Singing Freedom's Celebratory Dirge

Dear George,

Our crumbling economy is a wet dreamer’s dream. As home values tank, as the subprime virus continues to spread through the financial industry and as the Dow Jones Averages continue to fart, your Iraq fiasco is forced from the front pages of our corporatist media. This is giving your wet dreamers a chance to begin the victory chant that will drown out the discordant sounds of disaster and disorder.

And what a song they are singing. NYT columnist Roger Cohen tells us, “I still believe Iraq’s freedom outweighs [the war’s] terrible price.” He speaks of the freedom made possible through military occupation, mass arrests and incarceration, and massive airstrikes. Thanks to these, Iraqis are able to breathe deeply the purity of freedom’s air through the stench of raw sewage and decaying corpses.

And of course, your Neocon minions are quick to call anyone who opposes the Iraq enterprise “defeatists”, as they remind us that we would have prevailed in Vietnam had we stayed the course a bit longer. In this respect, they are like the wife who pulls her husband away from the poker table after he’s lost the house. She, too, is a defeatist because he was but two hands away from recouping his losses.

The beauty of all this is that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference who wins the 2008 election. Because of the traditional American distain for history and the lessons of the past, the new administration will no doubt adopt the position of the Clinton administration when it took office in 1993 and promised that it wasn’t going to refight the battles of the 1980s, which meant the entire Iran-Contra affair would be given a free pass.

What a wonderful defense this would make in a criminal trial. I can just hear the defense attorney in a murder trial addressing the jury: “Let us not dwell on my client’s past, but let us, instead, look to the future. Granted, my client exercised poor judgment when he slaughtered ten perfect strangers. But that was a rash act of youthful indiscretion. To focus on that one slipup is to paint a distorted picture of my client. Now is the time for healing and coming together. It is not the time for a divisive act such as finding my client guilty as charged. I urge you to look to the future instead of dwelling on the sordid past.”

Hell, that’s the argument that has kept Congress from impeaching your ass.

But, I digress. The fact remains that Iraq’s freedom was well worth the price, and in time even the dead will thank you. The new democracy has arrived astride a falling cluster bomb. Iraqis may be starving, they may be without basic services, they may be dying, they may be limbless, but by God, they are free, and that should be enough to offset their ongoing misery.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones