It’s one thing to try and scope out why someone would want to gun down dozens of people in cold blood; it’s quite another to consider how so clearly disturbed an individual could get his twitchy hands on such deadly weapons in the first place. The first problem is one experts, talking heads, journalists, psychologists, etc., will be grappling with on television and in print for years to come. The second is a bit simpler: mail order, gun shops, and Wal*Mart. Obviously if you haven’t yet killed anyone or committed a serious crime but are, in fact, dead set on annihilating a whole building full of people, it’s not so hard to procure military-grade weapons designed to mow down as many folks as possible in the least amount of time. And you can even buy your ammo within easy walking distance of campus in Virginia and elsewhere in our bullet-headed nation.

Sure, we have a culture of violence. It’s not something primarily driven by media consumption – it’s more a matter of policy. But our solutions many times deal with the more superficial aspect of violence. Pretty much all of the major broadcast news outlets have pulled the self-made video of the shooter Cho’s lunatic paranoid rantings; I can’t say that I disagree with that decision. But one piece of video I think they should broadcast again and again is the one documenting his firearm purchase – I suggest a super that reads, “See how easy this is.” And while I’m offering suggestions, how about a cable channel that shows how over-the-top these legally obtainable weapons are. Remember – these are offensive weapons. They’re easy to fire, easy to reload, and carry high-capacity ammunition clips that hold 33 rounds. Not exactly what I’d call a reasonable means of self-defense. The gun dealer in Roanoke said he was a good mannered, “clean-cut” college kid. I suppose we should be grateful the guy doesn’t sell rocket-propelled grenades or TOW missile launchers.

This is indeed a time to grieve. A lot of shooting going on – here in my hometown, another cop was shot (young guy doing a traffic stop). My feeling, though, is that the thing that is killing all these folks will once again go unaddressed, particularly since our political culture is so cowardly on this topic. I’ve heard some tepid discussion thus far of re-regulating assault weapons, but it seems like you can only hear that kind of talk when it’s balanced out by some right-wing nut job who wants to arm ALL students so that they can shoot back. (I’m not making this up. Hey dumbshit – Cho was an armed student.) And while boneheads on CNN and Fox debate the merits of facilitating schoolhouse shootouts, over in Iraq incidents like Virginia Tech happen on a daily basis. It’s hard to imagine how soul-crushing that must be.

So while Dubya offers his words of consolation, just remember – what he’s set in motion overseas is Cho times 20,000. Welcome to nutsville.

luv u,

jp

Explosion in the “Green Zone” this week, and a good number of the news accounts I’ve read have referred to the relative calm of the last few weeks in Baghdad. This is another one of those “flare ups” they’ve been referring to over the last four years; or worse, an attempt to keep the Iraqi Parliament from negotiating through key issues, such as the petroleum law. It bears pointing out that these are issues key to us, not them, and that if these people represented the vast majority of Iraqis, they wouldn’t be substantially made up of recently arrived exiles and wouldn’t have to meet in a fortified pillbox. Be that as it may, the finger of blame on this attack points inevitably to the “friendly” Iraqis. I heard one pundit opine (when she managed to tear herself away from talking about Don Imus) that this was an “inside job”. What that means I’m not certain (they only discussed Iraq for about 30 seconds), but as I’ve said before in these pages, when this Iraq policy is finally over, its failure will be the Iraqis fault… so much so that you will think they had invaded us.

From the beginning the onus has been placed on them. They were a rogue state menacing their neighbors. They were an existential threat to the United States. And yet, what the hell kind of way is this to defeat an existential threat? The last time one could claim our nation was engaged in a war with an enemy who could possibly destroy us was World War II. That brought about a national mobilization – young men were drafted by the million, many others volunteered for or were pressed into stateside service, legions were employed in war related industries, and people were taxed and had their consumption of essential goods regulated accordingly. If we are, indeed, fighting for our lives right now, why are so few of us actually involved in the fighting? Why aren’t we all being asked to sacrifice something for the salvation of America, just as the “greatest generation” was asked to do by their elders (the, I don’t know, “not-so-greatest generation”)?

Give up? Well, I’m gon’ tell yuh. It’s because we aren’t fighting for our lives. Not really. Sure there’s danger – there was danger during the cold war, too – but that danger is being aggravated by the war in Iraq, not reduced by it. There is no clear existential threat to the U.S. posed by the Iraqi insurgency, and that’s why our government feels it has the luxury to play only the safest political cards and avoid all the dicey ones. Draft? No need – we’ve got an all-volunteer force we can deploy again and again (and again…). Taxes? We’ll cut those and just borrow the billions we burn in Iraq – free money, folks! Vote for me!! Rationing? That’s just plain unAmerican and unnecessary… unless you’re (wait for it) under attack, which we plainly are not. We’re not fighting the Nazis across a 1,000 mile front. We’re not withering under the Luftwaffe’s nightly terror bombings. We’re fighting a war of choice, with the objective of securing a pro-western government in Baghdad and opening the Iraqi economy to the kind of extreme neoliberal exploitation that must surely inhabit Paul Wolfowitz’s piratical dreams.

Why can’t we trust Iraqis? Because they can’t trust us. This they know from experience.

God bless you, Mr. Rosewater. Just a word for Kurt Vonnegut, who passed away this week. Great thinker, great writer, great humanist. This old interview on Fresh Air gives you some idea why.

luv u,

jp

Perennial presidential candidate John McCain made his way to a Baghdad market this week, surrounded by a phalanx of U.S. soldiers, security guards, and kevlar body armor, then returned to the nearby Green Zone (i.e. crusader castle) alive. God be praised! What are we to make of this great triumph? That the incalculable suffering of the past four years has somehow been worth it now that McCain and some other bonehead politicians can go shopping in downtown Baghdad under heavy guard? Not sure, but I think they could have done that more easily before they started this stupid war. (One can only hope they’re not planning any shopping trips to Tehran in the near future.) It’s obvious that McCain is playing to the idiot Republican base – those folks that would support Bush if he knifed their grandchildren in front of them. And the administration, desperate for any sign of success in Iraq, is more than glad to glom onto the senator’s grandstanding.

Watching all this, you have to think that our leaders take us for abject morons. They assume that we remember none of the wild flourishes of rhetoric with which they regaled us four years, four months, or even four days ago. When we invaded Iraq, it was to advance a bold agenda of remaking the middle east, so we were told. Now the objective is holding Haifa street long enough for a senator to go sight-seeing. When the Mahdi army and the Sunni guerillas make the strategic decision to allow our troops to operate relatively unmolested in central Baghdad, we act as though we’d just defeated Pompey’s legions. For chrissake – surge or no surge, we’re only able to move an inch in that city because its inhabitants have chosen to tolerate our presence for the time being, probably in the hope that this will make us leave sooner. It’s not our city, nor will it ever be, and as a saner Republican senator recently observed, Iraq just doesn’t belong to us. Probably best to remember that as we ponder what to do next.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity for the anti-war movement in all of this happy talk. What the hell – if it’s going so well over there, why don’t we leave? Let’s call their bluff. Baghdad is safe? Fine! Everybody go home. That’s what a majority of Americans and a supermajority of Iraqis want, right? There’s one way to make everybody happy. Of course, that would bring us down to the core issue of this whole bloody enterprise – our government doesn’t want to leave Iraq. They didn’t go through all the trouble of contriving and sustaining this invasion just to be pushed out a measly four years later. For all intents and purposes, America is in Iraq to stay, which means we won’t leave until there is simply no other alternative. I happen to believe only Americans can bring and end to this, but so long as we as a nation behave as though the war doesn’t exist, it will go on and on and on.

That’s what the administration calls success. And friends… it sucks.

luv u,

jp