The Couch Potato's Burden
The White Man’s Burden is one of the more noxious terms from America’s past foreign policies of racist and paternalist colonialism. It was the view non-European based cultures were child-like- Noble Savages or demonic warriors- in comparison to white, European cultures. It posited people of European descent, usually Christian, had an obligation to dominate these cultures until they could mature into the ‘civilized world’. The WMB had kinship with the earlier Manifest Destiny. With the Winning of the West, MD was ailing. Fortunately, for America’s imperial aspirations, the Spanish-American War came along, and after that a war in the Philippines, won from Spain.
The term came from an 1899 Rudyard Kipling poem, The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands, published in the February McClure’s magazine. The British Kipling cheered American ascendancy, arguing the US needed to fill the power vacuum created by Spain’s decline. While the poem is simple-minded its poet was not. Kipling has been unfairly tarred as a racist and sexist because of a handful of poems in his oeuvre. In truth, he was a progressive voice, writing many poems in service to or praise of the working class and impoverished, and certainly no sexist, as his great poem The Rival proves. Even his tag as an imperialist is suspect, for half a year after The White Man’s Burden was published a poem called The Old Issue, a stern rebuke of the colonial Boer War, was published. Perhaps the most chilling defense of the WMB came from a great man, Winston Churchill, only proving even people with nobility can simply be flat out wrong. In 1937, at a commission looking into a 1936 slaughter of Palestinians, he said, ‘I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’ I include this to show merely because supporters of this war are wrong, means not they are irredeemable, nor innately evil.
While most people recognize the notion as condescending, racist, and paternalist, it has been re-embraced by the American Right Wing as a guiding light for the Iraq War, although neutering the language to downplay racial aspects, even though a few years ago this ‘nation building’ was seen as verboten. In this Madison Avenued version the WMB redivivus is a noblesse oblige richer nations have- although it is not sharing of wealth that is proposed, rather the installation of governments that favor their WMB patrons. Claims are made certain peoples are not capable of choosing the ‘correct way’ of governance by themselves, and need to be forced, as children, to behave.
Startlingly, this has been trumpeted by Right Wingers and pro-warriors, especially on political talk shows and in the blogosphere- usually by middle aged, middle class, middle brow white men- far more aggressively than the power elite. In response to this the term White Man’s Burden is somewhat outdated, and I have termed this neo-WMB the Couch Potato’s Burden. I first came up with the term arguing with pro-war poliblogger and apologist Dean Esmay. Esmay is merely one of many bloggers I’ve argued with in the last half year. He is a classic Right Wing, pro-war, don’t question the Pentagon sort, who voted for Bush, and devotes much of his blog to relentlessly sunny reports of a school being rebuilt, or the recent election, while skimming over the increasing American death toll, not to mention the innocent Iraqi dead. Nay, do not dare bring that up! He and his ilk are mirror images of Left Wing bloggers who downplay Saddam Hussein’s evil and opposed the war from the get-go, simply because they hated Bush. Both sides are Lowest Common Denominator propagandists, and their credibility suffers for it.
Yet, this is what discourse in this nation has come to- not arguing over the interpretation of facts, but arguing over different sets of facts. The Left and Right live in their own echoic star chambers, where anyone who disagrees is a traitor or slimeball, yet both are equally out of touch with the great masses in the middle. Need proof? I give you Easongate and Gannongate. What? The chances are whether you are reading this piece shortly after its appearance, or decades from now, these two ‘scandals’ will mean little to you, and the names vaguely conjure up ex-pro quarterbacks. But, in the blogosphere, the Right and Left wingnuts are making hay with these tales, and the men they’re named after, Jordan Eason and Jeff Gannon, as if they were as important as the Rosenbergs or Roy Cohn. Eason was the news chief of CNN, who stupidly recently claimed American soldiers were aiming to kill American journalists, wholly without proof, who recently cowardly resigned, and Jeff Gannon was the pseudonym of James Guckert, a Right Wing White House journalist shill implicated in a bizarre gay prostitute online sex scandal.
But, unless you are a blogging addict, these names and their ‘scandals’ are meaningless. Both sides of the blogosphere have demonized these two incidents far out of proportion, as they do most things. Recently, I posted reactions to these two scandals on both Right Wing and Left Wing blogs. I used the exact same phrasings posted into each side’s comments- calling both tales tabloid journalism only bloggers who are out of touch with reality care about. People have been known to have loose lips- Eason didn’t have guts to make a real accusation, nor stand by his comments, while Gannon was merely the latest in a long line of Presidential shills in the media. The blogosphere, to its rare credit, makes it harder to keep such things quiet. Left Wingers railed I missed the point Gannon was a severe threat to the integrity of the media, and evidence of Right Wing perversion of freedom of the press. Right Wingers railed I did not see the liberal bias of Eason perverts the integrity of the media. They made my points about each other and themselves, and the only relevance either story may have is Gannon, and disgraced black conservative journalist shill Armstrong Williams, among others, may bolster Leftist claims many pro-war bloggers in America and Iraq are on the White House and/or CIA payroll.
The Left, emboldened by lack of WMDs, and increasing likelihood their outlook at the start of the war will be proven true, seem almost to gloat when a body count comes in. Not all, but many. By doing so they risk alienating moderates who are sickened by the war, but don’t want to be seen as part of ‘that crowd’. The Right, increasingly desperate and frustrated their initial assumptions and further claims keep missing their targets, have gone even further, with an anger their power is even questioned. Note the terms I have used- Left and Right (with capitals), not liberal and conservative, because they are two different things. The true liberal and conservative opinion on the Iraq war is the same- to never have engaged, albeit for different reasons. The liberal opposes military force against a nation that did not attack us, and the attendant miseries sprung from it, while the conservative agrees with that, and also opposes interfering in other nations’ internal affairs, as well as the financial cost of the war.
Yet, these arguments are pooh-poohed by the pro-war Right, as they have co-opted the fascistic newspeak of the PC Elite Left, and shoved it back down their, and the rest of our, collective craws. In the insulated Right Wing blogosphere, for example, it is ‘inhumane and racist’ to NOT support the war. Yes, that is correct. The illogic unfurls thusly: Saddam Hussein, in thirty-plus years in power murdered and tortured several hundred thousand of his innocent citizens, so we were being humanitarian to topple him, and in less than two years, kill and torture upwards of a hundred thousand Iraqi citizens- the vast majority innocent. If you point out the logical folly of this humanitarian Big Stick leading us through endless wars, and ask why Iraq and not dozens of other equally bad, or worse, regimes, you are scoffed at as isolationist, left behind by history. And do not dare mention o-i-l. As for being racist to NOT support the war- the argument is you don’t believe brown-skinned Arabs deserve or can support democracy, even as it is far more plausible to see racism as the Right’s denial of Arabs as ethical agents, free to choose democracy if they wish. With Saddam gone, our stated mission of regime change done, and elections, why won’t Bush do what LBJ was urged to do by Vermont Senator George Aiken (R), in regard to Vietnam- just declare victory and leave? Well, the US has an ‘obligation’ to help this poor country. They cannot possibly deal with democracy’s vagaries by themselves. Thus the Couch Potato’s Burden rings clarion through the blogosphere! History repeats itself as the original WMB and Vietnam have no lessons to teach the Right. Ironically, the Right often accuses the Left of not learning from the past- usually in regards to communism, but equally applicable to the disasters colonial imperialism wrought. To impugn racism and inhumanity on those who oppose an unjust, factually unsupportable war, and the indiscriminate killing of people in their nation’s name, is to pervert not only dictionary definitions, but all sense of decency and fair play.
This sort of ignorance and backhanded bigotry is fortunately not espoused by all members of the Right, as true conservatives of conscience, tv talk show hosts John McLaughlin and Robert Novak, columnists Charley Reese and Pat Buchanan, and Reagan era Navy Secretary James Webb, among the more well-known, have spoken out vigorously and judiciously against the war, and the damage it can inflict upon America, as well the Patriot Act.
The most fervent has been conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts, a former Reagan era bureaucrat, who published in and edited for the Wall Street Journal and National Review, for months tilting at windmills regarding the war. Once beloved, he has become a pariah for his attacks on Bush and the war, a continuing series of articles, and many of his former outlets have dropped him. Just a few of his salient conservative points about the Looking Glass world of the pro-war Right:
‘There was a time when I could rant about the ‘liberal media’ with the best of them. But in recent years I have puzzled over the precise location of the ‘liberal media.’
Not so long ago I would have identified the liberal media as the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and the three TV networks, and National Public Radio. But both the Times and the Post fell for the Bush administration’s lies about WMD and supported the US invasion of Iraq. On balance CNN, the networks, and NPR have not made an issue of the Bush administration’s changing explanations for the invasion.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and National Review think there is a liberal media because the prison torture scandal could not be suppressed and a cameraman filmed the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner by a US Marine.’
‘In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.
The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. ‘You are with us or against us.’
This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits of no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.
That, gentle reader, is the full extent of talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and, indeed, of the entire concentrated corporate media where noncontroversy in the interest of advertising revenue rules.’
-November 26, 2004, What Became of Conservatives?
‘If Americans persist in these misconceptions, America will ‘share the fate of all those who in ages past have looked to war and military power to fulfill their destiny. We will rob future generations of their rightful inheritance. We will wreak havoc abroad. We will endanger our security at home. We will risk the forfeiture of all that we prize.’’
-January 17, 2005, How Americans Were Seduced by War
‘As one of Bush’s neocon puppetmasters, Robert Kagan, approvingly wrote in the Washington Post on January 23, ‘The goal of American foreign policy is now to spread democracy, for its own sake, for reasons that transcend specific threats. In short, Bush has unmoored his foreign policy from the war on terrorism.’ [A Higher Realism]....Kagan calls America’s moral crusade against the world ‘the higher realism that Bush now proclaims.’ Gerson declares that Bush’s ‘methods are deeply realistic.’
What is realistic about declaring weapons of mass destruction to exist where they do not exist?
What is realistic about assigning blame for September 11 where it does not belong?
What is realistic about destroying a secular state and creating a vast breeding ground for terrorists?
What is realistic about making Osama bin Laden an Islamic hero and shaking the foundations of America’s reigning puppets in the Middle East?
What is realistic about declaring a world crusade in the face of evidence that the US cannot successfully occupy Baghdad, a city of only 6 million people, much less Iraq, a country of only 25 million people?
There is nothing realistic about Bush or any of his advisers. The world has not seen such delusion since the Children’s Crusade led by a visionary French peasant, Stephen of Cloyes, marched off to free the Holy Land from the Muslims in the year 1212.
The children were captured and sold into slavery.’
-January 24, 2005, War Without End—Bush Proclaims Jacobin Crusade
I have disagreements with other of Roberts’ views, but the point is being anti-war is by no means merely a political stance. Rather, it is a stance based on rightness, realism, and intellect. Such clarity of thought is rabidly dismissed online, as one person I argued with, using Roberts’ words, declared, in all delusive seriousness, ‘People like Roberts will eventually pay the price for their crime.’ The crime being racist and inhumane in opposing the war. The quote is not taken out of context, and all too typical.
Yet, the Right Wing blogosphere will grasp at anything to justify their reasons for warring, just as, had there been WMDs, the Left would have grasped at any straw to deny their existence. My positions were the only reasonable and correct positions to take in regards to the war. To be reluctantly pro-war before the reasons for war evaporated, and avidly anti-war after. These are wholly consistent given what was known at each time. They are the humane positions, to seek to de-fang the possible cause of future victims, and to simply admit error, and not prolong suffering our error caused. Had Bush admitted his error and withdrawn he would have beaten Kerry in a landslide. Simplistic ideology does not suffice- be it the Never Stand Up Left nor the Couch Potato Burdened Right.
To those who say it is dishonorable to leave Iraq I state it is dishonorable to wage war on a nation that did not attack us, based on false premises. To those who claim it is our burden to teach the uncivilized governance I state societies ripen at their own pace, regardless of race or ethnicity, and the Iraqi people have ethical agency and are free to choose whether to work together or civilly war without our paternalistic intervention. If blood need be spilled for democracy, as Jefferson admitted, better it be Iraqi blood by Iraqi hands, lest the mounting American dead’s sacrifice there be purposeless as their elders in Vietnam. Evidence of this notion can be seen in Ukraine, where the masses were ready, willing, and able, to stand up for democracy. They are much farther along the continuum than Iraqis and were freedom to fail there it would be a far greater blow to the democratic ideal than failure in Iraq.
But, many in the pro-war Right simply do not believe the Iraqis, or Arabs, or Moslems, are capable of freely choosing their own form of governance, and you can believe if a theocracy is democratically chosen they would not stand for it. This is why the kinship with the White Man’s Burden exists, why so many middle aged cyber-jockeys who are vicariously living out the computer game fantasies they grew up with in Iraq are more properly purveyors of the Couch Potato’s Burden. It is the simple-minded, hand-down-pants approach of Couch Potatoes- Al Bundy Geopolitics. It is why they give credence to the recent sham election.
While it’s true to say Iraqis, on January 30th, embraced the idea of democracy, this was in no substantive way democracy- where a person makes an informed choice between candidates and positions, and knows of the choices beforehand, not when they walk into the polling place. Here, candidates and parties were mostly unknown and their positions a mystery. I term this sort of election Glory Hole Democracy. Let me explain: as a child I recall gay bars in my poor neighborhood where child prostitutes, mostly runaways to the Big City, who were pals with me and my band of hellacious urchins, were hired to sit behind ‘glory holes’- cutouts in a wall- and fellate anonymous males, mostly gay, some bi and ‘straight’, who would stick their penises through the holes. The ‘customers’ would claim they had no idea they were abusing children and walk away feeling they had a clean conscience, but none could claim, to be ‘intimate’ with their fellaters.
The same is true with this election, as this was no real democracy. Yes, as in an act of prostitution, from a distance, the mechanics are there- but it is not the same thing as ‘making love’ to one you care about. Only deluded propagandists see this as a legitimate thing. Huzzahs for the voters, but shame on the puppeteers who’ve duped the freedom starved into thinking they have done something historic. Their actions are no more democratic than the glory holes were a place of sexual intimacy, and to claim this election was ‘democracy on the march’ has as much credence as the North American Man-Boy Love Association’s claims pedophiles care for their victims.
Yet, not only is democracy in Iraq, as being practiced by the Bush Administration, a sham; the fact is Iraq, as a nation, is a sham. It has no real continuous history, and is a cookie cutter state whose boundaries were carved out during British colonialism’s heyday. This makes the utter neglect of the Kurdish hopes for an independent state so sickening. If freedom were truly on the march we would support a free Kurdistan. But we are not, and neither is the Right Wing, nor pro-warrior crowd. The reason? We don’t want to piss off Turkey, our ally in the area, and the nation we hope can be a wedge force in politically dividing the European Union- thus our support for its entry.
Thus, what it always seems to come down to in the world, of the Couch Potato’s Burden, or beyond- politics, one of the basest of all human affairs: the divvying of power by an elite to orchestrate the masses. One of the big differences, and a huge political advantage, the Iraq War has over the Vietnam War, in America, is a greater percentage of good PR, due to the pro-war blogosphere’s many distortions of American success, which are real, but far fewer than the blogs or mostly still ‘on board’ MSM would have people believe, and wholesale ignorance of our failures, that does not square with the reality laid out by independent American, and non-American, sources. Evidence of this can be seen from how quickly the New York Times and Washington Post were savaged when their war coverage turned from fawning acceptance, to mere critical ambivalence. They were media Rosenbergs. Anything short of absolute cheerleading is considered treasonous.
For example- on Election Day in Iraq there were a couple dozen deaths reported, and the very mention of it had Right Wing polibloggers enraged that a mere twenty-four deaths ‘overshadowed’ the vote of millions, and a 70+% voter turnout. This was definitive proof of the Left’s co-option of the MSM. Yet, I watched all three newscasts that night, and ABC, NBC, and CBS all led off with the ‘successful’ vote, high turnout, bravery of the Iraqi electorate, and great day for freedom, as purple inked fingers were waved as if at a sporting event where a team won a championship, and the naysayers and doubters were portrayed as Neville Chamberlains or delusional Cassandras. It was only after nearly ten minutes of upbeat reportage that the newscasts also mentioned, briefly, there were two dozen dead. In short, the election was ‘an unqualified success’, the terrorists had been shown to be toothless, and a few deaths just sour grapes. In the following days facts came out to dispel those notions. Including dead in a downed British airplane, the death toll nearly tripled (although the US and Iraqi governments refuse to give ‘official’ body counts), attacks on polling places numbered nearly three hundred, election fraud was rampant, as impartial election observers were not allowed to watch, Sunnis mostly boycotted, and the turnout was 58%, likely lower, since the registered voters represented only a portion of age eligible voters not scared off from even registering. It was one of the bloodiest days of the American occupation, and- in light of the claimed 83% who voted in Vietnam, and projections and initial claims- a bit of a failure. Not of the Iraqis, but of the American propaganda machine’s conflict with reality.
This is the very area the pro-war Right Wingers are most ‘challenged’, as they have sipped the Utopian fantasy Kool-Aid that left the Left hung over for decades. Thus, I will now take on the very reasons the US went to war in Iraq and show they are not what they appear, not as many as claimed, and rhetorical sleight of hand. I should also state the structuring of my Vietnam-Iraq parallels was influenced by the bloated reasoning put forth by the White House. I could have easily, using their drawn out rhetorical parsing, numbered my stated parallels at well over a hundred, rather condensing them to eight.
That said, the next time a pro-warrior throws the straw man of, ‘it wasn’t just for WMDs we went to war, there were over a dozen other reasons’, you can use this handy syllabus, below, in rebuttal.
