by JerkyLeBoeuf » Sat Jul 15, 2006 4:19 pm
Depending on your current level of paranoia/awareness, this week's acceleration in the ongoing slide towards mass insanity and pan-global chaos serves as proof positive that the Bush Doctrine is either a miserable failure, or a brilliant success. <br><br>If you take at face value the neoconservative contention that invading and occupying Iraq were necessary first steps in transforming the Middle East into a hotbed of Jeffersonian democracy, simply opening your eyes in the morning must feel like the rudest of awakenings. <br><br>Iraq is dead already, a corpse nation in the midst of a noxious decomposition that threatens to further foul an already gangrenous region. In Baghdad alone, mass murders and sectarian atrocities are claiming dozens of innocent lives every day. Coalition-trained extremists man fake checkpoints in search of easy pickings, and roving death squads of indeterminate origin haunt the countryside, leaving nothing but corpses and despair in their wake. A recent dispatch reported the grisly discovery of a child's corpse. As if rape and decapitation weren't enough of an insult, her assailants decided to sew a dead dog's head onto the stump or her neck, transforming her into a grim yet fitting mascot for this third, grinding year of America's failed occupation. Never has the term "civil war" seemed so oxymoronic.<br><br>In the Levant, a ridiculous game of kidnap ping-pong has devolved into all-out, open war, complete with the usual bloody scenes of dead-eyed shock victims and shrieking protesters wandering amid wreckage both human and infrastructural. Meanwhile, the usual suspects are attempting to take advantage of this cross-border frenzy by using it as a pretext for dismantling the regimes in Damascus and Tehran. And won't that be a swell time for all?<br><br>Meanwhile, in Mumbai, it was India's turn to serve as an object lesson in the inherent vulnerability of pluralistic democracies. Would it be terribly vile of me to point out that the mass transit terrorist attacks that killed over two hundred innocent Indian commuters happened on a date that, numerically, works out to an amusingly ironic 7-Eleven? Say what you will about the terrorists -- or, if your darkest suspicions about the real force behind these paint-by-numbers terrorist attacks have turned to reflexive half-certainty, as have yer old pal Jerky's, The Powers That Be -- at least they've got a sense of humor.<br><br>Which brings us back to the original topic of whether the horrors described above represent a spiralling out of control, or the deliberate herding of our blindfolded species towards some terrible reckoning deemed necessary by the invisible sculptors of our history. Are we suffering the consequences of incompetence on a heretofore unimaginable scale? Or are we suffering the first pangs of artificially induced labor as some Rough Beast -- genetically modified and artificially inseminated -- prepares to rip itself from our collective womb, its hour come round at last?<br><br>I don't know about the rest of you, but I think I know the answer to that question. And I want an abortion. <p></p><i></i>