Jesus Christ It's This Shit Again

I Mean, Seriously? Like What the Fuck, People

“The Cartoonist’s Dilemma” (detail), published Baltimore City Paper, October 2004. Translations: “Six beers, please.” “SIX more, sir?” “…and OUZO! Many ouzos…”

Back when I lived with my friend Kevin in Baltimore, we heard a crash out in front of our house, and Kevin walked down to the nearest intersection to see what had happened. It was a bad accident: a car had collided with a motorcycle. The biker was seriously injured; as Kevin described it, his leg was still attached, but just barely. By chance a doctor was on the scene, who was trying to keep the wounded man still so he could control the bleeding until EMTs arrived. But the guy was clearly in shock, kept insisting he was fine and struggling with the doctor, trying to get up. Finally he punched the doctor in the jaw, at which point the doctor gave up arguing. “Okay,” he said, stepping back. “Go ahead—get up.”

That’s how I feel this time around, watching another bunch of arrogant incompetents commence yet another bloody clusterfuck that might grind on ‘til I’m in my seventies. You want to start a war in the Middle East? Okay. Go ahead. Glory awaits. It’s hard enough to turn on the news without flinching anymore, but this last weekend was the first time I couldn’t even bear to read or listen to it. I don’t need to hear it; I’ve seen this one before. Every Republican President in my adult lifetime has 1.) crashed the economy and 2.) started a war in the Middle East. It’s as certain as death and tax cuts for the rich. By now it might as well be their official campaign platform, yet somehow the adorably slow learners of the American electorate are still surprised by it, every time.

Almost a quarter century ago, about a year after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration started making noises about invading Iraq. By the first time they floated the idea in public it was already a fait accompli; it was, by some accounts, decided on the afternoon of 9/11. Even back then, congress had already abdicated its responsibility to authorize wars, but the executive branch was still expected to come up with some halfway-plausible casus belli to persuade the public to support a war. (It seems like a quaint courtesy now—a gesture to make us feel included.) Because they needed a year’s lead time to build a false case for invasion based on fabricated evidence, we had plenty of time to organize mass protests against it, to write impassioned letters-to-the-editor and to our representatives, and draw devastating editorial cartoons. We pointed out that it didn’t make any sense to invade Iraq; we’d been attacked by a decentralized terrorist network, not a nation-state, and anyway almost all the terrorists of 9/11 were Saudi, not Iraqi. But the Bushes were in business with the Saud gangster family, just as the Trumps are, so we weren’t about to attack them. The administration insisted that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, so attacking them would only be self-defense. We tried to warn them that it would be a disaster, turn into a quagmire like Vietnam that could drag on for years. The government assured us, Shut up. Gullible gung-ho dumbfucks chanted “U!S!A!” and called us treasonous liberal sissies. Anyway not to belabor this but it turns out we were right about everything, the government was lying and had no idea what they were doing, and the gullible dumbfucks were wrong, like they always are, every time, the dumbfucks.

The gullible dumbfucks will grudgingly concede that the war they supported was a tragic “mistake” (no one ever calls it a premeditated crime or atrocity, for which someone might be held accountable) ten or twenty years after it was obvious to the smart kids, but by that time there’s a new generation of dumbfucks who don’t know it’s a tragic mistake yet and are happy for their chance to chant “U!S!A!”. It only took seven years after we’d finally extricated ourselves from the atrocity of Vietnam before Ronald Reagan (R), tried out a couple of little wars, starter wars to help us all get over the bummer of having massacred a million people for nothing, bolster our confidence and help us get back out there and start mixing it up again. Seven years after that, George Bush Senior (R) held a bigger war, a real war this time, In Iraq. Then, twelve years later, his feckless son (R) launched the even bigger one mentioned above, which turned out, to everyone’s solemn surprise, to be a tragic mistake.

On the eve of that second Bush war, I wrote the following:

“What I still can’t believe, in spite off my thirty-five years of consistently disappointing experience with my fellow human beings, it that it’s working. It amazes me that anyone is taking the administration’s claims at face value, pays attention to the President’s speeches, considers and debates them as though they contained information or were intended to communicate. Have these people never heard of being lied to? Have they never seen an advertisement, or bought a used car, or been to a singles’ bar?”

You can almost hear me sputtering in incredulous disgust. I was thirty-five. I’m older now, and less incredulous; now I’m just disgusted. And here we are again already, starting another war in the Middle East, this time without any rationale at all, not even a polite nod to the pretext of democracy. The illusion of consent is yet another democratic “norm” that Donald Trump’s dispensed with. They’re no longer bothering to hide their contempt for the electorate—not even for their own base, whom they warned, during the election campaign, that the warmongering Kamala Harris would sacrifice their children to some pointless war in Iran. Trump and his various spokesmodels can’t even agree on a consistent explanation among themselves: Iran was an imminent threat; it’s been an imminent threat for 47 years; Iran would soon have had a nuclear weapon, even though we’d already “obliterated” their ability to make nuclear weapons; Iran was about to attack us; Israel was about to attack Iran, which would’ve caused them to attack us. Our attack is laser-focused; our attack would overturn the regime and require unconditional surrender; it would all be over in a few days; it could go on for weeks; it’ll go on as long as it has to. The troops have been told it’s to jump-start Armageddon, forcing God’s hand a bit to expedite the Rapture/ Millennium/ Second Coming. The obvious truth is, the government doesn’t give a shit whether the American people support it or not, because they’re Fascists. The war certainly isn’t in reprisal for the Iranian theocracy’s massacre of its citizens, since Donald Trump admires tyrants and zealots and would love to machine-gun his own protesters. It seems to be to no one’s benefit but Israel’s, which more and more Americans think of less as a friend than like your asshole cousin who swears he didn’t kill anyone but wants you to come bail him out.

There’s really no credible explanation for this war that doesn’t require what I used to think of as conspiratorial thinking: it’s one more frantic attempt to distract us from the Epstein files (whose contents must be even more monstrous than we imagine), or blackmail by Israeli intelligence over something in the Epstein files, or provocation for a terrorist attack they can use as an excuse to suspend elections—at this point, I’d believe anything. All these speculations suffer from the same fallacy that afflicts so much eggheaded analysis of Trump’s decisions: imputing Machiavellian motives and long-term stratagems to a man who is much stupider than anyone you know and has never been able to think about anything other than his own promotion for more than thirty consecutive seconds.

Trump allows as how this war might take a few weeks, possibly longer—a calculation whose reliability is compromised by the fact that Trump says whatever seems convenient at any given moment and then forgets all about it and expects you will, too. It gives me occasion to recall George W. Bush, in his badass Army Man costume, declaring victory in Iraq from the impressive set of an aircraft carrier under a big banner saying “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” eight years prematurely. Though some might dispute that the MISSION was truly ACCOMPLISHED even then, since we only managed to replace a dictatorship with an American-backed system of total chaos, and come to think of it we do still have some troops over there. It would take us a bit longer to tie up loose ends in Afghanistan, a war that formally ended in 2021—long enough that someone born after it began could enlist to fight in it—and whose outcome was the victory of the same pious sex-slavers who were in charge before we invaded.

I don’t find a lot of cause for optimism these days, but it does seem as if the percentage of the public that supports whatever war the government wants to start is a little lower each time around. It took a few years and hundreds of casualties before people protested Vietnam in large numbers, but they started marching against the war in Iraq by the thousands before it even started. Public support for the attack on Iran is at a record low, down in the twenties (except among Republicans, who largely comprise the gullible dumbfuck demographic), perhaps because the administration forgot to mention to anyone in advance that they were going to start a war or say what it was for. Not that it makes much difference what the public thinks now: the government knows that once you start a war, it’s too late, you’re committed, and anyone who questions it or refuses to Support Our Troops is a treasonous liberal sissy. It’s possible that this apocalyptically dumb decision will eventually cost the Fascist party the election, though that assumes they’ll allow elections to take place, and that it won’t have been eclipsed by even greater crises generated by this same administration.

The worst part of it, for me, is that we’re all dragged into complicity; because this is still, in name at least, a democracy, we can’t help but hold ourselves responsible for the war crimes committed by these cruel, depraved people our idiot countrymen elected— the flouting of international law, the bombing of civilians, the massacre of schoolgirls, torpedoing musicians and letting them drown. Certainly the rest of the world will. I want to disown this war, wash my hands of the Jesus Nazis who’ve seized control of my country, step back and watch them try to walk on one mangled leg.

But, even though I’m not a gung-ho dumbfuck, it doesn’t feel good to take sides against my own country, to root for anyone who opposes us. Trump wants America to be a predator state, like Putin’s Russia—knocking off any world leaders we don’t like, taking other countries’ territories just ‘cause we want them. I just want not to have to be ashamed of my flag or my accent if I travel abroad. I still hope to see our beloved old corrupt dysfunctional democracy restored. I’d love to see Trump and Hesgeth in cages at The Hague. At this point I’d be content to call it a win all around if we killed Iran’s totalitarian theocratic leader and they killed ours, and set both our people free.