Turgid, purple, ranting, venting:
An essay, in which the author, having changed brands of coffee and not slept adequately for more than a week, gives free rein to the logorrhea that was, and is, his birthright
As the details spill out into the living rooms of the indefinable American public - Haditha, Kabul, these latest straws on the buckling camel's back - just like with Abu Ghraib there'll be an almost residual twitch toward some kind of cathartic "justice"; it's an open file until something happens, something official and authoritative. The P.R.'s too thin, it won't cover enough of what's clearly present now.
The constipatory aspects of undeniable atrocities - committed by our troops, with our bullets, in wars and engagements we flew the flag in support of - the way they get in the way of people trying to imagine a better future, the way they back up and clog the system - that needs relief, release.
Someone has to "pay". The way people have been trained to think criminals "pay" for their crimes by doing whatever it is they do behind bars.
Another Lynndie England won't get it. Trailer-trash hillbillies won't serve as permanent scapegoats for all this, not any more, and there will be at least a modicum of clamor for accountability, possibly an outright strident demand - for someone to blame, for a face to put in the news next to reminders of the horror.Children were executed gangland-style in their family homes by American soldiers because...Bush of course, but that's a done deal, he's virtually the official moral punching bag of the USA now.
Optimum continuity: blame it all on him and cheer the new "liberal" alternative leader as soon as she's anointed by the same obscure hand that placed Bush before the wrong-footed electorate. Not going to happen.
We need someone to blame more specifically, closer to a real causative actor - Bush is too obviously not in control of anything, too obviously never has been.
Probably at least a few dozen top brass in the military and the DOD should catch the spotlight and its dessicating heat for this - this being not just Haditha and Kabul, but Fallujah, Al-Latifya, Samara, and all too many other My Lai analogs.
Not to mention illuminating the heck out of the doings of those scuttling figures in the shadows and margins of what naive folks still call the "Bush Administration", the men who arranged the big strings into bundles, and hid the friction as they were pulled.
But none of that has the ceremonial tang of a good auto-da-fe, a good town square hanging - the purpose of public executions isn't to impress the criminal mind with the consequences of bad behavior, the purpose of public executions is to make the public feel good about itself for not being executed.
Lynndie England was an attempt to manipulate that phenomenon, but it wasn't as effective as its delusional creators thought it would be. And no one currently in the pipeline for accusation and shame has the merit, or the power and glory, to really move the public through the maze of this moral nightmare.
We need a surrogate for our crippling greed and delusions, for our addictions and the submission to them that got us stumbling into the quicksand of Iraq in the first place.
Nobody's yet been mentioned as culpable who could really catalyze the public's imagination, and none of the currently possible playlets-of-justice have that certainty, that definitive exactitude that will relieve the building pressure of guilt and shame, and the confusion that follows right after them, as we go from being defenders of freedom to pea-brained thugs in the eyes of the world and ourselves.
None of it has that cathartic rush of the moral pivot, when things really do change and one individual carries the weight of the old world away on his back, leaving us free to enter the new one.
The place where the buck stops should be at the top of the chain, shouldn't it?
Even if it's not precise, even if the real culprits are near legion and mostly invisible, we need a symbol to bear the burden of this feral degradation, to wear this moral breakdown like sackcloth and ashes, out of the village and back into the wilderness.
Send Rupert Murdoch to the Hague for war crimes.
