Friday, April 26, 2013

Victims and Victor

Rachel Maddow surprisingly doesn’t make the obvious point in the clip below, when she talks about the Carnival Triumph debacle—the poop cruise, as she calls it—and the eight years that we suffered through George W. Bush. The Triumph passengers had a horrific week-long vacation. We spent 8 years while the ship drifted aimlessly, and then fell recklessly into maelstroms. Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Guantanamo, the War in Iraq, Katrina, the erosion of the worldwide goodwill after September 11th, the list goes on and on.
Or rather, the poop kept rising while the ship kept sinking.
It was a disaster at every turn, and I was fortunate, I now realize, that I was so exhausted by Wal-Mart and Franny that very little of it got in. Yes, I read the headlines, skimmed the articles, and then went out to the back of the building to make my morning call to Franny. Then it was eight hours of teaching, an hour or two of emails / writing / class preparation / brownnosing the Human Resources ladies. (Yes, I caved to pressure, I’m sorry to say, and used to force myself to spend 20 minutes chatting with people in the department. I had been told, you see, that some people felt I was aloof, that I wasn’t fully a part of the department. So chatting I did….)
So all the five presidents and all the first ladies (minus Nancy) got together down in Texas to dedicate the new George W. Bush Library. And of course they would; it’s a club, after all, that handful of ex-presidents, and there must be a tacit disagreement. Once you’re out of office, your job is to shut up. Do good works: solve global warming or AIDS in Africa or build houses for the poor—but shut up.
And no one is gonna deny—the job’s not easy. My problem with W is that for him, it was. He was arrogant and entitled and too stupid to know how stupid he was on the first day of his presidency, when he inherited a country largely on its feet, and W was just as arrogant / entitled / etc. on the last day of his presidency. The difference?
The country was lurching on the edge of financial collapse, the rest of the world despised us, global warming was no longer a theory but a fact, and the United States Constitution had been overridden.
And the worst thing? Through a combination of arrogance and stupidity, Bush never realized the damage he had done. In fact, he said recently that he was “comfortable” with the decisions he had made.
Yeah?
We’ll never see him brought to justice, and I suppose he had to build his damn library, and he could hardly not do that and not dedicate it, and so he invited the boys down to Texas and they sighed and crossed a day out of their lives and whooped it up down in Texas with W and Laura.
And yes, by tomorrow we will have forgotten about it. And if Rachel Maddow is wondering, I can tell her that yes, last week there was a day when four cruise ships sailed into the old city, and walking Calle del Cristo felt more like Des Moines than San Juan. If the Carnival Triumph ever happened, you wouldn’t have known it as you found it impossible to move any faster than the gawking, open-mouthed couple ahead of you permitted.
We forget, the rest of the world does not. Often, of course, because so much happens over-there done by you-know-whom. Take a look at this:
 PAKISTAN
Name | Age | Gender
Noor Aziz | 8 | male

Abdul Wasit | 17 | male

Noor Syed | 8 | male

Wajid Noor | 9 | male

Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male

Ayeesha | 3 | female

Qari Alamzeb | 14| male

Shoaib | 8 | male

Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male

Tariq Aziz | 16 | male

Sanaullah Jan | 17 | male

Maezol Khan | 8 | female

Nasir Khan | male

Naeem Khan | male

Naeemullah | male

Mohammad Tahir | 16 | male

Azizul Wahab | 15 | male

Fazal Wahab | 16 | male

Ziauddin | 16 | male

Mohammad Yunus | 16 | male

Fazal Hakim | 19 | male

Ilyas | 13 | male

Sohail | 7 | male

Asadullah | 9 | male

Khalilullah | 9 | male

Noor Mohammad | 8 | male

Khalid | 12 | male

Saifullah | 9 | male

Mashooq Jan | 15 | male

Nawab | 17 | male

Sultanat Khan | 16 | male

Ziaur Rahman | 13 | male

Noor Mohammad | 15 | male

Mohammad Yaas Khan | 16 | male

Qari Alamzeb | 14 | male

Ziaur Rahman | 17 | male

Abdullah | 18 | male

Ikramullah Zada | 17 | male

Inayatur Rehman | 16 | male

Shahbuddin | 15 | male

Yahya Khan | 16 |male

Rahatullah |17 | male

Mohammad Salim | 11 | male

Shahjehan | 15 | male

Gul Sher Khan | 15 | male

Bakht Muneer | 14 | male

Numair | 14 | male

Mashooq Khan | 16 | male

Ihsanullah | 16 | male

Luqman | 12 | male

Jannatullah | 13 | male

Ismail | 12 | male

Taseel Khan | 18 | male

Zaheeruddin | 16 | male

Qari Ishaq | 19 | male

Jamshed Khan | 14 | male

Alam Nabi | 11 | male

Qari Abdul Karim | 19 | male

Rahmatullah | 14 | male

Abdus Samad | 17 | male

Siraj | 16 | male

Saeedullah | 17 | male

Abdul Waris | 16 | male

Darvesh | 13 | male

Ameer Said | 15 | male

Shaukat | 14 | male

Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male

Salman | 12 | male

Fazal Wahab | 18 | male

Baacha Rahman | 13 | male

Wali-ur-Rahman | 17 | male

Iftikhar | 17 | male

Inayatullah | 15 | male

Mashooq Khan | 16 | male

Ihsanullah | 16 | male

Luqman | 12 | male

Jannatullah | 13 | male

Ismail | 12 | male

Abdul Waris | 16 | male

Darvesh | 13 | male

Ameer Said | 15 | male

Shaukat | 14 | male

Inayatur Rahman | 17 | male

Adnan | 16 | male

Najibullah | 13 | male

Naeemullah | 17 | male

Hizbullah | 10 | male

Kitab Gul | 12 | male

Wilayat Khan | 11 | male

Zabihullah | 16 | male

Shehzad Gul | 11 | male

Shabir | 15 | male

Qari Sharifullah | 17 | male

Shafiullah | 16 | male

Nimatullah | 14 | male

Shakirullah | 16 | male

Talha | 8 | male
Right—so what is it? It’s the list of kids who have been killed in drone attacks in Pakistan.
“No,” you say. “It can’t be. You trawled through the Internet and found a site to your liking, and now you’re ramming anti-America propaganda down our throats.”
Well, it’s true—I haven’t checked out this site, which, by the way, adduces a Colombia Law School Human Rights Institute study that says that up to 98% of drone deaths are civilians.
But of course we do remember, on those rare occasions when the carnage takes place on our soil. We read the three thousand names every September 11th.  Next April 15th, there will be ceremonies, minutes of silence, bowed heads, tears and prayers.
I’m guilty of it myself. I had written about Tomas Young, the Iraq vet who wrote an angry last letter to George W. Bush, and then set himself the date of 20 April 2013 as the start date for his fast until his death.
20 April 2013—the day after two young men shut down an entire city plus several substantial suburbs / small towns. These “terrorists” killed five people and maimed over 150 victims.
Horrifying and completely indefensible.
But what would you say if you were the family of Luqman / 12 / male—to choose at random just one of the names on  the list above?
And sadly, there is a group of Americans who will remember—or rather, who are incapable of not remembering.
Guys like Tomas Young, whose damage is physical, if they’re lucky. Or guys who have the worst fate thrust on them. Guys with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, guys who startle awake at 2AM when a car backfires, guys who take their wives “hostage” when their kid forgets not to slam the screen door.

No comments:

Post a Comment