Let’s, in effect, throw good lives after bad. To admit that it was bad strategy would hurt. We will continue to maintain the same talking points: We were attacked, war on terror, fighting the terrorists on their own ground. And somehow it will all work out.
This is Bush’s product. He sells it for political power and personal glory. Also, to advance a certain way of being. There is a market for this product, and we are naive to think that the market = “Red States.” If you look at the district map of last year’s election results, you see red areas in every blue state, and blue in every red.
I like bitter foods and drinks: Dark chocolate, Chinese bitter melon, coffee, tea, IPA, and whisky of all types. Some people like bitter politics: a struggle, a war, the left vs. the right. And both the soi-disant liberals and conservatives partake.
Currently, however, the product of the right is so deleterious to the political and social order of the world that it is impossible to laugh off its cravings as a harmless predeliciton or victimless crime. To wit:
The asinine “I Support W” and “Support Our Troops” red-white-and-blue ribbons and bows and gewgaws. The worse things get, the deeper and richer the chocolate is: the heads of the true right are going to explode once 100% Venezuelean (different topic) corillo cacao is reached. I’ll cover my van with patriotic mobius strips celebrating unending devotion to the President. Why? Because he’s shoving it to those people who are complaining about the body bags and suicide bombers and how we’re in a quagmire and they’re not my side. And the more they complain the more they’re not my side and the conflict feels good and we have a cause, finally.
Human nature has a fundamental conflict. It’s wants release from all burdens, yet it also wants a conflict, a cause, a purpose. Per Godel, the system cannot be complete and consistent at once. Conflict feels good. We tell ourselves that the Reich is going, after a short and glorious struggle, to free us of all burdens and last for a 1,000 years. We just need to win this war on terror. No, Bush is not at Hitler’s level, but the principle is the same: an enemy, a cause, a struggle, a catharsis.
The Buddha taught us that the conflict cannot be won and catharsis cannot be achieved except through attaining nibbana. Which, in effect, is annihilation of the individual psyche. He may have been correct, but I think rather than returning to the origin we ought to channel the desire for conflict into catharses of love and construction, rather than hate and destruction, as we are doing now. And, most fundamentally, we must recognize our nature: the desire for a struggle and the negative ways entropy can use this desire against us.
Yes, we were attacked. We were attacked because the culture of the Middle East has devolved from the heights of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the great poets and saits, into a two-year-old’s tantrum. But we were also attacked because we did not have the wisdom to control and contain the two-year-old. Shame on them; shame on us.
Then we went and started beating up on the wrong two-year-old. Double shame on us. And now a large number of us still say, “It’s all OK.” Triple shame on us.
Triple shame, or three large scoops of ooey-gooey vanilla ice cream in a big ol’ unsophisticated banana split. At Dubya’s Ice Cream Parlor. Yum, yum, we’ve jumped the shark as an empire, yum.
