tonight's program has been pre-empted
It can't be an accident that Israel and the Bush administration have both started using "pre-emptive" so heavily these last weeks, to describe their military attacks on the Islamic world.
Anne Coulter was on Tavis Smiley tonight talking about the "Islamic Mafia", which makes that whole pre-emptive idea terribly exciting. Pretty much killing whoever you want because they were probably about to do something bad. Let's all live like that.
Pre-emptive killing is a very dark concept.
Not least because it creates what it purports to remove, generally.
Attacking someone because they might be about to attack you means they are being attacked, or are about to be; so they're going to want to get pre-emptive on you first; so this catalysing begins, this concretizing of intent, like a show of guns answered by a show of guns and then more guns until everyone's weapons are drawn.
Then it's a roomful of gasoline and everyone's slipping their Swiss lighters out of their pockets. Then it's the end of the human race as we've known it. Racial suicide. Species death.
That's the crux for me, it's consuming most of my personal energy, that conflict. Maybe it would be good.
Think of a world without these assholes in it. We're already losing what's best about the human race, we're already losing most of what's vital and strong about the rest of life, maybe we should push it on through, see what comes out the other side.
The disgust I feel right now makes it hard to write coherently. Disgust and rage.
How about the Holocaust as pre-emptive strike? All you need there is some kind of movement backward in time. These idiots are moving directly toward the death of us all, they're on fire with it.
The formula seems to be, if we go you go with us.
I'm sort of OK with that.
If we all play that way it accomplishes what I think is the most important responsibility of moral actors now, the most immediate task. Stopping the madness.
But it's too easy that way. Maybe the hard way is better. That means patience, and it means risk. And it means pre-emptive strikes are to be scorned as the weapons of cowards.
Bush was drugged tonight. Stoned on something. And Coulter looked designer-wired.
What I see is, just like with that Spanish train, desperate cunning and duplicity, a cynical self-loathing and hatred of life. Men who will stop at nothing accumulating like debris in a flooded river, racked up against a downstream barrier.
But desperation doesn't sell, it loses votes. So the tone is confident, everyone wants to see and hear the tones of confidence, the smile of a winner. So the key figures learn how to make that smile.
It's dreary. Like your cousin trying to sell some real estate at your grandfather's funeral. That's Bush, the comer, the hick on the make.
We're seeing a hundred things unfold at once, each of which would have filled an historical moment in other, simpler times. Being raised on television stories leaves us unprepared for that kind of synchronicity and complexly overweighted plot-line.
Where does it go?
See this: We're moving toward the space-pod as normal human context. Surrounded by inhospitable alien landscape and atmosphere, sheltered by protective artifice, unable to survive outside the paternal womb. The technologies are headed there, the passive majority is shuffling toward it. Cattle at the cusp of domesticity, as the last wild blood gets culled from the herd.
That's what this feeling is, the rage at the smugness on the dogs' faces as they look up from their feast, and it's our children they're eating. It's really that horrific. And they're just dogs, they're not the enemy.
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I'm voting for Nader unless something changes between now and November.
