How To Use The Future For Evil

I caught an incoherent rant on the radio the other day, some blathering bit of puff about how Palestinian children are indoctrinated from birth with anti-semitic hatred, brought up to kill Israelis, taught to disassemble a klashinkof before they learn to read. The barely unstated implication was that Palestinians are vessels of pure hatred, with terrorism baked into their bones, and are therefore responsible for everything that’s going wrong in the West Bank and Gaza.

What rankles about this particular brand of sophistry is what it leaves out. The Palestinians have been under occupation for forty years now, crammed into tiny, squalorous enclaves, subject to bombings, embargoes, imprisonment at the whim of their Israeli occupiers. If a large portion of the Palestinian population has been completely radicalized, you have to ask why. Yes, their leaders have been ineffectual and corrupt; yes, many of them subscribe to a religion that — in its current form — makes a fetish of violence in the service of belief; yes, they’re “supported” by Arab countries that run the gamut from corrupt dictatorship to brutal theocracy. All true, all relevant, and all completely besides the point. The Palestinian uprising is a direct result of the occupation. Period. This is just so freaking obvious that it blows my mind every time I hear one of these mincing apologists parroting the same lines we’ve been hearing for two decades now. And they’ve got it down to a science, pretty much, a toxic cocktail of lies, half-truths, and omissions: focus exclusively on proximate causes, stubbornly refuse to do any sort of complex analysis, and ignore those pesky bits of history that don’t substantiate your current manufactured argument. It’s blame the victim, on a massive scale, and it’s been this way for a long, long time.

But it’s a very effective technique, and it would be a shame to waste it all in one place. And so the Bush/Cheney combine, never ones to pass up new and exciting ways to lie to their constituents, have co-opted it for Iraq. In fact, it’s the only consistent Iraqi strategy they’ve ever had. They talk about their vast landscape of failure only when they have to, preferring to spend most of their time focusing monomaniacally on the “good news” — which, given the extreme rarity of anything even resembling non-tragedy in Iraq, leads inevitably to an inordinate fixation on things like new schools and meaningless pronouncements by toothless government organs. This is sort of like standing outside a burning house and commenting on how beautiful and inspirational that bit of bannister that hasn’t caught on fire yet is.

But the Bush people have added a new wrinkle to the old technique, a dodge as fullproof as it is pathetic: the future. Whenever they run out of tiny pseudo-successes to celebrate, they fall back on what Atrios has dubbed the Friedman Unit — six months of time after which things must change in some way, named after Thomas Friedman’s tendency to place serial six-month deadlines on this or that aspect of the disaster. The administration has been spouting Friedmans for years, the latest example being the new troop escalation (ie, surge), six months of which, we are told, may or not affect things in some significant but undisclosed way. We’ll have to see. As usual.

It gets better than that, though. When even Friedman Units don’t do the trick, they take the extremely long view. Things may look like a total clusterfuck right now, says Condie, or Don, or Dick, or George, but in thirty, forty, fifty years, the seeds we’re planting in this ravaged ruined landscape will blossom into a beautiful garden of peace and democracy. So you people will have to wait.

The thing is, bullshit this ridiculous only works with the tacit consent of its audience. We the people are as much complicit in the lies as the liars themselves. Their stories aren’t convincing, but they do give us the tools we need to validate our own preconceptions: to believe the unbelievable, to justify the unjustifiable, to permit the impermissible. We want to believe, and these people make it possible. That’s their great sin. But it’s also ours.