The US and alternate realities

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Sat, 13 Aug 2005 13:16:49 +0400

The US and alternate realities

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http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/081205Bohne/081205bohne.html

 

The US and alternate realities

 

By Luciana Bohne

Online Journal Contributing Writer

 

August 12, 2005—There is no such thing as a lie as perfect as the

truth. That is why it is necessary to construct an alternate reality

in which to house it.

 

Let's start with 9/11.

 

We were told that 9/11 happened because " they hated our freedoms. "

 

People who up to then knew they lived in an imperfect society where

even their votes didn't count, where lobbyists bought Congress and

corporations bought elections, whose 14 percent of the population had

disproportionately high representation in prison and on death row,

whose work force had been removed from jobs by the tsunami of

globalization, whose illiteracy rate was one of the highest in the

industrial world, whose country was the stingiest donor in the

industrial world, whose 40 million uninsured lived in fear of getting

sick, all these various people were suddenly collectively made aware

that they were the object of envy for something they hadn't known they

had—a really spiffy country.

 

They were flattered and dusted off their flags, in gratitude for

living in a country that was an object of hatred—so fine and great and

generous it was to its own people that others would willy-nilly attack it.

 

No one asked why Andorra wasn't attacked. No one said that terrorism

was a tactic, not an ideology. So no one asked why. It was assumed

that people with turbans and veils, frequenting mosques on Fridays had

an " evil ideology. " Alternate reality had taken hold. In this

alternate reality, suddenly, no one was free. The Bill of Rights in

the American Constitution became " quaint, " like the Geneva

Conventions, as per our Neo-Reichjusticeminister, Alberto Gonzalez.

 

But since we are no longer free, why is Vice-president Cheney so eager

to expect a second 9/11? And it really doesn't make sense that those

freedom-hating terrorists attacked Casablanca, Bali, Istanbul. Have

you ever heard these places touted as beacons of freedom? Ah,

yes—Madrid and London. But a case could be made that they were mainly

hit for riding on the coattails of the freedom-loving US. Oddly,

Spain, now that it has given up on Uncle Sam, has more freedoms than

before—one of the highest percentages of women in governing circles in

Europe and the right for gays to marry. Britain, on the other hand,

will probably get government-issue ID cards.

 

You can try to construct alternate realities, but there's always the

daily nuisance of having to reinvent them each day, for people don't

immediately or automatically accept a paradigm shift that defies the

rules of logic. The press, ardent for someone else's glory in dying

for a war they merely promote, comes in handy for this task.

 

To return to the theme of inventing reality, we were told after 9/11

that 19 (mostly Saudi) hijackers had neutralized all the defense and

aeronautical surveillance systems and counter-tactics set in place to

defend the mightiest country in the world from hostile penetration—a

scenario Russian military experts at the time found simply

" impossible. " In exchange for going along with this claim, we were

told that invading and bombing Afghanistan was the logical thing to

do, considering CIA-trained asset, Osama Bin Laden, had taken up

residence there after President Clinton told Sudan officials the US

had no interest in catching him, so he might as well go to

Afghanistan, where an important pipeline was under negotiation with

the Taliban. Some years later, off went our Army, Navy, Air Force, and

Marines in pursuit of now " public enemy #1, " bin Laden, who was soon

forgotten after we won a victory over a country with no air force and

no suitable " military targets, " as Donald Rumsfeld griped before the

invasion, when he was greedily eyeing Iraq from the Afghanistan warroom.

 

Three-thousand civilians lost their lives in villages, at wedding

parties, and in death trucks near Mazar al Sharif—and the survivors

got a government presided over by a former executive of Unocal, a

party in the bid for the pipeline. Some people (taxi drivers and

others suspicious people on the road at the wrong time in the wrong

place) got renditioned to Guantanamo—a US naval, Caribbean paradise

stolen from Cuba, which happens to have one of the deepest ports in

the world, suitable for sheltering nuclear submarines on the ready for

patrolling our good neighbors in South America against threats from

anti-globalizers and liberation theologists. It is also a place where

the Koran does not fare well, since the sacred book has frequent

close-encounters with toilets and the summary flushing thereof.

 

Back in Afghanista, meanwhile, Sharia law is doing well, and women

have been wise enough not to shed the burqa, trying to dodge the ever

alert misogynist wrath of war lords, on the payroll of the US

government, who rule the country outside Kabul as a narcotrafficking

US protectorate.

 

In the gunslinger, revenge western script about Afghanistan we were

dished out as alternative reality, there was no mention of the fact

that the plans for the invasion of Afghanistan were on the desk of our

chief executive on the weekend before 9/11. Makes you wonder if the

traditional relationship between cause and effect is intended to be

stood on its head by this plan for the new American reality in the

twenty-first century!

 

Of course, the Iraq story was the greatest invention of alternate

reality since we were told that storks delivered babies or that babies

appeared ex nihilo in cabbage patches. After Colin Powell, Tony Blair,

and Condi Rice publicly stated Iraq was no threat, they changed their

tune.

 

Far be it for me to be boring the reader with the summary of details

of a cock-up planned nearly a decade before 9/11 (which shows that

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, Osama, or, indeed, WMD) and too huge

to be entirely suppressed by even the most dedicated efforts of the

lying press! But I'll point out just one or two results of the

collusion with alternate reality: the women of Iraq are threatened

with Sharia after decades of secular law that respected, at least on

the books, the personhood of women—their rights to inherit, to marry

and divorce without permission from mullahs or their family

patriarchs. Now, under the new government we so cynically cobbled

together, the women of Iraq are threatened with going back to the

proverbial tutelage of their male overlords. No doubt, this new

enslavement of women's rights will play as women's liberation in the

alternate-reality book. I assume women will still be allowed to vote,

albeit accompanied by male relatives or having no idea who the

candidates are, this last the case for every voter in the last

election. Since voting without politics is a US fetish, expect Laura

Bush to congratulate you on liberating Iraqi women and on a job well

done because, as a defender of women's rights married to Bush, she has

a limited experience on the subject. She will be speaking directly

from the alternate reality channel.

 

The second thing to notice about Iraq is that, though it seemed a

virtual impossibility only a year ago, the country is on the verge of

a civil war—largely manufactured by our systematic policy of favoring

now this, now that, ethnic faction, a stratagem inherited from British

imperialism, who think they got it from the Romans ( " divide et

impera " ). Not being able to control the country via a puppet-installed

regime, we are trying the civil-war option. This will play as " we

can't leave now that we've got so much to do " in alternate reality.

 

All along, in the real world, Halliburton will make out like bandits,

our troops will continue to die, the Iraqis will fight until their

last breath in spite of being tortured, detained, and deprived of

jobs, water, and electricity, the US will " reconstruct " Iraq by

building military bases, gasoline prices will hit the roof, and we

will be offered another tale of alternate reality: the threadbare tale

that Iran plans to develop nuclear weapons for the sole purpose that

it hates us and envies us, that it has an evil ideology, and that it

is the breeding ground for terror.

 

Meanwhile, our military/industrial complex is working at a brisk pace

to produce " robust " nuclear weapons that won't make the dramatic

splash once judged expedient for sowing terror through the epic,

visible horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This new generation of

homicidal nuclear gadgets won't be called affectionately, " Fat Man " or

" Little Boy. " This new generation of nukes will be deviously nicknamed

" Deniable, " " Limited, " " Precision-Targeted, " and, of course,

" Civilian-Caring " —when not just plain " Democratic, " which they will be

as they will kill a lot of people.

 

And where will it end?

 

Like Alice trying to get out of Wonderland, will we continue to listen

to the Mad Hatter's directions for getting out of this infernal

labyrinth of deceptions—or will we make ourselves wake up, demanding

sane policies and objective solutions?

 

Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of

Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne.