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.
