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May
20, 2003
Linda
Heard
The Cage of Occupation
Edward
Said
The Arab Condition
May
19, 2003
CounterPunch
Wire
"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
Ross
Vachon
Dennis Miller's New Gig: the Last
Refuge of Goofy?
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
Matt
Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
Robert
Fisk
Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
Freedland
Ann Coulter's Appalling Magic
Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
May
17 / 18, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Children's Teeth
Peter
Linebaugh
An American Tribute to Christopher
Hill
Gary
Leupp
Nepal Today
Rock and
Rap Confidential
The Republican Plot Against the Dixie Chicks
Walter
Sommerfeld
Plundering Baghdad's Museums
Ron Jacobs
Condy Rice's Yipping Tirades
Thomas
P. Healy
Dubya Does Indy
Tarif Abboushi
Bush, Sharon and the Roadmap
Francis
Boyle
Debating US War Crimes in Iraq
Mark Davis
An Interview with Richard Butler
Richard
Lichtman
American Mourning
Michael
Ortiz Hill
Overcoming Terrorism
Adam
Engel
Uncle Sam is YOU!
Alan Maas
The Best News Show on TV
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Albert
Elaine
Cassel
Good Enough for an Alien
Website
of the Weekend
The 37 Americans Who Run Iraq
Song of
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Talkin' Sounds Just Like Joe McCarthy Blues
May
16, 2003
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Wells
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Fear Itself
Sharon
Smith
The Resegregation of US Schools
Ramzy Baroud
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Sam
Hamod
A Nation of Fear
Phil Reeves
Baghdad Pays the Price
Robert
McChesney
The FCC's Big Grab
Mark Engler
Those Who Don't Count
Steve
Perry
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Website
of the Day
Iraq and Our
Energy Future
May
15, 2003
Ayesha
Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How
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Writing Campaigns
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Hilden
Moussaoui and the Camp X-Ray Detainees:
Can He Get a Fair Trial?
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Laura Carlsen
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The New Fakers: State Dept. Undercuts
New Yorker's Goldberg
Stew Albert
A Story I Will Tell
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Perry
Bush's Little
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Website
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Strip-o-Rama
May
14, 2003
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
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Leopold
The Pentagon and Hallburton: a Secret
November Deal for Iraq's Oil
David
Lindorff
Fighting the Patriot Act: Now It's
Alaska
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Chuckman
Giggling into Chaos
Jack
McCarthy
Twin Towers of Journalism: Racism
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Madsen
Assassinating JFK Again
M.
Junaid Alam
The Longer View
Paul
de Rooij
The New Hydra's Head:
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James
Reiss
What? Me Worry?
Steve Perry
More on Saudi Arabia Bombings
Website
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May
13, 2003
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Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
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Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
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Bush's War Web Log 5/12
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Fooling
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Watch
Michel
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Uzma
Aslam Khan
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Arrogant
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The
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Francis Boyle
Impeach
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May
21, 2003
The
Rapture of Destruction
Shopping,
the End of the World, & Bush
By SAUL LANDAU
"There shall be a fourth kingdom
on earth that shall be different from all the other kingdoms;
it shall devour the whole earth,and trample it down, and break
it to pieces."--Daniel 23
As I browsed the New York Times for news of Iraq,
terrorism, SARS and the latest environmental disaster, my teenage
daughter and her friends arrived with the nutritional equivalent
of ecological bio-terrorism. They opened Burger King bags and
unveiled cheeseburgers and fat-laden fries (the French might
reject their name connected to such items) dipped into what Ronald
Reagan called a vegetable (ketchup). They drowned this cholesterol
feast with noisy slurps from 22 oz. plastic coke containers.
As they slowly sucked in the artery clogging
"fast food," I recalled the messianic words from the
Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle: "This is total war. We
are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out
there," he told John Pilger in the New Statesman, December
16, 2002). "If we just let our vision of the world go forth,
and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together
clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will
sing great songs about us years from now"
If kids eat food like this, I thought,
the only songs they'll sing in the future will be hymns at each
others' premature funerals. Fast food, shopping and total war!
Can one encompass epic concepts like waging perpetual war for
perpetual peace on the one hand and harmonize them with a vision
of a trivialized society whose spiritual glue is perpetual shopping?
The Bushies address this issue through
religion, not political philosophy. For example, their policy
planners reject scientists' prognosis of disasters that will
ensue from global warming. Indeed, neither corporate CEO's--except
for insurance chiefs --nor government heavies seem to factor
global environment into their plans.
The May 7, 2003 LA Times reported, for
example, that "lawyers representing some 30,000 impoverished
Ecuadoreans are expected to sue Chevron Texaco Corp. today, accusing
the second-largest U.S. oil company of contaminating the rainforest
and sickening local residents. The suit alleges that a Chevron
Texaco unit discharged billions of gallons of contaminated water,
causing widespread pollution and illness."
Other oil companies used similar practices
in Nigeria. In 1999 Shell Oil injected a million liters of waste
into an abandoned oil well in Erovie in the Niger Delta. Those
who ate the crops or drank water in the area fell ill. Almost
100 people died from poisonous amounts of lead, mercury and other
toxics. In 2001, exploration for new wells by western oil companies
contaminated the fresh water supply, causing serious illness
among the local population. The typical oil company responds
to such mishaps by explaining: "hey, people drive cars,
cars need gas, we supply the gas." Neither oil company CEOs
nor the President addressed the implications of using more fossil
fuels.
When pushed, one corporate executive
alluded to "God's will." At the 1997 Kyoto Conference
on environment, Jeremy Leggett, who wrote The Carbon War: Global
Warming and the End of the Oil Era (2001), cornered Ford Motor
Company executive John Schiller.
Leggett, a Greenpeacer, asked Schiller
how he dealt with "a billion cars intent on burning all
the oil and gas available on the planet." Schiller first
denied that "fossil fuels have been sequestered underground
for eons." He claimed, instead, that the Earth is just 10,000,
not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.
Schiller then referred Leggett to The Book of Daniel: "The
more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible."
In other words, Schiller's "theological" interpretation
of the world foresees "earthly devastation [that] will mark
the `End Time' and return of Christ."
So, like members of the powerful in the
White House, just refer to biblical passages to understand those
photos of melting ice caps on the Andes and breakups of polar
ice caps, like the warming effects of the now frequent of El
ninos, which have a devastating impact on the sea and land's
wellbeing.
I juxtapose my fears over deteriorating
environment with the rapture experienced over such ecological
decay by the very people who manage the destruction. They view
optimistically the dire environmental warnings as sure signs
that the end is near and the Messiah will return. As a kid in
Hebrew school the Messiah would supposedly arrive and take all
the Jews to Israel. When my father told my mother about this
imminent event, she wailed in despair: "Just after we spent
all that money fixing up the house?"
In the no laughs born-again world, however,
the Millennium means that the Lord will welcome a smog-filled
planet so he can redesign it as it in its original Edenic form.
Somehow he will afford to the true believers the necessary lung
power to survive and live for a thousand years in Nirvana.
If this sounds bizarre, then read Joan
Bokaer, who studied the fundamentalists at the Center for Religion,
Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. Tens of millions
of Americans, she reports, have taken up this apocalyptic form
of religion. Not all of them shape their lives dogmatically around
this religious vision, but they do tend to dismiss environmentalists
as worry warts.
Bokaer adds that these serious soldiers
of God see their role as paving the pious road for the Lord's
return. Like the Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay Colony
in the 17th Century, these modern zealots predict Christ's return
only at the time when they have successfully carried out His
work: purged the country of sinners and replaced the corrupt
civil law with the dictates of the Bible--which includes, in
foreign policy, promoting the battle of Armageddon by supporting
Israel.
Like the Puritans, they do not believe
in the separation of church and state. The Puritans, however,
studied science, believing that God had placed the challenge
of discovery before them. Modern fundamentalists tend to disparage
the discipline of research to learn about God's ways and instead
direct their energies at promoting ultra right politics: including
belittling environmental concerns and supporting Israel. So,
long live Israel (even with its population of Jews, whose prayers
God doesn't hear); hooray for depleted uranium in military shells
and bombs.
This religious vision --or nightmare--coincides
with a society whose main spiritual value is shopping. Place
at the political head of this nation a born-again alcoholic and
you may have the glue albeit not one that's logical or holds
together disparate pieces in any other way. George Bush's inflexibility
of thinking on the one hand--his dogmatic use of good and evil
as politically defining poles--allows him to live with or ignore
the obvious contradictions in his imperial plan for world domination
on the one hand and his destructiveness on the other. "We
need an energy bill that encourages consumption," he told
a Trenton, N.J. audience on September 23, 2002.
In the October 11, 2002 Counterpunch,
Katherine van Wormer cites brain studies to "reinforce what
recovering alcoholics and their counselors have been saying for
years; long-term alcohol and other drug use changes the chemistry
of the brain These anomalies in brain patterns are associated
with a rigidity in thinking."
My wife first said it during the presidential
campaign debates, when issues emerged for which the programmers
had not prepared Bush. "He's a dry drunk," she said,
referring to the Alcoholics Anonymous term that describes the
alcoholic who no longer drinks, but has not stopped thinking
about drinking and has not entered a program to deal with his
addiction.
Van Wormer, a professor of social work
at the University of Northern Iowa and the co-author of Addiction
Treatment: A Strength's Perspective (2002), says dry drunks tend
"to go to extremes." I immediately thought about his
religious fundamentalism, his insistence on an extreme tax plan,
his threat to "smoke 'em out." As we all have heard,
Bush called for a "crusade" after 9/11--which he later
rescinded, but he loved to label his enemies as evil. Van Wormer
also lists "exaggerated self-importance and grandiose behavior"
as characteristics of dry drunks. Judge for yourselves!
Arguably the least qualified president,
Bush presides over the most complicated period of world history.
The American economy needs a public in a constant shopping frenzy.
That requires certain kinds of freedom--freedom to confuse desire
with need. Shopping needs advertising, which needs broad freedom
to lure anxious customers into purchasing goods and services
to elevate their status, self esteem, sexual prowess, and power,
as well as to improve or enhance their body features. In Upside
Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (2001), Eduardo Galeano
calls advertisers who "know how to turn merchandise into
magic charms against loneliness. Things have human attributes:
they caress, accompany, understand, help. Perfume kisses you,
your car never lets you down."
The car--or SUV--has become a basic capital
good which our system must mass produce. The very act of producing
gas burning vehicles, however, conflicts with the future of human
life on the plant--global warming, ozone layer depletion etc...
Bush's policies exacerbate the environmental issue. Instead of
confronting this reality, Bush and his followers pray that the
end will soon come. Perhaps his troublesome teenage twins contribute
to his desire to bring it all to an end.
My teenager finishes her greasy burger,
belches and does not sing great songs about Bush.
Saul Landau
teaches at Cal Poly Pomona and is a fellow of the Institute for
Policy Studies. His films on Cuba, Mexico, Iraq and the Right
Wing are available at Cinema Guild 800-723-552. He also writes
a weekly column for the progressive webzine, www.rprogreso.com.
He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org.
Today's
Features
CounterPunch
Wire
"Terror" Slut Steve Emerson
Eats Crow
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Letter to Kofi Annan on Powell's Missing
Evidence
Ross
Vachon
Dennis Miller's New Gig: the Last
Refuge of Goofy?
John
Chuckman
Blair's Awkward Lies
Matt
Vidal
Corporate Media and the Myth of the Free Market
Michael
S. Ladah
The Fine Print to Bush's Road Map
Robert
Fisk
Bush's Eternal War Backfires
Elaine
Cassel
Clarence Thomas, Still Whining After All These Years
Jonathan
Freedland
Ann Coulter's Appalling Magic
Steve Perry
Play It Again, O-Sam-a
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