On diffused complicity
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - december 08 ]
All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed. - Montaigne
There is a general malaise in the United States. The bread and circuses no longer satisfy. We are marking time, waiting for the Bush years to be over. Anything would be better than this legal theft, incompetent expertise, business embezzlement, potlatch politics, and sanctimonious hypocrisy. There is plenty of everything for everybody, but it is a free-for-all, a dog-eat-dog affair, with the powerless sucking on the hind teat. Everyone on the fringes, the kids, the minorities, and the old folks, might as well be in the jungle trying to survive on swamp water and rotten fruit. As ever in the USA, if you are from the wrong side of the tracks, you stay there, unless you move to a new community with your stolen loot and set yourself up as wealthy. America is closed communities within closed communities, with Blacks in the inner cities, then Spanish and Orientals around them, within professionals in the suburbs and the owners in their gated communities and estates. It has always been that way, with like choosing to live with like, excluding undesirables. If we are not free to choose our associates and live wherever we can afford to live, with whom we please, then we are slaves. If you don't like your situation, do something about it.
We demand expert opinions. Whenever we seek to know about a product or service, we turn to those who have solid reputations as doers and thinkers among our friends, people who have been there and done that. We avoid so-called experts who might tell us what we don't want to hear, people not in the same know we want to be in. There are lots of opinions we don't want to share because they are hard to accept and no fun. We would rather listen to simpletons like George Bush and Jerry Falwell, and then follow them to triviality and inanity. And then we have the media, whose only interest is the money they make from advertising revenue. Network news is only a medicine show, selling snake oil along with misinformation.
We have the Neo-conservative experts running the show because the Supreme Court decided that we would be better off with a president who is a cheerleader rather than a president who is a graduate student. Graduate students like Al Gore pile it higher and deeper until they know everything about very little. Cheerleaders are court jesters who make you feel good whether you are losing or winning. An expert is a person who knows one thing more than you. An ex is a has-been. A spurt is a drip under pressure.
So we can blame the CIA, the Supreme Court, the Tri-lateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, Wall Street, and each other, especially each other.
In the words of Simone Weil, we are like the good thief crucified alongside Jesus, for no matter how great our affliction, we deserve it. We have been "an accomplice, through cowardice, inertia, indifference, or culpable ignorance, in crimes which have plunged other human beings into an affliction as least as great." Maybe we could not have prevented the chaos of Iraq or the misery of the American underclass, but we could have protested the greed, cupidity, and avarice that perpetuate them, but no, we allowed the mafia MBAs, the criminal masters of business administration, the technocrats, to give and to take away for the benefit of the super-rich, running the American democracy into the ground.
We could at least protest because "among our institutions and customs there are things so atrocious that no one can legitimately feel himself innocent of this diffused complicity... the guilt of criminal indifference. [Weil, in "The Love of God and Affliction, " in Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, London 1968]
When someone gets rich, someone else gets poor, and we burn up the earth. A new Gilded Age has arrived with forty percent of African Americans unemployed and the young working-class men in prison or in Iraq.
The rich hire poor men to die for them. If you owned twenty slaves or more, you did not have to join the Confederate Army in the CSA, the Confederate States of America. The rich and the poor live in different worlds, ignorant of each other's thoughts, habits, and feelings, not governed by the same laws. We who are about to die salute you! Morituri salutamus. That's what the gladiators in the Coliseum shouted to the crowd watching the show. That's what the National Guardsmen on active duty should promise the folks back home.
Who is to blame for the horror in Iraq and the squalor at home?
We are all to blame.
We in the West have ignored the Arabs since the 19th Century, and rightly so, because their only useful contribution to the world is their language, into which many old classic texts from Greece and Rome were translated, saving them from oblivion. We ignored them in building the Suez Canal, paid for by the Ottoman Empire and France. After WWI we created the "countries" Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, in order to keep them in their places, and to try to make a profit from them. British and French imperialism, the Nazis, Zionism, the Cold War, and Saddam brought the sort of order in Iraq and stalemate with Iran that we could live with.
We gave the Arabs sanitation, transportation, communication, education, civil law, medicine, as long as they kept to themselves. Participation in the larger world was a no-no.
The Saudis kept order and put their money in American banks. The Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians stewed in their own juices. Saddam had the Iraqis under control. We should have bought Saddam off, given him a palace in Switzerland and a boatload of jewels just as we did King Farouk of Egypt when he was deposed. Saddam was smart. He knew his people, those Arabs who were "a little people, a silly people - petty, barbarous, and cruel," in the words of TE Lawrence.
Saddam had the Kurds, Persians, and Israelis to worry about too. He kept them all in check. He maintained a balance so that business went on as usual. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, generosity, courage, and knowledge were not in Saddam's plan. His greed, fear, and ignorance ruled his quarrel with Iran over the Shat-Al- Arab waterway, and then he thought he might as well control Kuwait too, too bad for him. But Saddam and his Ba'athist Party were preferable to the civil war and chaos that American occupation has allowed to occur. Like Mussolini, Saddam made the state work. Like Mussolini's armies, his ran away.
Today Iraq is a dead parrot.
