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May
3, 2003
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May
5, 2003
Regime Change Begins at Home
Literally Speaking
by LEILA MATSUI
For those of us fed up with military homecoming
parades and demolished palace toilets, (the staples of post-invasion
reportage on Iraq), FOX and CNN's renewed and aggressive coverage
of the missing Modesto mother-to-be, Laci Peterson, comes almost
as a welcome relief. One could argue, however that Iraq's plundered
and eviscerated artifacts and the discovery of the pregnant 27
year old's remains are both revealing examples of the Bush administration's
agenda to corporatize, at any cost, all aspects of social and
economic life at home and abroad.
For Whitehouse ideologues, the destruction
of all evidence of Iraq's history and civilization conveniently
started a new calendar page - the year one for capital's triumphant
monuments over ground zero. For a Modesto, California fertilizer
salesman, an unwanted, pregnant wife was just more dead wood
to be downsized.
In 'Bowling for Columbine', filmmaker
Michael Moore cites the bombing of Kosovo as a starting point
for the rampage that led to the student body count of Columbine
High School by two of it's own students - products, he argues,
of the institutionalized violence embraced by the town where
the massacre took place. As home to the Lockheed Corporation
where missiles and other weaponry are manufactured for the Department
of Defense, it's hardly a coincidence that Littleton, Colorado,
has been turning out killers over several generations. Should
it really come as any surprise then, Moore argues, that two of
its own sons could interpret this meaning literally? Could the
suspect in custody in the Laci Peterson case be yet another prodigal
son putting a very personal spin on this particular administration's
policies?
Laci Peterson's murder, unlike the Columbine
massacre, did not occur during any full-blown conflict. On the
contrary, her disappearance on Christmas Eve came at a time when
Bush hawks were merely squawking about regime change in Iraq.
Still, stupid white guys had every reason to feel smugly confident
that their appointed leadership had only their interests in mind.
Regime change could just as easily be interpreted to include
one's wife.
Scott Peterson, the recently arraigned
suspect in his wife's murder seems to have done his own number
crunching in the spirit of disgraced Enron execs, doing the devil's
calculus to maximize short-term profit gains. In this case, more
hot-buttered booty action from a San Bernardino masseuse named
Amber.
Again, we can draw gruesome visual parallels
between the discovery of Laci Peterson's dislodged fetus in San
Francisco Bay and later, her headless torso, coming in on the
heels of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's verbal victory laps
around the gutted museums and libraries of Baghdad. This was
the sound of freedom, remember? The war-whoop of the newly liberated
bachelor yucking it up at his own stag party.
As Governor of Texas, GW used the festive
occasion of death row inmate, Karla Faye Tucker's last-ditch
appeal on the eve of her execution to try his hand at stand-up
comedy. His on-camera impersonation of white trash going down
the chute could easily have been interpreted as an official endorsement
of domestic violence. Here was a politician familiar with the
patter of angry white guys in pick-up trucks everywhere. By the
same token, the less-than-grieving Scott Peterson's pre-arrest
cameo appearances at the volunteer centre where he was supposedly
assisting in the search for his missing wife gave us the clearest
glimpse yet of a dirt-bag (oops, fertilizer) salesman working
the room at a Travelodge convention centre - the familiarly glib
frat-boy very much at home in the spotlight. A chip off the
old presidential block, mini-me Peterson puts forth a similar
aura of simpering, faux concern that does little to conceal a
drainhole where other people might have a conscience.
Like his presidential pater, the shoulder
slapping, high-fiving Scotty-boy can summon forth when necessary,
divine entities to do his P.R. In Scott's case, it was the 'spirit'
of Laci, who'd dropped by the centre to thank the volunteers
for their efforts in finding her. Surprisingly, few people commented
on the fact that foul-play was still just another scenario the
police were toying with during the investigation. No one at that
point had ruled out the possibility that Ms. Peterson would return
home safe and unharmed. Scott himself was insisting this was
indeed the case, all the while channeling the spirit of his dead
spouse to deal with the press.
George W. Bush, no stranger himself to
syphilitic sugar plums dancing in his head applied a similar
logic to push forth his Apocalyptic vision of a Saddam-less Iraq,
where the maimed and dead danced on the streets and tossed ectoplasmic
rose petals towards oncoming tanks.
Not surprisingly, both men share a tendency
to mangle even the simplest of platitudes when called upon to
look grim - all part and parcel of the sociopath's inability
to deal with emotional issues beyond a few pre-scripted banalities.
Those axioms of evil spoonfed to then by trusted aides and legal
teams become just more pretzels to choke on. Neither seem capable,
for that matter of sustaining sincerity beyond the time it takes
to summon up a cliche. For them, everything is divine but certainly
nothing is sacred.
Like Bush, Peterson's motives for his
slayings have yet to be fully determined. Why the people of Iraq
needed to be liberated, in most cases, from their own bodies
is still a topic of wide debate. Peterson's decision to do away
with his own wife and unborn son has a similarly fuzzy logic
but one that mirrors in many ways, the regime's fundamental goals
of funneling all tax dollars into military coffers and dispensing
with such frills as education and healthcare.
For a weekend warrior like Scott, whose
hunting and fishing trips were, no doubt, jeopardized by the
immediate and future demands of a wife and fetus, this may have
been the determining factor in his decision to divest himself
of them in order to protect his remaining assets. Indeed both
men share a rugged disrespect for the great outdoors in their
mutual fondness for all-terrain gas guzzlers and even a similarly
predatory view of the scenery. In his own way Scott Peterson,
behaved like any Whitehouse CEO looking at the bottom line through
a cocked gun barrel, aiming to strike poor performers from the
company's portfolio.
The unfortunate Laci Peterson is just
another name we can add to the swelling death toll on Bush's
watch; another casualty of the aggressions being waged from the
corporate homefront while more nameless bodies pile up overseas.
Scott Peterson, now facing the death penalty will pay the ultimate
price for adhering to the principles of the second Bush's new
world order. While it would be easy to adopt the popular pundit
view of Scott Peterson as a singular aberration, exempt from
any claim to humanity, we would be closer to solving his riddle
by examining his pathology within the context of 'homeland security'
and what it really means on the domestic front.
Leilla Matsui
is a freelance writer living in Tokyo, Japan. She can be reached
at: catcat@s3.ocv.ne.jp.
This article first appeared in Dissident
Voice.
Yesterday's
Features
Saul Landau
The Cuba Conundrum
Neve
Gordon
US: No Right to Know About the Disappeared
John
Chuckman
Tom Friedman's Life as a Pet Hamster
Bradley
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Harvey
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John
Troyer
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Perry
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of the Day
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