The Mother Of All Vanity Posts: 2 Years of DU Columns

[Plaid Adder]

For some reason today I decided to sit down and look over all my DU stuff and try to see whether I was any good at predicting the future. This was the result, posted to my livejournal. Enjoy.
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Crystal Ball's 3000 mile Checkup

I'm all tuckered out from ranting about National Marriage Protection Week, so what I have decided to do this morning is go back and look at my old Democratic Underground columns and see what kind of track record I have at predicting how things will go. Because if I've been more or less accurate, then according to efficient market theory I should be able to predict the future.

First one I ever had was

July 26, 2001: Laughing At Himself, Or Laughing At Us?

Being a pre-9/11 effort, this is mostly just a pissed-off screed about Yale inviting George W. to campus to give a commencement address. By all accounts it was a bomb. But in the midst of my ranting about how Bush's smugness about his own laziness and ignorance is just really, really irritating, there is this little portent of things to come:

"I happen to think that morality is linked to the ability to think critically; that compassion and empathy are dependent on the cultivation of curiosity; that both individual happiness and national prosperity are related to our willingness and ability to learn. I believe - call me crazy - that an education is more than a series of hoops through which you have to slouch in order to get the B.A. that will qualify you as a member of the middle class...And that is why, when it comes to Dubya, I am no longer amused."

I could never, of course, have forseen 9/11; but I could at least forsee that W's unrepentant anti-intellectualism might have some unfortunate ethical consequences...

September 22, 2001: An Unwinnable War?

This was part of my initial response to the bombardment of Afghanistan. The basic argument was that invading Afghanistan would be wrong, useless, and stupid. From a prognostication standpoint, this is the most interesting part:

"In order for this war to have any practical effect, we would have to send ground troops in to kill off the entire Taliban, prop up some oppositional regime that's friendly to us, find Bin Ladin, put him in a sack, and mail him to the US. I'm quite sure that the Bush adminstration is totally psyched to kill off the Taliban. The question is, can we do it? Again, we look into the magic 8-ball of history, and it tells us, "Outlook Not Good." Because of its convenient central location, Afghanistan has long been attractive to imperial powers vying for global domination. England and Russia fought for it in the nineteenth century; both had cause later to regret their infatuation. The Soviet Union and the USA went head to head over it in the 1980s, which incidentally is when our Central Intelligence Agency used American tax dollars to train Osama Bin Ladin, who was in Afghanistan organizing opposition to the Soviets. As you will notice, neither the USA or the Soviet Union really won that one. But this will be different, see, because now the American people have the will to support a long, brutal foreign war which will involve massive American casualties."

Was I wrong or right? The 'war' was over quickly, and the Taliban basically fled the field. However, all accounts from Afghanistan (and you don't hear much about it unless you go looking, because the administration is not interested in reminding people about this) indicate that the Karzai government's power only reaches to Kabul and vicinity, warlords are running the rest of the country, and the Taliban is slowly but surely making a comeback. Whether I was right or wrong depends on what you mean by "topple," I guess. We replaced the regime at the centralized point of control. However, the rest of the country is still very much up for grabs.

Oh, and another thing, not a very important point really but still interesting to note...we never did find Bin Laden, put him in a sack, and mail him to the U.S., even after we had 'toppled' the Taliban. Toppling the Taliban was supposed to be a means to that end; but everyone has forgotten that now.

August 23, 2002: Iraq Attack Is Back, Jack!

It surprises me that there was almost a year's gap between that one and this one; but I was busy with No More Blood, and for a while DU wasn't printing the stuff I sent them (too focused on the war and not enough on Dubya, I suppose). This is the interesting thing to remember: you could not get people to a protest about the Afghanistan campaign for love nor money. There was widespread acceptance of the idea that since Bin Laden was behind the attacks, and he was being harbored in Afghanistan, it was our right and duty to go in there and take him out. I hope that now, when people look back on it, they can see that this was the first step in what has become a terrifying journey toward total world war. The object, we were told, was to get Bin Laden. We never did; nobody in Washington seems to care.

Anyway, you know the saying, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. A lot of people in this country were not willing to be fooled twice. Of course, a lot of them were. But I still felt, very early on, that this war was going to be a hard sell for the administration:

"The only question is whether Bush II will have the fortitude to hold off until 2004, or whether he'll get overexcited and shoot the wad right before the midterm elections. But whether we send the boys in this October or two Octobers from now, one thing will still be clear: George W. Bush is the only person in the entire world who wants this war. Of course, when I say George W. Bush, I don't really mean him, per se, so much as the syndicate that's running the country in his name. Apart from them, though, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone else who considers this a good idea. We've been working so hard to alienate most of our traditional allies - if our handling of the war in Afghanistan wasn't enough, we've also been treating the United Nations as if it is just one big litterbox, and we are a 2000 pound cat that's just had a very heavy high-fiber meal - that we could hardly expect them to sign off on something that was actually necessary, let alone a gratuitous and unprovoked invasion of another sovereign nation that hasn't really done anything to us since.well, since we sent our army over there in 1991."

Well, I was right about that much...

October 11, 2002: Anticipatory Self-Defense: A Modest Proposal

Once the 'preventive war' rhetoric got revved up, I was moved to put together this piece about the central absurdity of the concept, which is that the privilege of starting a war to protect yourself is only ever ceded to those who are so powerful that they have no legitimate need for it:

"Then I started thinking about what would happen if women in general started adopting 'anticipatory self-defense' as their policy. Why bother with restraining orders and stalking laws? Anticipatory self-defense would entitle any woman who was being hassled by any man who she deemed to be a potential threat to her to just head out there with her handgun and blow him away. It'd make the world a lot safer - for women, anyway."

No real predictive value, unless you count the warning about how the 'anticipatory self-defense' concept was going to wind up abused...

October 18, 2002: Beyond The Salon

This was my response to an intensely irritating piece in Salon about the Stalinist past of International ANSWER, which organized the first two big marches I went to. Although I have to say that the local chapter of IA, which is the one I have the most experience with, has not endeared itself to me on closer acquaintance, I still stand by the argument I made in this piece about how a movement needs both extremists and moderates. Then there's this argument about the value of protest itself:

"Peaceful protest is an incredibly dorky activity. You go out and listen to a load of speeches which are never going to be uniformly exciting, then you team up with a bunch of strangely-dressed people carrying gigantic placards and then march in a big amorphous blob while chanting singsong nursery-rhyme caliber slogans. It's about as hip as marching band. There is only one reason to do something this ridiculous, and that is that it works. It works despite the fact that the media will do their best to portray your event as the eccentric outburst of a lonely band of loonies. It works because of what it teaches the people who are in the protest as well as the people who watch it. With our Congressional representatives rolling over for Bush's resolution and our unelected President helping idiocy run rampant all over both foreign and domestic policy, it's easy to feel voiceless, powerless, and helpless. Protest teaches us different. We can act. We can help. We can speak. We do have a voice. And we can make it heard, if we all yell at once."

Was I right? I dunno. I'm still waiting to find out. I'll tell you one thing: we are getting more media coverage per protest now than we ever did in the months leading up to the war. The Bush administration appears to be on the defensive, and to be nearing implosion point. What did protest have to do with that? Nobody will ever be able to say, really.

October 30, 2002: How Big Was My Rally

Plaidder's first march on Washington. Fond of the piece, but no predictive value, so moving on...

November 20, 2002: Saving Invisible People

This is a very sad one to look back at, because it's about trying to make people understand the impact the Iraq war would have on civilians before it was too late. Naturally, it failed. And it is not much satisfaction to reflect that I was right about this much:

"I can't 'see' , of course, any more than the anti-abortion folks can really see 'the unborn,' but I know they're there, and I know that if we go to war, thousands of them are going to die. And since I don't believe we have a good reason for going to war, apart from gratifying whatever political needs the Republicans may be feeling at the moment or whatever strange bloodlusts the Bush/Cheney axis might have (maybe Dubya misses all those executions he used to oversee as governor of Texas?), then what I see coming around the bend every time I read one of those 'War With Iraq Inevitable Despite Hussein's Compliance, Bush Says' articles is the cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent people, using our tax money. So I try to explain to people that this is why war with Iraq is not a good thing; and they just say, What people? Where? I don't see any people.' "

January 31, 2003: Shock and Disgust

This is about, what else, "Shock and Awe." Mostly it is me registering my horrified disgust with this as a policy, but there is this interesting bit at the end:

"The best we can hope for is that in fact, this is all just a plant organized by that Office of Strategic Information (that Dubya's administration says they decided not to set up after all) and in fact our battle plan is something completely different. And that's what we're reduced to, folks: hoping that our government is lying to us, because it's just too damn horrifying if they're actually telling the truth."

Well, I was wrong on that one. They were telling the truth. It really was their battle plan. Whee.

Feburary 15, 2003: Getting Serious

This one probably got the widest play on the Internet of all of them, and I think it was really more because it fed conspiracy paranoia than any other reason. Well, this is what happens when you read Zizek in an excitable state of mind. Although I do still think that this administration's approach to government is uncannily reminiscent of a totalitarian regime's, I'm no longer sure about this part:

"We're used to the idea that our elected officials care about whether we are going to vote for them next time or not. Well, as we all point out daily, Dubya is not an elected official; neither are any of his appointed lackeys. It is time that we start not only saying that, but getting that. Dubya did not win a fair and free election in 2000. And he is certainly not acting like someone who expects to compete in a fair and free election in 2004."

Now, we've started to see that he actually does seem to care about his approval ratings, what with the Oh What A Lovely War PR initiative that is currently being shoved down our throats. Maybe he is worried about the 2004 election. Perhaps it will be fair and free. Then again, Governor Schwarzenegger. Time will tell, I suppose.

March 27, 2003: Guilty In Defense

This was one of the first entries in this journal, prettied up for publication. The only real predictive value, oddly enough, lies in its discussion of the already-in-the-past leadup to the war:

"The regret constantly being expressed over the Iraqi army's failure to save the lives of its own people by laying down its weapons and refusing to fight is just the latest example of a strategy they have been using all along: making this war Iraq's fault.

The inspections pretext was supposed to accomplish that; but even there we couldn't really make the pretense convincing. Every time there was an example of compliance, the U.S. raised the bar. Things became fairly bizarre when Colin Powell started arguing that what Saddam Hussein ought to be doing is cheerfully and freely offering up every single thing he had with a smile, a song, and an interpretive dance expressing his joy at finally submitting to our will. Powell knew damn well that no country's government would do that, especially not a regime like Hussein's. We certainly would never make ourselves that transparent to a U.N. commission, especially if we were under the constant threat of attack by one of the U.N. security council's most powerful members. Bush, true to form, burlesqued this tactic in his 'press conference,' where he said that if Hussein really wanted to disarm, he would 'take all his weapons out to a parking lot and destroy them.' A parking lot? The image of Hussein just backing up a truck into a lot and dumping a huge pile of missiles onto the tarmac is amusing before you start to feel that familiar 'good Christ, either the world is insane or I am' panic."

I'd forgotten about the parking lot. It just goes to show: the WMDs pretext was self-evidently bullshit a long time before those 16 words in the State of the Union address.

May 13, 2002: Story Wars

Now this one is interesting. Again, it began life as an entry on this journal responding to a rejection for Better To Burn from one of the editors I had sent it to. THe basic point was that the Republicans were being successful because they had crafted a better story and sold it to the media, and that their power would not weaken until the story itself started to fall apart:

"Thanks to corporate control over the airwaves, the major media networks have all been able to construct and support the same story about the war in Iraq: we the heroes, animated by altruistic motives, free the suffering Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and achieve through the bravery and self-sacrifice of our troops a quick, decisive, and relatively painless victory. This story has been told with great attention to symbolism, and both the administration and its media lackeys have become very skilled at providing compelling illustrations. The most blatant recent example is George W. giving his "end of combat operations" speech on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln underneath a banner reading "Mission Accomplished." Every element of that performance was sending the same message: CLOSURE. The story's over; we won the battle, the hero has triumphed, the brave men and women who fought are coming home to their families, the evil empire has been defeated, and all the liberated people are celebrating. It had everything but Princess Leia presenting them with that Sharper Image light globe and a horde of Ewoks gamboling about a celebratory bonfire.

Only the thing is that, like the romance formula, the story the media is telling us about war is a lie, and it is a lie not just because of what it excludes but where it ends. Like the romance formula, this war story has striven to exclude anything messy, ugly, or perverse that might interfere with the audience's fantasization - chiefly civilian death and suffering and American greed, ignorance, and arrogance. But in both cases the biggest lie is the ending. In a relationship, really, finding the person is the easy part; the real story starts after the commitment. And in this war story, the 'victory' was the easy part; the real story is the occupation."

And in fact, that "Mission Accomplished" stunt is already biting the administration rather sharply in the ass. I only hope the bite will become infected.

June 4, 2003: Reality Bites

And speaking of biting the Bush administration in the ass...this is a little in advance of what I hope will turn out to be the turning point, which I now place in July of 2003. Somehow, it was at that point that the media's determination to give Bush a free ride began to seriously weaken. But even before then, there were signs that he wasn't going ot be able to hold it together, even will all the king's horses nad all the king's men working overtime:

"As frighteningly omnipotent as the Bush clique may seem to Americans right now, in fact, they are not evil geniuses. They are nothing more or less than a bunch of greedy, cruel political hacks with a lot of connections and a lot of cunning. This is a gang of people who have gotten by on their willingness to lie, cheat, steal and kill without hesitation or remorse. They're ruthless, and they're dangerous; but apart from a few narrow areas of expertise, they are really not very good at what they do. And that means that they can be beaten."

Was I right? God, I friggin' hope so.

July 26, 2003: Making a Spectacle Of Ourselves

Another graduate of the livejournal, this was inspired by our decision to broadcast videotape of the dead and mangled bodies of Saddam Hussein's sons. No predictive value, really, but it's still amazing to me that this actually happened.

August 26, 2003: Futures Shock

I was a day late and a dollar short with this one, but I just couldn't pass it up; you folks who have read "Trees" will understand why. It's about the market in terrorism futures that was quickly dropped like a hot coal after the media got a hold of it:

"What was never really articulated during the scandal is the fact that what is wrong with the terrorism futures market is what is wrong with this administration as a whole. The war in Iraq is the expression of the same kind of fanaticism. It's an oil-baron jihad, a crusade to open up the deserts of the Middle East to church of capital. And it is being prosecuted by its adherents with the same myopia, obsession, and failure to grasp reality that characterizes any other brand of religious fundamentalist."

Now that Congress is starting to poke into that requisition for $87 billion, we're finding out how true this is. Bremer is over there right now privatizing everything with the zeal of the missionary, while Halliburton and Bechtel try to persuade us that Iraq needs $50,000 dump trucks and planned communities. Oy.

September 25, 2003: What's Sex Slavery Got To Do With It?

Too recent to have any real predictive value...and if I had it to do over again, I'd probably have cut the part about Meaning Of Life.

So. That's two years of writing, and taken all in all, I guess I have as good a track record as anyone else at predicting where this all would head. Too optimistic at times; and sometimes too pessimistic (I hope). As I look at it all, I can't help wondering whether there really was any point to it all. The war is still on, and I doubt that by putting in all that effort I effected any kind of actual change. I don't know why I'm still driven to do it, except that it's just what happens to me; these things come out of me and I put them up and I hope that somehow down the line after 2000 degrees of separation I can say that they were part of some larger change. I still hope for that larger change. But even after doing all this, I still can't decide what the magic 8 ball says about where we head from here.

Reply hazy, try again,

The Plaid Adder