unspoken

This morning I might prefer to snicker through the squabbles over marijuana in Washington State, where prim holdouts in some municipalities have refused to issue retail licenses to legal distributors. Comes to mind from college fraternity days, a drinking song that we started with the tune to “My country ‘tis of thee” or the British national anthem, “Down with king alcohol,” then breaking into shouting chant, “ee-yi-yi-ee-yi-yi-dubya-see-tee-yuu,” mocking W.C.T.U., the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It is a human perversion to rise up in self-righteousness to forbid, outlaw, even render unconstitutional those things we are against, the Prohibition Era for instance.

 We freedom-loving Americans love to forbid and punish the “wicked,” laying our particular values and views on everyone else. In a smoke-filled room of the religious certitudinous, a martini toast to celebrate a constitutional amendment deciding who other people can love and marry. In a nation of the prim and certain whose heritage is Salem witch trials, decades of wasted resources raiding weed growers, prosecuting and imprisoning those who grow, sell, and smoke pot; a nation of Puritan moralists claiming to be "conservative." A true “conservative” wants first above all, government out of his life and leaving him alone, not installing a camera in his bedroom to monitor what he smokes and who he kisses. In our pompous arrogance it never dawns that we are disingenuously stupid on the home front also. Also.

Notwithstanding that conversational preference, my mind this morning is elsewhere, on another "also", geographically Iraq. In the news, inevitable chaos, anarchy, discord and murderous sectarian vengeance. The Iraqi troops for whom we spent billions of dollars and buried thousands of humans in order to train and equip them showed the white feather to advancing militants? What the alphabet did we expect from the same armies who turned tail and fled Kuwait as Saddam Hussein’s “Mother of All Battles” in the First Gulf War? Consumed in self-hatreds, it is a culture of bluster and backstabbing where we have no business. Looking back, second guessing is political fine art honed sharp around election times, but there were some who opposed the unconscionable American invasion of Iraq the first place. That our elected and appointed officials lied to us and to the world to justify that phase of American atrocity may be recorded by future historians, but it will be too late to convene Nuremberg trials of our own war criminals and to prosecute our crimes against humanity. But history is that only the losers ever get called to account. It will be interesting to see what kind of lies we have to be force fed, choke down and swallow this time around before American troops start dying in Iraq again. My solution? Unspeakable, therefore unspoken.

T