Most people in the United States do not know what they have likely avoided with this week's election miracle, basically because they're not quite up to considering such a possibility. We Americans tend to be extremely naïve about politics and always greet the future with hope and a barbecue. That's why it's possible for abuses of the kind we've witnessed endlessly for six years (far more, really) to go on unchecked until finally someone, some other factor, speaks up—and even that is extremely rare.I have been wondering every single day when we would get the message of the torture and sexual abuse of prisoners in Iraq (whom we were supposedly saving from tyranny). I've been wondering when we would get sick of seeing American GIs bashing in the doors of poor Iraqi families; when we would get fed up with the Guantanamos and extraordinary rendition and torture flights; when we would finally find compassion for our sons and daughters coming home with missing limbs, brain trauma, blind and deaf, or packed on ice in metal caskets.
I have wondered every day when we would figure out that we possessed responsibility for the lives of up to a quarter-million Iraqis (so far) who have been killed and maimed under bombs or in the crossfire, and the generations of people throughout the Middle East who will be inhaling the residue of our depleted uranium shells eternally.
And I've wondered when we would sicken at the cost of this mayhem, now estimated at more than two trillion dollars (that is to say, $2,000,000,000,000.00) and counting—a cost that will be borne by our grandchildren and their children, in addition to economically strangling the current generation of Americans. That is not money. It is the life force energy of our people, because money is generated by human effort and creativity.
I have also been wondering when we would notice that gay-bashing went from a relatively contained problem to a vast national movement. And, just personally, between you, me, and the world, if I were a parent and heard that the public schools were teaching a religion-based "abstinence only" program to my children, I would be back with a legal team and seek a federal injunction to stop it.
Apparently, some of this—we don't know what or how much—got through to some people the past few weeks. Americans tend to vote their emotions. We are an emotionally cut off society, and behold, something came through; we actually felt something and responded. Thankfully, there were too many separate races on the ground for Karl Rove to steal them all. Convicting Saddam on a Sunday did not work. The "Rev." Ted Haggard turning out to be gay helped the gay and lesbian cause a lot. The timing was impeccable. The heroic woman I kept seeing in the charts for this time of year turned out to be a male prostitute.
Yet understood properly, this week's election victory is strictly symbolic; it is a statement of intent; an unfulfilled promise. It is, to borrow from Martin Luther King Jr., a check that has not yet cleared the bank. The war, widely supported by Democrats and renounced by nearly none of them, even as the layers of fraud have poured out of the closet, will most likely go on for a long time. Long after we leave Iraq, the mayhem will continue (remember Cambodia). Even Marco Polo, who traveled the region in the 13th century (then known as Iraq, as it is today), commented in his diaries on the brutality of the country's people against one another when they lack a strong leader.
Measures that the Bush administration has put in place to disembowel our Constitution still exist, and will exist, for years. Halliburton still has its contract to build prison camps in the United States. Dick Cheney is still breathing. And I'll accept that Bush will leave office on January 21, 2009, the day after someone else is inaugurated. Not the day before, an hour before, or five minutes before.
The Good Guys?
The image that most Americans have of their country is based on World War II movies, which always have us coming in to save the day. We tend to remember Patton and forget about Coming Home or Born on the 4th of July. Patton is the truth and Coming Home is just the result of an unfortunate 25-year era filled with dope, longhaired hippies, groovy chicks, and protests. The United States is always the good guys. For this reason only, we can go into Iraq claiming to be doing the world a big favor, swearing it has nothing to do with Halliburton, oil or the vicious hatred of Muslims that has in recent years become a holy sacrament.
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