The Powell of positive thinking
Colin Powell is making the rounds, marketing a book on how you, too, can lead the life of an avuncular mass-murderer. One can only hope this is niche marketing.
Powell's "regrets, I've had a few" nonchalance about his role in selling the wanton slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis is perhaps more disturbing than if he'd clung to the idea that he didn't sell a pack of lies at the UN.
The former Secretary of State carefully circumscribes his little foible, his greasing the skids to an epic massacre—costly in most every way... except to his acceptance as a sage authority.
His (nano-) second thoughts impress Jon Stewart as a sign of the uniquely high ethics the liberal host ascribes to military folk.
Even now, Powell insists he had believed what he was saying was factual... and that much of it really was. Further, he still thinks the mission was worth accomplishing.
A lot of that information was on point. I can tell you right now that if Saddam Hussein stayed there, if his regime had stayed in place, and he got out of UN sanctions, we would have seen weapons of mass destruction come back. He had the capability and he had used them before against his own people. I'm glad he's gone. I'm glad the Iraqi people have a chance to build a more stable, diplomatically proper representative government.
And could there be a better role model of diplomatic propriety than 21st century America? I think not!
Powell makes it clear that what he's selling is optimism. Key lessons he offers are "it will look better in the morning" and "perpetual optimism."
He admits that such optimism may be wholly unwarranted. But it's empowering stuff, and that's the important thing.
Little matter that it may give one the blind-eyed gumption to commit and then shrug off atrocities.
If you, say, wrongly condemned millions of people to death, dismemberment, or displacement, it might lead to a touch of self-doubt. A DECtalk would choke on glibly saying "you have to get over it" about such a "blot." But not our great man, and not Team America!
(h/t Raw Story)
Labels: Day of shame
posted by Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy at 7:13 AM
4 Comments:
"Be optimistic." Seriously? What was the book that Oprah was touting that said that if you focused on something and intended to have it with sufficient energy that you didn't have to actually do anything to get it that the mere wishing would get it for you? Turned out the author was "wishing" to sell books.
(from "Boobie Official Mendacity,"
an episode of Fernando Po, U.S.A., America's post-literate retreat to Plato's Cave)
The Boobie Condoleeza Rice
And Colin Powell, too,
Proved once again that Black folks lie
Just like the White ones do
Repeating what no one believed
Exactly right on cue
and
(from "Deputy Dubya's Droopy Diaper Rap")
And Colin Powell played along and told the world untruths
In service to a man who oft betrays;
And now no thinking person who resides on Planet Earth
Believes a single word that this man says.
Back in Vietnam, where Colin Powell got his start helping to cover up for the My Lai massacre, we had an name for upwardly mobile, ticket-punching careerist ass-kissers: "Fuck-up-and-move-up." I think that still holds true in the U.S. Army and "War" Department today.
Michael, discussions of the role of race in politics are so fraught, I'm not entirely sure introducing them in verse here to the topic of Colin Powell's UN speech will lead us anywhere good.
I'm also unclear what the word "Boobie" means in this context, not sure it's going to help with the discourse, either.
Point taken about the color "black," but I could just as well have used the color "green" (also one syllable) to describe American officials like Rice and Powell (and Rumsfeld and Cheney) who lie just to keep in practice, just so they won't forget how. The entire poem -- part of a much larger epic -- makes that clear. Nothing racist about it, especially the parts about George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Powell and Rice got off lucky.
The word "Boobie" refers to the epigram to Chapter One of The Meaning of Meaning, by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, two pioneering British scholars in the field Semiotics, namely:
"Let us get closer to the fire, so that we may see what we are saying" -- the Bubis of Fernando Po.
It seems that ethnographers of the late nineteenth century had come across a small group of aborigines on an island off the coast of Africa called Fernando Po: a people so culturally devolved that they could no longer communicate with each other unless they could also see one another physically gesturing or striking poses. Joseph Campbell picked up on this, too, and mentioned "The Boobies" in his book The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959).
Chris Hedges has written an entire book on the subject of modern-day image gawking in lieu of reading and writing, which he titled: Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. In it, Hedges makes early use of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I assume you know the classic metaphor.
Former Vice President Al Gore wrote something on the subject of rampant illiteracy, too: what he called "visual rhetoric" -- or communicating by striking poses or uttering inarticulate noises (like audible sighs) -- in his book The Assault on Reason.
But Hedges wrote his book in 2009 and Gore wrote his in 2007, while I had already begun composing Fernando Po, U.S.A. after reading Ron Suskind's now-canonical article, "Without a Doubt," in the New York Times Magazine (2004). Surely you know of the Bush administration official who boasted "We're an empire now, ... [and blah, blah, blah)." But for me the money quote came from Mark McKinnon, the Bush media guru whom Suskind quotes saying of Bush loyalists:
"They like the way he walks and they like the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. ... and you know what they don't like? They don't like you! ... meaning people in the reality based community."
I tried to visualize the AWOL Texas Air National Guardsman "walking" and "pointing" and "exuding" but I had no luck at it. But something else did occur to me. Something about Boobies. Something about the Walrus and the Carpenter. And so this happened:
They like the way he "points," they say
They like the way he "walks,"
Despite the fact that no one can
Decipher how he talks.
Yet when he mimics "standing tall,"
The stupid Boobie gawks.
Everything just followed and flowed from there -- for years. I couldn't stop interpreting everything I saw and heard from America as shadows on a cave wall aimed straight at a bunch of illiterate Boobies camped around their television fires striking poses, pulling grotesque faces, and uttering inchoate noises at each other -- the perfect paradigm explaining and exemplifying Fernando Po, U.S.A., America's post-literate retreat to Plato's cave.
Many thanks to Ogden and Richards and Campbell and McKinnon for getting me started. I don't know if any of this contributes to your discourse, but it sure has helped me with creative therapy for delayed onset PTSD stirred up by Dimwit Dubya's stud hamster debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq -- continued and escalated by Barack Hussein Obama, another of Plato's puppeteers casting heroic shadows of himself upon a cave wall for a captive audience of Boobies to mistake for reality.
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