This column is a response to Meteor Blades recent invitation to contributors to share their answers to his question: "What are you doing to make America better?" in his "Tell us what you’re doing" post on Saturday June, 12, 2010.
When the Bush Propaganda Machine started to pump out prose promoting a higher stakes revival of the Gulf War, we became alarmed and started to do the keystrokes necessary to produce a steady flow of columns (elsewhere on the Internets) challenging the doctrine establishing the infallibility of Dubya’s team.
When the "be very afraid" campaign suggested that folks buy duct tape and plastic sheeting phase for building a sanctuary room to be used in case of a chemical attack, we eagerly turned to the New York Times letters to the editor page to see the readers rip the reporters for not pointing out that there was one small flaw in the idea. If the safe room was not airtight, chemicals would get in and make the effort futile and if it was airtight, then anyone using such a refuge would suffocate themselves. Weren’t warnings about the dangers of suffocation a basic part of a modern American childhood?
No one said anything about the dangers of the airtight room, so when we read a subsequent news update saying that hardware stores were experiencing a run on duct tape and plastic sheeting, we raced to our computer to fire off a letter to the New York Times’ letters editor and point out the absurdity of the idea.
When my letter appeared in the New York Times’ Letters to the Editor page on February 14, 2003, it was the only one that addressed the asphyxiation issue (the illustration was an anthropometric drawing of a home wrapped in plastic struggling to breathe). Later that day Donald Rumsfeld pointed out the danger of asphyxiation and said that the warning was meant to be symbolic and not taken literally.
In the letter, we expressed hope that such a misguided effort was not going to be a harbinger of more poor management and ineptitude when Iraq would be invaded a short while later. It was obvious at that point that the invasion was inevitable. As it turned out, the duct tape and plastic sheeting gaff turned out to be a symbolic indicator of what level of competency to expect once the forever war was launched.
That little baby step inspired a long series of columns for the next several years and we harbored the image of a steady drip of water wearing away a stone.
We wrote a column comparing George W. Bush contempt for the Geneva accords to the pre WWI German remark about "a scrap of paper."
We were among the first pundits to point out the absurdity of the concept of a Presidential library for George W. Bush and we went beyond the humorous aspect of the idea and wondered if the man who was obsessive about secrecy would put his paperwork at the disposal of researchers when his inevitable Presidential Library opened.
We suggested that if they were not going to put the paperwork where it could be available to historians, perhaps they could display one of those famous aluminum tubes that precipitated a war.
We had ridiculed the aluminum tube as a "smoking gun" premise saying that perhaps something so dangerous should have serial numbers stamped on them like the somewhat less dangerous hand guns do.
Over and above the one liners about putting on display the book he was reading when he was informed about the attack on the World Trade Center, we just couldn’t picture someone in the bowls of the Presidential Library pouring through the White House paperwork concerned with the run up to the Invasion of Iraq.
We repeatedly suggested that George W. Bush & Co. deserved a war crimes trial every bit as much as the hoodlums tried at Nuremberg did. The Germans had committed war crimes. The Bush team used the same methods of coerced questioning. It seemed like a simple bit of logic would lead to the conclusion that Bush deserved a war crimes trial for ordering the waterboarding tactics.
When the TV folks reported that Howard Dean had suffered a major mental breakdown, we pointed out that it was unattributed opinion and not a legitimate diagnosis from a reputable mental health expert. The nation’s newspapers played along with the ruse and just a few days later, Senator John Kerry was universally described as being the Democratic frontrunner.
Later, in retrospect, we wondered about the legal paperwork for such entities as the swift boat veterans for truth group had to have been paid for, filed legally, and at the ready, long before the time of the miraculous change of frontrunners was unveiled. Did that carefully orchestrated bit of preparation outweigh the fact that similar organizations to use against Howard Dean were non existent? Do you think that a 2004 Presidential Campaign designed to inundate Senator Kerry with preselected talking points may have inspired the Republicans to prompt the "mental breakdown" media blitzkrieg aimed at denying Howard Dean the Democratic Party nomination?
When we chanced to speak to a woman who had been a part of the Australian legal team collecting, organizing and presenting evidence for the World War II war crimes trials in Tokyo, we asked her some questions about possible similarities of Bush to war criminals. When we asked her for her opinion (based on actual war crimes trials experience) about Bush possibly being a war criminal, she snapped: "Of course he is!" We wrote a column that logically proved that Bush is a war criminal. Ho-hum. The column’s effect reminded us of the Longfellow line about "I shot an arrow into the air/ it landed I know not where."
We asked Vincent Bugliosi (at a public event at the Santa Monica Public Library) to compare Bush to Charlie Manson. He sidestepped a direct answer to the question but then described both men in terms that did seem interchangeable.
After years of waiting for some well paid journalist to write the obvious sidebar story about what the trials at Nuremberg had established concerning war crimes, we went off to the Santa Monica Library to see what we could learn.
Turns out, the American lead prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, delivered an opening statement that was described by newsmen who heard it as one of the finest of its kind ever. The money quote was "any invasion is a crime against peace." We may not have been the first to delve into the Nuremberg trial for a Bush era sidebar, but we did notice that subsequently the Conservatives seemed to drop their "he didn’t know that there wasn’t any WMD’s" way of responding to questions about the futility of the invasion of Iraq. According the principles established at Nuremberg by America, that was a red herring answer and just a clever debating dodge.
After five years of attempting to improve America by writing columns urging the country to return to its position of honorable morality in the conduct of wars, our efforts to convince America that the way to do that was to arrest George W. Bush and try him and some members of his administration for war crimes were temporarily suspended by the election of a new President.
It seems that Bush’s successor has determined that my suggestion is frivolous and spurious leading us to the conclusion that our efforts to improve America can be epitomized as "Don Quixote with a laptop."
We will back President Obama and second the motion and join him in urging Democrats to drop the matter of war crimes trials and let bygones be bygones. We will start pumping out columns of a more whimsical nature.
It’s not like my life has been a total fiasco; Paul Newman many years ago asked for my autograph.
Bruno Bettelheim, in the Introduction to his book "The Uses of Enchantment: The meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales," wrote: "To find deeper meaning, one must become able to transcend the confines of a self-centered existence and believe that one will make a significant contribution to life – if not right now, then at some future time."
Now the disk jockey will play "You’re so vain," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and John Waters new version of "We Shall Overcome." We gotta go check for bargain airfares to Ireland. Have an "Ozymandias" type week.