 34
annie
you have every reason to be afraid. this administration is without question the most murderous & rival anything that the nixons & the reagans ever did. & there is such a psychopathic streak in the new america that the likes of foxnews celebrate as if it is a virtue
i have been rereading the hagakure by joch yamamato & the commentaries of mishima & i am reminded that even these fascist servants of the oligarchies were fundamentally decent & moral men – the opposite of what is in essence the armed forces of american capital
& i am reminded reading lao tseu – how much the resistance in iraq deeply deeply understand the nature of war & for all the wealth poured into military institutions of (higher learning) – of how imbecilic they are. they think n the end the level of force will decide – there is absolutely no ideas of time & space – let alone of culture & geography
& culture steeped in that form of ignorance is a danger to others but also to itself & that is being proved to us every day
to be afraid while being in the middle of a tidal wave of bestial murder seem normal to me
but being afraid means that the poor the marginalised have to carry a disporoportionate weight in creatubf resistance to that lurder. we too must carry that weight
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 25 2005 2:05 utc | 35
I think so many many of us struggle with this question about when to pull out. For me and my friends, this has been a two year discussion because for two years all but the most lame have known this was a lost cause. A lot us started out saying something along the lines of what Prof. Juan Cole is now proposing (there’s no one I respect more than Dr. Cole and I don’t fault his reasoning). As tough as it is, I , too, say pull out now, before more die, that further death won’t make a difference. I think that, as Tolstoy and others have said, whatever will be will be. I’ve come to think that all wars such as this are insane, little more than mass murder. Lots of people die and whatever was going to be the end result is the end result. Sure Saddam was a murderer, but so is George Bush and so was Churchill.
Posted by: ken melvin | Sep 25 2005 2:25 utc | 36
The dirty little not-so-secret about the Iraq war is that the mistake was made to even go in.
To those who argue that leaving Iraq quickly would lead to civil war and much death, I agree. But my question is this. Wasn’t that inevitable with the end of Saddam? With or without U.S. involvment, the Iraqis have to work out long standing tribal, ethnic, and religious differences that have been in existence for a long time.
The presence of the U.S. merely postpones the inevitable at the cost of American lives, treasure, and credibility. I wish,…I truly wish….. we could do something to make it different. But we can’t.
Period.
The die was caste when we set out (for whatever reason) to involve ourselves. Bush I and his cronies knew this. Bush II and his idiots were too naive to get it. Now, a lot of dead people can testify to that naivete.
Bush II and his idiots were too naive to get it.
So it seems.
I agree with Bernhard.
They not only got it, they were counting on it, hoping to use it to fuel their Endless War and Endless Profit.
I am certain they are very disappointed there was no violence in D.C. today they could use as an excuse to declare martial law everywhere.
ok, b suggested i write about this experience months ago but i have no courage. i hosted some iraqi women at my home thru a international group. no journalists allowed and i would fear they may loose clearance if they are identified. but i could not hold back and just serve the tea. they were sponsored thru some womens group re/women in business or some such that is i’m sure connected to some cpa/right wing cheney wife fiasco. one of the women was a popular tv personality dear abbey type prior to the occupation, answering personal questions. another woman said as a child she watched her regularly and had been a fan. the tv woman was a sunni as was the husband of the fan. there was also a palestinian woman. right off the bat i ask them if they think the occupation will ever leave. no . no. they said sunnis and shite live side by side and this inner strife was not prevelant in their society. they spoke of the tribes there and that the husband(shite) of the tv woman and the husband of the other woman were in the same tribe. i mistakenly thought the tribes were always connected by religion . the tv woman and myself kept stealing moment out on the porch. she would say to me. iraqui’s are not stupid. we know what is going on. there was a much stronger sense of fear in speaking w/ the other woman. she loved art, she wanted to talk of architecture, much more refined, very cautious. but they both emphasized this separation of the sects was not the way their society worked. sunni’s and shite lived side by side. and they spoke of the beauty of the market in bagdad. they both agreed that sadam reminded them of bush. i invited my neighbors and some friends. women kept flowing thru all afternoon/evening, bringing cookies and food. my neighbors mother, politically active, oh, i wish it could have gone on for days. it felt so unleashed. yes, i am sure they hated sadam, but this occupation, i will never forget her repeating to me ‘the iraqui people are not stupid, we know what is going on’.
whatever they will go thru, i do not believe there will be an ethnic cleansing to the degree we fear. these people are very civilized. they have a history with eachother that includes much compromise and understanding. i am not just idealistic. what will be will be.it is not for us to decide if they are ready. they want us out. will there be massacres. i don’t know. i really don’t know. i am a potter. sometimes someone breaks one of my pieces. would i trust them to glue it together, hell no.give me the pieces, i know my work, only me.irag belongs to the iraqi’s.who are we to suppose we know whats best for them.they don’t want an iraq in our image, run by our corporations. they are not stupid.
Posted by: annie | Sep 25 2005 3:25 utc | 40
“would i trust them to glue it together, hell no.give me the pieces, i know my work, only me.”
Bless you, Annie. Fucking right.
Posted by: stoy | Sep 25 2005 4:34 utc | 41
A Brief for the Defense
Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
someplace else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit that there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island; the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back in is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
[I am not sure whether I agree with him or not. He does sort of overlook the inconvenient detail: that many of the suffering humans he describes are suffering precisely because someone else is seeking satisfaction by hurting or using them, i.e. the rich “enjoying their lives” by exploiting the poor, the male punters “enjoying their lives” by using the caged women in Bombay, etc. — but perhaps this is the distinction he draws between “pleasure” and “delight”. Perhaps the viewers who enjoy the warporn pics online experience pleasure in the evidence of another human being’s destruction or pain, but never delight…]
Had not Richard Nixon been a decent, if devious person, and had he not been caught, quite by accident, red-handed and on audio-tape, and had the Congress not passed the War Powers Act, and had the American people not been innocent and just waking to the power of television, we would still be at war in Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos.
George Bush has none of those handicaps. He’s a merciless sociopath, in thrall to Corporate. He
has been caught, right out in the open, but he
rewrites history faster than it can be revealed, and makes TOP SECRET before the truth comes out.
Congress is his, as is SCOTUS, and the Fed. Bush runs America Inc like his own personal Arbusto,
with his own personal army, and his mercenaries.
So if you think Bush is going to resign, or get impeached somehow, it ain’t gonna happen. Even
if it did, he’s just a front-man, a cheerleader.
The backroom GOB’s have darker intent.
As for that gleet website, what the hell did you think war looked like, anyway? Where have all the flowers gone? I’m with alf, you have no idea what out there on the Net, if this shocks you. But it’s a sideshow. Meaningless. Look away.
We’re captives of Corporate. Learn to kiss the ring, or go live expatriate. If you can’t afford to go live expatriate, learn to kiss the ring.
Posted by: tante aime | Sep 25 2005 5:52 utc | 43
… and I am thinking that this is the culture that made a best seller out of American Psycho. From enjoying graphic fictional descriptions of torment and dismemberment, to enjoying images of actual dismemberment, is it such a long difficult step?
Truly there’s some voyeuristic impulse in us humans — I sometimes think that along with the impulse to empathy and the urge to aid and comfort (reciprocal-altruistic impulses helpful to our kingroup and tribal survival) there’s a parallel impulse to feel gladness and relief that the witnessing self, the “I” which observes, is not suffering what the observed victim is suffering. That is, it’s someone else’s head blown off, not mine; someone else is being tortured, not me. That’s someone else’s severed arm in the pictures. Does this give us a momentary rush of satisfaction in being, for the moment, whole and untortured and alive? Does it give our ordinary existence a sudden sparkle, make us feel fortunate and warm and safe compared to that other unfortunate person whose destruction we witness?
Could it be that the biggest market for this type of imagery is among people who aren’t too pleased with their own selves or lives as they are, and need that comparison of someone far more destroyed, more dead, more terrified, in more pain, to make their own self and life look and feel good by comparison?
If you remember your dreams, you have insight into what lurks in the subconscious of all of us. This part of our being doesn’t use judgement, editing, or social approval standards. It exits as a free, huge mix of images that often frighten us. Our conscious minds keep it under wraps but we are unbearably curious, so horrors that we can experience voyeuristically provide the hook. We can’t help ourselves. I’ve consciously trained myself not to look at these things and to read the details of torture over and over. I feel I can progress without some of it. I remember… some of the images forever.
Every abominable act of man is under some light somewhere and it is personal choice as to how much of it we want to drink in. One thing to keep in mind about the voyeurs is that they are not actually doing the murdering. Sometimes it’s best not to know what goes on in others’ minds. Sometimes it’s painful to be reminded of what lurks in our own.
The Winter Soldier testimonies of the Viet Nam vets are heartbreakingly revealing as to what happens to a man in war and the psychotic state he enters. It’s impossible to understand this without study. These are available and are an in depth description of the mental, emotional, and physical trip through the killing fields. They are not for gratuitous perverse pleasure, just honest and factual. And they deal just as much with the horrors of remembrance and the guilt of what they did.
We all should question the use of images like this for entertainment, just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was marketed as television entertainment for the public. As long as the audience watches, the images roll on.
Posted by: jm | Sep 25 2005 7:10 utc | 45
weep…talk…weep…march…weep,weep,weep… and nobody willing to lift a motherfucking finger?.. we are all responsible… we are all pathetic and COMFORTABLE!
“And the only thing I can think to ask God — if she does exists — is why, just for once, can’t you smite the wicked instead of the innocent?”
“Sometimes it’s painful to be reminded of what lurks in our own hearts.”
Exactly.
Kurt Weill, the namesake of the Whiskey Bar, bitterly glamorized and continually explored the darkness of human nature, the “perverted cult of desensitized, mindless violence” the despair, depravity and corruption of politicians, authorities, and ordinary individuals that seemed to confront him on every corner in prewar Berlin; “psychopaths who get their rocks off at places like nowthatsfuckedup.com.” This aesthetic done right, is both inconsoling and a source of great refuge. Beauty is enough, and what I seek here in the posts that appeal to me–“songs degenerate and otherwise” which do not lend themselves to reductive ideology, dialectic and rational analysis. So you’re on the right track.
Now, about that compassion deficit for this poisoned republic and its brain-dead wicked, that bilious contempt you can taste in your mouth, you know what you can do with that–roll it around awhile then spit it out, or take it like a man and swallow.
Posted by: flawedplan | Sep 25 2005 10:39 utc | 47