20 December 2004

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…

"Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America." -George W. Bush, April 30, 2004, the day after the Abu Ghraib photos hit the media.

In the climax of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends discover that the fearsome wizard is merely a large mechanical puppet controlled by a benevolent huckster. Dorothy's dog Toto fearlessly pulls back a curtain in the wings on stage left exposing the real "Wizard". "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain", he roars into the microphone while setting off another series of flash pots. The curtain has been opened again and to America's surprise and the world's consternation, roles have been switched between the puppet and its operator. The benevolent huckster is the puppet, smiling broadly and hawking technological wonders. Nike shoes, Ipods, sports heroes, fast cars, big trucks,  cowboys in white hats, the American Dream. But now the man behind the curtain is the monster, so hideous that Americans refuse to even look at it.

I grew up in a small town in the upper Midwest believing what I was told about America and our role in the world. In that world Sky King came out of the blue of the western skies to swoop in and rescue. Superman fought for truth, justice, and the American Way of Life. Red wasn't a color, it was a Menace. Our President was a cross between Jesus, Moses, George Washington,  and God Almighty. America had just whipped the Germans and the Japs and the Italians but there was some strangeness going on in Korea. The bottom line was Americans were always right, always fighting for the little guys, proud of our government, our citizenship, trying to feed the world's hungry people and make them free. We were on the square, big-hearted and strong, a nation to be respected, admired, and loved.

Sometime between the fictitious 1964 attack on the Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin and the helicopters being pushed into the sea off the deck of the USS Midway in May 1975, the Truth allowed itself be briefly seen peering back at me through the cracks forming in The Mask. I saw it, and a generation of people like me saw it, too. And it's a funny thing about the Truth. Once you've gotten a glimpse of it, you know what it looks like and it's a hell of a lot easier to tell it from the lies. And it turned out that Superman, Sky King, the straight-shooting cowboys in white hats, Dick, Jane, Sally, and even Spot were all a pack of lies. They were the worst kind of lies, too. You can lie to your priest, your lover, your friends, your allies, your enemies, and your mother. Those lies are bad enough. But the worst lie you tell is the lie you tell to yourself, and that's the lie I caught America in. We were hiding the Truth about the nature of our nation behind The Mask, and The Mask was starting to crack profusely.

Flash forward, past decades of American international intrigue, past millions killed by tinpot wannabe despotic chumps supported by American dollars and murderous cloak-and-dagger meddling. Past a well-meaning but naïve peace and environmental movement, past the hippies, the yippies, the yuppies, into the era of 24 hour info-tainment and misinformation, into ubiquitous non-Al-Gore-invented Internet on your PDA. Flash from the dawn of television past the queer Teletubbie. Flash from watching Lee Oswald shot dead live, through the Chicago riots, through the nightly Viet Cong body count to Janet Jackson's tit on the boob tube. Flash forward past Reagan/Bush dabbling in political engineering by arming Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons and pumping warbucks, bombs, and guns into Osama's Taliban to fight yet another proxy war. Flash forward into our brave new world where people are so strung out on fear that they have to do drugs and embrace superstitious religions and carry guns to keep them feeling safe while pulling their SUV over in a bad neighborhood to buy cheap gas.

The year is 2003 and George W. Bush has declared war on a concept. The name of the concept is "terrorism" and if you put 100 people from all over the world into a room and asked them to write down what "terrorism" means you would probably get 50 different definitions. Bush's definition of "terrorism" is Iraq, a nation he says is a threat to the US. According to George, Iraq is a threat because they harbor terrorists like the ones who attacked us on 9/11. George claims Saddam has WMDs, chemical, biological, and nuclear. Why, he gassed his own people, says George. We know where the WMDs are, says Cheney… they're east, south, north, and west of Baghdad. But there's Truth again, showing through The Mask. Many of us see it. We want to know how Saddam got all that stuff when the UN inspection teams say it's not there. Explain why Saddam would risk getting caught up in a scheme to attack the US with his political, religious,  and ideological enemy Osama bin Laden. Show us where any UN Security Council resolution gives any nation the right to declare preemptive war.

George is the Answer Man. He has all the answers, the only problem is that none of them match up with Truth's questions. I'm a War President, he answers. Terrorists, terrorism, terror, war on terror, workin' hard, hard work, he answers. Spreading Democracy and Freedom… they hate us for our freedom. You're either with us or with the terrorists. Support our troops, keep your mouth shut or you're not patriotic. Coalition of the Willing. Mass graves. Axis of Evil. But although these answers raise the level of fear and hatred, they have nothing to do with the Truth. And Truth will have nothing to do with the answers. But Americans always rally behind their president in times of war, even if the war is based on lies and was illegal, immoral, and unnecessary.

The Mask was taking crushing blows through Bush's preemptive war. Precision bombings were "sparing civilians"… vicious uppercut. "We have more than enough troops and supplies to get this done"… right cross to the temple. "We'll find the WMDs, it's only a matter of time"… jab, jab, jab, jab. "The Iraqis love us because now they're free"… left hook to the kidney. And then on April 29, 2004, long after Bush declared victory, at the end of the bloodiest month for GIs, The Mask took a bone-shattering blow to the sternum that smashed it to smithereens… the pictures of torture and murder at Abu Ghraib hit the media.

The facts about these war crimes are now in the public record. Despite Bush's lie that these atrocities and murders were committed by a few "bad apples" at the bottom of the food chain, we know that the White House legal team gave the Secretary of Defense the nod to use torture. We know that the White House was aware of torture and murder being used on prisoners at US camps around the world as early as 2003. We know that torturing prisoners was not the act of a few sadistic deviant grunts out to get their jollies. Instead, it was a widespread, deliberate, systematic policy originating from the top levels of the US government and its agencies including the White House, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Justice.

Where is the outrage? Where is the news media? Where are the Americans standing up to face this travesty head on and demand that those responsible are held accountable? Where are all the good, solid American people who believe in justice and our Constitution and fair play? Instead of acknowledging this evil and owning up to it, America has turned a blind eye to it. Rumsfeld is still on the team. Alberto Gonzales is going to be Attorney General. Bush, despite all the irresponsible lies he told about Iraq, despite the lives lost and ruined and fortunes squandered, despite presiding over a worldwide reign of US terror, despite being caught in a dirty lie about the most serious course of action a nation may follow,  has been elected to four more years.

The Mask now lies shattered in pieces on the floor. The curtain has been thrown back, and the monster is standing there in plain sight but it seems to have forgotten how to run the controls. Can you see it? Do you recognize it? Do you know its name? Pay no attention to the monster behind the curtain… it's YOU.