Free people do bad things--an essay masterpiece

Free people do bad things--an essay
> masterpiece
>
> The following article is written by a self-described
> "Virginia country
> boy who loves his country." A vet of the Vietnam
> era, his descriptions
> (warning: some of them contain crude language) in
> this essay brought
> tears to my eyes. The story of people he once lived
> near when he lived
> in a cabin in Idaho I think would bring tears to the
> eyes of anyone with
> a heart. I consider this essay to be a masterpiece,
> in spite of its
> crude language. The author's e-mail address is at
> the end, in case
> anyone would like to write him their thoughts or
> opinions...or send him
> a thank you for the essay because what he says needs
> to be said and
> heard by all Americans.
>
> EXCERPT: Things smell more ominous by the day, and
> to quote the late
> Dr. Thompson, "Big darkness, soon come." Feels like
> it's already here.
> Hunter also said "a man with a greed for the truth
> should expect no
> mercy and give none." Damned good advice, I would
> say. Because from this
> desk at the edge of Washington D.C., it looks like
> we are not about to
> get any at all.
>
> 'Free people do bad things'
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> By Joe Bageant
>
> A while back there was a wrestling promotion
> campaign in which young
> children were encouraged to attend local wrestling
> bringing weapons of
> their own creation. The weapons would later be used
> in the ring. One
> small boy returned with a baseball bat wrapped in
> barbed wire. Asked
> about the wisdom of encouraging the child to create
> such brutal weapons,
> the kid's father appeared dumbfounded: "This is just
> entertainment! It's
> fun!" World champion Wrestling's Vince McMahon's
> indignant response was,
> "This is still a free country. I will not let anyone
> stop me." The
> implication being, of course, "I am a great defender
> of freedom against
> evil liberal regulation." Then he looked into the
> camera to his fans and
> said: "DON'T LET ANYONE STOP YOU!"
>
> Well kick my ass and call me Henry! Spare us all
> from liberal sissies
> unable to see the good clean family fun in clubbing
> folks bloody with
> barbed wire wrapped baseball bats. About the only
> consolation here is
> that, were Vince McMahon to be pulverized by the
> very same bat on TV,
> the same people whose basest instincts he exploits
> for profit would LOVE
> IT. Hell, I'd love it. At any rate, McMahon is an
> example of true,
> unregulated "freedom-in-business." And to think that
> we once thought
> football was about as bad as America's bread and
> circuses would get.
>
> Why does it feel like the brutality of a Vince
> McMahon, football, the
> NRA, Wall Street, Republicans and America's
> far-flung network of secret
> prisons and desert wars all have something to do
> with one another?
> Connected in some way? Why this unnamable suspicion
> in the back of the
> mind, and darting sense of fear? Ah yes! Something
> is happening here,
> and we all know what it is, don't we Mr.
> Joooooones?! Things are bound
> to turn more ugly.
>
> For now, though, our attention is absorbed in the
> efforts of our armed
> and clueless youth who, rather like pit bulls, are
> turned loose on the
> rest of world. About 1,700 of them have been killed,
> but not before
> killing a hundred thousand or so Iraqis, nearly all
> of them civilians.
> The carnage in Iraq is not a problem. "Free people
> do bad things," said
> Donald Rumsfeld (referring to the murderous Iraqi
> clusterfuck
> masquerading as a government over there.) But at
> least we are returning
> to our violent roots. As any indigenous person can
> tell you, we are
> coming home to the values that made America great.
> Abu Ghraib was a
> fresh start at reestablishing our violent national
> heritage that began
> with Indian slaughter and seemed to stall out a bit
> after Vietnam. But
> we're baaaaaack! And we're as bad-assed as ever.
>
> Presiding over all at this critical but vulgar time
> in our history is,
> rather appropriately, a vulgar idiot whose second
> bogus inaugural was
> hosted by Trent Lott, a deliberate "fuck you"
> precisely equivalent to
> those Mississippi men groping themselves for the
> cameras of Life
> magazine back in the 1960s. Our esteemed president
> IS one of those men.
> Things smell more ominous by the day, and to quote
> the late Dr.
> Thompson, "Big darkness, soon come." Feels like it's
> already here.
> Hunter also said "a man with a greed for the truth
> should expect no
> mercy and give none." Damned good advice, I would
> say. Because from this
> desk at the edge of Washington D.C., it looks like
> we are not about to
> get any at all. (Bear with me; there is a theme in
> here somewhere. I
> promise to find it.)
>
> Speaking of bringing up America's brutal Reich
> tykes, there is Scott
> Hildreth of Pinellas Park, Florida who is grooming
> his 10-year-old son
> Joshua to do jail time. Josh is one of six children
> --- ages 10 to 14
> --- arrested for crossing a police line at the
> Woodside Hospice to take
> water to Terri Schiavo. Josh pestered his dad
> (himself arrested many
> times at abortion clinics) to drive him there from
> Kannapolis, N.C., so
> he could be arrested at the Schiavo circus.
> Meanwhile, other children
> stood by with duct-taped mouths labeled "JAIL" in
> black magic marker.
>
> God told Josh to do it. "My wife and I felt like God
> really put it on
> his heart, and that we should come down, to allow
> him to live out what
> God had put on his heart," says Scott Heldreth.
>
> So there goes little Joshie, doing his daddy proud,
> walking right up to
> the sheriff's deputies, carrying his plastic cup of
> water. After he
> refused two orders to halt, deputies cuffed his
> hands behind his back
> and loaded him into a van with 14-year-old twin
> girls. At the
> courthouse, the three youngsters were photographed,
> fingerprinted and
> released. Josh described the event with smarminess
> worthy of the most
> self-righteous fundamentalist: "We were smiling for
> Jesus and they
> didn't like that much," he said. Which proves that
> if you get to a kid
> early enough, you can probably have him throwing his
> first firebomb into
> a clinic before he even discovers masturbation. You
> can bet your sweet
> ass he will be combat ready for North Korean duty by
> age eighteen.
>
> My redneck psychotherapist friend Brad Blanton tells
> me that
> militarization and open democratic societies do not
> work together at all
> and produce pathologies at both the individual and
> collective levels.
> Thus we get such conflicted bullshit as the U.S.
> soldiers being kind to
> that Iraqi boy wiggling around in his pus stained
> bed like a bandaged
> grub because an America bomb took off his arms and
> legs. "Attention
> private first class Leroy Rodriquez Jackson! Stand
> forward and give that
> dusky little torso with a head a chocolate bar and a
> Wal-Mart teddy
> bear. And grin for the camera, for Christ sake! Hey
> let's airlift the
> kid to Germany, mount four metal claws on the
> stumps, and hang him on
> the playground monkey bars. Make a great PR shot!
> One thing for sure,
> that one won't ever be driving any suicide car bombs
> into the compound,
> right private?" (Heh, heh,heh!)
>
> But you have to feel sorry for Private Jackson. It
> is his ass that gets
> caught in the disconnect, as he tries to wrap his
> head around how to be
> "lethal and compassionate." As in "Kill the
> motherfuckers, but be loving
> and kind to children as you blow their parents' guts
> out onto the
> sidewalk." People who kill other people are
> desensitized. Humans are
> hardened to the face of suffering; the killing
> becomes reality,
> compassion an abstraction. Private Jackson is
> totally screwed. When he
> does his soldierly duty of causing misery, death and
> maiming, he must do
> it compassionately, according to some hallucination
> generated in the
> Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The
> hallucination is
> transferred through the chain of command until it
> reaches where the
> rubber meets the road---then five privates go on
> trial for hurting an
> enemy they were specifically trained to kill. Anyone
> who has ever been
> in the armed forces understands the certain
> hypocrisy of the proposition.
>
> For some reason though, civilians, smugly ensconced
> in their recliners
> and on barstools, cannot grasp why ignorant kid
> soldiers do horrible
> things during wars. I once defended Lynndie England
> in print and got
> hundreds of emails demonizing the poor Appalachian
> mutt girl, saying
> that she dishonored our "heroes" in Iraq. State
> generated garbage such
> as "Lethal and compassionate" works fine for these
> people, whose entire
> lives have been spent in the controlled environment
> of America's
> industrial military state marketing messages. All
> these post-teens in
> desert camo, the ones making the "good kills," as an
> appropriately
> conducted murder of an Iraqi is deemed military
> parlance, they are
> heroes on the TV news. Funny how you cannot see
> their Clearasil on TV. I
> have never seen as much acne medicine as when I was
> in the military
> during the Nam era, of which this war reminds me
> greatly.
>
> As James Carroll brilliantly put it in "A Nation
> Lost" (Boston Globe
> 4/22/03)
> http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0422-02.htm:
>
> "Photographic celebrations of our young
> warriors, glorifications of
> released American prisoners, heroic rituals of
> the war dead all take
> on the character of crass exploitation of the
> men and women in
> uniform. First they were forced into a dubious
> circumstance, and now
> they are themselves being mythologized as its
> main post-facto
> justification -- as if the United States went to
> Iraq not to seize
> Saddam (disappeared), or to dispose of weapons
> of mass destruction
> (missing), or to save the Iraqi people (chaos),
> but ''to support the
> troops.'' War thus becomes its own
> justification. Such confusion on
> this grave point, as on the others, signifies a
> nation lost."
>
> I just heard that Vern and Sherry's kid, Glen, got
> killed in Iraq. Vern
> and Sherry lived in a log cabin near me on the Coeur
> de Alene
> Reservation in Idaho a couple decades ago, back when
> many white people
> live on little plots inside the res. Vern had
> emphysema, Sherry weighed
> over 300 pounds, and they had a white malamute dog
> named Ike. The
> isolation bothered us older people sometimes, and
> Vern and I drank a lit
> of whiskey during the six winters I lived there.
> Hell it was two miles
> to the mailbox and seven miles to the main road,
> there was no
> electricity, and about the only fun available in
> winter was drinking,
> guitar picking and horse logging when the ground
> froze solid enough. But
> Glen was a little loner and never seemed to mind.
>
> Anyway, Glen, that skinny kid in the fatigues who
> loved to fish and hunt
> and damned near set my cabin on fire once while
> playing with matches, is
> dead. Killed by a roadside IED. And I cannot help
> but think about the
> road that led him to Baghdad. The one that started
> with the deepest love
> of his crippled up ole daddy and ended, right along
> with his chances in
> life, right after high school when there was no
> possibility of college
> and no work within a hundred miles of the
> reservation. The kid was quick
> as a whip, just like his daddy who could draw, do
> calc in his head and
> break horses on those days he had enough wind to
> tackle the job. And
> like his daddy, Glen was born into one of those
> corners of America where
> people are rooted in the earth they were born upon
> and grow up grounded
> enough not to care about making it in the big city
> or imitating what
> they see on television. They also grow up proud of
> their country,
> untroubled by the bitter truths borne by more
> educated people. Their
> notion of patriotism has to do with a sense of place
> and people, blood,
> kin and whatever higher power rustles the branches
> great red fir trees,
> animates both the chipmunk and the mountain lion,
> and stirs fish to leap
> in the rivers. Hard as it will be for urban readers
> to understand, Glen
> was a stone cold country boy of a kind mostly
> vanished from America. The
> real thing. Now he is dead and now the Iraq War has
> plucked the most
> sacred thing from the lives of a poor crippled up
> old man and his huge
> sad wife crying in their shabby little cabin on the
> range above the
> Minneloosa Valley in Idaho. People like Dick Cheney
> or Donald Rumsfeld
> could give a goddamn what I think. In fact, millions
> of fellow Americans
> who support the war could care less what a banged up
> old writer down in
> Virginia thinks. So I know I am yelling into the
> wind. But I think there
> is not one goddamned thing in the entire nation of
> Iraq worth the life
> of that boy.
>
> One wonders just how long the slaughter can be
> sanitized by the state. A
> quarter million young men and women will eventually
> return. At least a
> few of them will speak the truth, though our supine
> media will not hear
> them unless it is sweeps week and they need the
> ratings.
>
> But overall, we can expect more of the same.
> Thousands more dead, blood
> and treasure hemorrhaged on desert sand for the
> satisfaction of an elite
> cult of aging rich men obsessed with power.
> Americans seem not too
> worried. They knowingly reelected the men who
> orchestrated perhaps the
> bloodiest public hoodwinking in American history,
> one spawned in
> secrecy, hatched behind closed doors and launched
> upon the world amid a
> flurry of the most vulgar sort of lies. Lies so
> huge, so brazen that
> even now most Americans simply do not believe anyone
> would have that
> kind of balls. Dick Cheney has said that: "The
> American people will
> continue to support this ongoing effort to establish
> freedom and
> democracy in the world."
>
> Or to put it in the parlance of the dwarves of
> darkness behind the thick
> oval room curtain: "The dumb fucks will never see
> through it."
>
> Copyright 2005 by Joe Bageant
>
> Joe Bageant is a writer and magazine editor living
> in Winchester,
> Virginia. He may be contacted at
> bageantjb@netscape.net
> <mailto:bageantjb@netscape.net>.
>

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