War on Christmas; Soft Numbers on the Toll of Debt. Today is the day that (Western) Christians worldwide celebrate the birth of "The Prince of Peace", but we, the largest Christian nation on Earth, are at war, an unjust war against a country that never attacked us, a war that Jesus surely would condemn. It is at best sad, and at worst a stain on our honor and pain to our conscience — if we have one anymore, somewhere under all the patriotic hype and militarist pride. How long will manipulated patriotism and a siege mentality continue to suppress our conscience? How will we redeem ourselves as a Nation, as a people, as individual human beings? And who speaks for the best in us? (Other than me, that is.)
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Before the U.S. national election last month I tried to warn the Democratic Party, several times, that they would lose the election badly unless they focused on their biggest and best issue, personal debt. They ignored me and did indeed lose badly — not in terms of percentage of the vote, since the Republicans managed to win only 51% of the popular vote, but in terms of the organs of government secured: Presidency, Senate, and House of Representatives.
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Now the Democrats are almost marginalized, as the Radical Rightists and neocons pretend that a 51% just-barely-squeaked-by win is a "resounding victory", a "mandate" to enact the most extreme and regressive features of their program. Dubya announced yesterday his intent to resubmit 20 controversial nominations for federal judgeships and ram them thru the Senate, by a rules change to end filibustering if need be. The Democrats are reduced to little-girl protestations that that's not nice and will polarize the Nation (as tho we're not profoundly polarized already). They don't have the votes to stop any of this, but must win moderate Republicans to their side to prevent a neocon steamroller from carrying off a revolution that could transform this country beyond recognition if not reversed within a few short years.
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None of this had to happen. The Democrats could have won the White House, won the House of Representatives, won the Senate. But they refused to use their most powerful issue, personal debt. Refused even to MENTION it in the final weeks of the campaign.
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Until this week, most of my information about personal debt focused on the financial figures, but it is personal experience with debt that allowed me to understand how oppressive debt has become. The leadership elites of both major parties are, however, rich, so the Demmies might simply have disregarded my advice as alarmist and overblown since it did not accord with their personal experience. I don't think that's what happened. They couldn't be that out of touch, because all of them have staff made up of ordinary working people at lower income levels, coping with debt; all had pollsters telling them what most concerns ordinary people. No, they made a conscious choice not to talk about their strongest issue. Why?
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I have been forced to conclude that they decided this was not a good time to win control of the national government, which they could easily have done had they focused on the Republican Party's heartlessness in actively conniving to drown the poor and middle class in usury and debt, and prevent them from escaping debt by "reforming" the bankruptcy laws to make it almost impossible for ordinary people to wipe out debts in one brief legal procedure. But the Democrats felt they could not afford to win the election, because they had concluded that the situation in Iraq is now and will likely remain for the next several years a nitemare that will devastate the political prospects of whoever is in charge, and they'd rather the Republicans be ravaged than the Democrats. They no more have an "exit strategy" than have the Republicans, and European and other allies refused to commit to help a Democratic administration internationalize the "nation-building" project. So Democrats would have been left the hard choice of continuing to kill and destroy, and suffer American casualties (over 2,000 killed, 10,000 wounded to date), or just walk away and try to contain, outside Iraq, the chaos that would ensue.
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They decided to let the Republicans be engulfed in those flames. If that means that the people have to suffer third-degree burns in the process, that's tuf — 'can't be avoided, and besides, anyone who voted Republican deserves to suffer! In the end, the liberals will be proved right, the rightwingers will be crushed, and we can all move on.' Or can we?
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I'm not sure they have miscalculated. Certainly the news out of Iraq in the past 10 days or so has been horrible. Queries to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld from soldiers, on his most recent visit shifted from 'Why don't we have armor on all our vehicles?' and similar complaints to 'How can we win the media war?' — as tho the media are making up the violence they report — and 'Why don't the media show all the good things we are achieving?'
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Republicans' assertions that things are really much better than they appear ring absolutely and profoundly hollow. The Fallujah assault may have killed 1,000 "insurgents" — and literally uncounted numbers of noncombatants, who apparently don't matter; they would matter if it were American mothers and children being slaughtered by an occupying Arab army, but in today's reality don't matter at all since they are 'only' Arabs murdered by Americans — but that didn't stop the "insurgency", did it? Everyone who knows anything about guerrilla warfare, which is what this has become, knows that guerrillas know better than to stand and fite a vastly superior force. Rather, they melt away and attack elsewhere, where the enemy (that would be us) is weaker — like a dining room under a TENT!
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Iraqi and allied guerrillas must be astonished at how STUPID Americans are that they send UNARMORED vehicles into a war zone and make their soldiers eat under a TENT within range of mortars! Oh, the claim now is that there was a suicide bomber and the hole in the top of the tent came after, not before, the blast that killed 22 Americans and additional numbers of Iraqis, and wounded 72, but media reports are unclear as to whether that's really what happened or the Pentagon is just covering its ass, trying to pretend that the problem was not that its men were eating under a TENT but that somebody got into the mess tent with explosives strapped to his body. Is that supposed to reassure us? How is that better? (And yes, it is almost solely American men who are dying in Iraq, despite all the bullshit about "our fiting men and women" that we hear endlessly from our lesbianized, Communized government that feels compelled to exaggerate the role of women in the military beyond all resemblance of reality.)
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Can't critics reply that if you know there's a problem with security, why on Earth would you concentrate hundreds of men in a single location at specific times of day as to make them prime targets for mortars OR ground blasts?
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Hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis have been killed by the "insurgents" in recent weeks, a toll far worse for Iraq than the World Trade Center and Pentagon blasts were for us, a country 12 times as populous as Iraq. Exactly how many Iraqis have been killed? We don't know. The U.S. and British governments that control the whole of Iraq adamantly refuse to count Iraqi deaths! Tom Fenton, a distinguished CBS News correspondent based in Britain, addressed this issue on December 13th. (Comments in brackets and italics are mine.)

In the early days of the invasion of Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks famously told reporters at his headquarters in Qatar, "We don't do body counts." The Pentagon and our British allies have stuck to that position ever since. They have never given an accounting, or even a rough estimate, of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died in the bombing and crossfire of combat during the invasion, or in the deadly insurgency that still wracks the country.

The United States and Britain, under the Geneva Convention and Hague Regulations, have a binding responsibility as occupying authorities to prevent civilian deaths, including those resulting from the breakdown of law and order and inadequate health care or sanitation. So you might think a little accounting would be in order. * * *

It has been left up to anti-war campaigners, NGO's and other unofficial sources to provide their own estimates. Chief among them is Iraq Body Count, ... [which] has compiled roughly 15,000 Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of the war and its aftermath. But attempts to do body counts through deaths reported in the press necessarily underestimate, since areas where civilians are being killed are often areas where journalists don't dare go.

For a few months this year, the Iraqi provisional government published figures obtained by counting bodies arriving at hospitals. Its total was 3,853 civilians killed between April and November. [Note (a) that this is almost a year after Dubya declared "Mission Accomplished" and the active phase of the invasion had ended — that is, 'peacetime'; and (b) that 3,853 is almost a thousand more people than died in the September 11th attacks (2,749 at the WTC plus 189 in the Pentagon and 44 in the crash of the third jet = 2,982). Multiply by 12 to get the equivalent in U.S. terms for the Iraqi government estimate of 3,853 killed in a mere seven or eight months: 46,236.] Again, that is necessarily an underestimate, since many of those who are killed or die never reach a hospital. [In the U.S. and other First World countries with well established governments, a Bureau of Vital Statistics keeps excellent track of births and deaths, and violent deaths must be evaluated by a coroner. But Iraq has no functioning government, and Islam requires that a body be buried within 24 hours after death, so a great many deaths show up in no statistics kept by anyone.]

The most scrupulously scientific effort to arrive at a realistic figure was reported in October by the [distinguished] British medical journal The Lancet. ... It estimated there have been 98,000 "excess" civilians deaths since the start of the war. Given the relative size of the two countries, that would be the equivalent of roughly 1,200,000 American deaths.

That devastating figure has been widely disputed, especially by the British and American governments. [Oh? On what basis, if you refuse to do body counts? Huh? You can't have it both ways. Either keep track or shut up.] But whatever the truth, it is clear that civilians are usually not only the first casualties of war. They are the most numerous.

The Lancet study was reported by U.S. media on October 28th, but the story vanished by the next day. (See my entry to this blog of October 29th, second item.) Americans plainly don't want to think about how many Iraqis they have killed — and continue to kill. They want to think of themselves as "the good guys" bringing democracy, peace, and progress to the benighted Middle East. They are not, and need to face the fact that this war, and the previous 13-year campaign of terror against Iraqis committed by both Republicans and Democrats, is the darkest chapter in our national history — to date. If we have as a Nation lost our conscience and become a militarist monster making war all over this planet for reasons the people do not understand and don't care about, it may be only the first of many dark chapters, until, like Nazi Germany, we are destroyed by a worldwide alliance and subjected to a military occupation ourselves. I suspect we won't regard that as "liberation".
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We might luck out, find our national conscience — where is it hiding? — and redeem ourselves by ousting the scum that has floated to the top of society and turning them over to an international war-crimes tribunal. But as of now, there is no prospect of that happening. Our aggressors are "heroes". Our dead "enemies" are uncounted. And we don't need good reasons to go to war. Any pretext will do. And once we're there and the pretext is shown false — Weapons of Mass Destruction, Dubya's ass! — the bulk of the population will still "rally round the flag", and not merely ignore but actually defy conscience!
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The Brookings Institution on March 25, 2003 observed:

The invasion of Iraq has validated a basic rule of American politics: Americans rally round the president in times of national crisis. Polls now show that seven in 10 Americans support the decision to go to war. * * *

Signs of a rally round the flag were evident even before the first bombs fell .... Between last August and the beginning of March, Gallup found that support for the war generally fluctuated between 52 and 59 percent. Then in mid-March, as diplomacy began breaking down, public support crept higher. The last Gallup poll before the war started showed 64 percent in favor.

The increase in support for the war also carried over to support for President Bush. His overall public approval rating jumped between five and 13 percentage points, depending on the poll, in the first days of fighting.

The rally round the flag, however, extended beyond the White House. As also happened with the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan wars, the public responded to the invasion of Iraq by giving higher marks to Congress and expressing greater optimism about the country's future. A New York Times/CBS poll found that Congress's approval rating jumped 7 percentage points and now sits at 52 percent. [Think about that: before the war, only 45 percent of Americans, a minority, had a favorable view of Congress!] Gallup found that the percentage of the public expressing satisfaction with the way things are going in the country jumped from 36 to 60 percent. Rather than being simply about the president, the rally is better understood as a surge of patriotic support for the government and country as a whole.

The phrase "rally round the flag" apparently came into the popular culture of the United States due to a Civil War-era song, The Battle Cry of Freedom. A website about it is worth a visit, not just for the full lyrics of the two versions (Rallying Song and Battle Song), which speak to our best instincts, but also for the quotes at the bottom, which urge us to speak out when the Nation is going wrong. Consider these lyrics:

[Rallying Song]
Yes, we'll rally round the flag, boys
Rally once again,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom * * *

We will welcome to our numbers
The loyal, true and brave,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom
And altho' they may be poor
Not a man shall be a slave * * *

And we'll hurl the Rebel crew
From the land we love the best,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom!

[Battle Song]
And we bear the glorious stars
For the Union and the right, * * *

Yes, for Liberty and Union
We're springing to the fight, * * *
And the vict'ry shall be ours
For we're rising in our might,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom.

[Chorus of both versions]
The Union forever!
Hurrah boys hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star,
For we're marching to the field, boys,
Going to the fight,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom!

Today, the Southern scum who tried to destroy the Union are in charge of the very Nation they tried to destroy, and are using their excessive power to disgrace us. Oh, they're still using the battle cry of "freedom", but this war has nothing to do with freedom, only with Zionism (see this blog's entry of October 29th, item 1). Indeed, at home they are doing everything in their power to destroy freedom and reduce everyone to wage slaves, debt slaves, and conformists who allow the most regressive religious dictates to control them sexually and in every other way.
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In abandoning us to these regressive forces, the Democratic leadership made a conscious choice to let the Republicans prove how catastrophic their policies will be, so the electorate might recoil in horror and revile the Republican Party and all its tenets for the next 40 years.
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But how often does a society regain its conscience? How often does it feel it has gone too far to back out but must plow ahead, justifying the unjustifiable because to heed their conscience is too painful? Good people heed their conscience at all times, and don't let flags (today's 'Redneck, White and Blue') or wars or anything else silence the still, powerful voice deep in their head and heart that tells them Yes or No.
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One David H. Hackworth on the website Soldiers for the Truth, says of the red, white, and blue, a phrase we sometimes substitute for "the flag":

Congress approved the new flag on June 14, 1777. In this legislation, the Continental Congress also defined the symbolic meaning of the colors: white was designated to signify purity and innocence; red for hardiness and valor; and blue for vigilance, perseverance, and justice.

That's worth remembering when we see people who have few or none of those qualities wrap themselves in the flag.
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Bad people give in to their worst instincts and charge right ahead, rationalizing away all doubts. They will NEVER accept that they did anything wrong. But good people who have erred can accept blame — if they can immediately escape the pains.
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That is why Christianity has been such a success, because it permits a declaration of moral bankruptcy, in the best sense of the concept of bankruptcy: you admit fault, repent, and are forgiven. Your sins/debts are washed away and you start over, fresh and renewed.
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But in order for this Christian escape from sin to work, the leadership of the Church must accept the sinfulness of the course they too embraced, and I have serious doubts that the rightwing denominations in this country can accept that they have been part of a horrendous crime against humanity. How are they to grant absolution who are party to the crime and do not themselves repent? You see the problem.
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Catholics (24% of our total population) at least have a Pope who, fortunately, is opposed to this war. They can repent easily, and they have priests to confess to and receive absolution from thru prayer. Episcopalians (1.7% of the total American population), as part of the Anglican communion, have the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also opposed to this war, to appeal to their conscience. But many Protestants in this country belong to churches with no hierarchy at all, each congregation being independent. Indeed, the largest group of Protestants in the Nation, and especially in the South, which now dominates national politics, are Baptists (31% of Protestants, 16.3% of the total national population), who practice "congregational polity":

congregational polity means that Baptist churches are independent. They are free to choose their own ministers, to determine their own standards for church membership, to organize their worship, to select their literature, to designate their offerings, and to decide their ministries in any manner that the congregation thinks best.

What are the chances of these thousands of individual congregations independently seeing the error of their ways and repenting? Not good, I'm afraid. Since they are unlikely to lose their political clout anytime soon, we are likely to be stuck with bad policy for several years because the Democrats abandoned us to the barbarians. It didn't have to be this way.
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The website iWon.com's daily survey on Tuesday, December 21, 2004, titled "Stressed Over Debt", asked "Are you worried about your personal level of debt?" The answers were:

17% - Yes - it's extremely stressful
36% - Yes - it's somewhat stressful
30% - No - I don't stress about it
16% - I don't have any personal debt [the group I now belong to]
1% - I don't care

The surveys at iWon.com usually tilt slightly, perhaps 4-6 percentage points, higher for Republican and conservative views by virtue of the fact that they are surveys of computer users, mainly computer owners, who are more prosperous than the general population. Nonetheless, this one survey shows 53% of Americans stressed or "extremely" stressed by personal debt. Yet the Democrats spoke not one word about debt in the closing weeks of their campaign for President and Congress. Not one word.
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They lost by 3 percentage points, in a country where 17% of people are "extremely stress[ed]" over debt, and 53% are at least "somewhat stress[ed]" about debt. I cannot but conclude that the Democrats could have won, but refused to. They are, thus, responsible for the division, violence, and regressiveness of the Republican revolution we are almost certain to suffer over the next four years. It didn't have to happen.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:44 PM