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Our long national nightmare

"Follow the money," Deep Throat said, and it still seems good advice.

Conspiracy theories rarely seem plausible. People don't keep secrets, and complex behind-the-scenes machinations require too many disparate actors with discrete agendas to pull off long-term deception.

We on the left have taken some weird solace in the presumption that President Bush is stupid, for only a fool would have invaded Iraq based on such threadbare intelligence and with such a poorly drawn plan. Some years ago Geffen sought to convince journalists that Kurt Cobain's European suicide attempt was merely a drug overdose, a very peculiar form of public relations jui-jitsu that reveals far too much about our morality.

All this "worst president ever" hype is unconvincing. What if all this mess is on purpose? What if we assume Bush isn't an idiot, but is simply smart and venal? Where, then, does the money take us? The blindingly obvious fact is that Vice President Dick Cheney was most recently President and CEO of Haliburton, whose bills and cost-overruns for the Iraq excursion have been enormous and legendary. We are somehow supposed to blink twice and say, "Oh, no, Dick Cheney is an honorable man, there's no connection."

Who else has benefited? Oil company profits are ridiculous and they have the audacity to claim that it's because environmental regulations have kept new refineries from opening in the U.S. And never mind that, like paper mills and countless other large businesses, they manipulate plant closures and retrofittings so as to maximize profits, and work assiduously to keep independent operators out of the marketplace. You know things are weird when an investing group led by the evangelist Pat Robertson can't reopen a closed refinery.

Kentucky politics seem particularly rawboned, poor counties where votes still sell for $50 and political jobs -- up to and including the governor's -- are widely seen as opportunities for patronage, not policy leadership. Small towns in which interconnected networks of businessmen and politicians quietly make decisions which shape the lives and prospects of the entire community. And so I am, perhaps, more jaded than usual this morning. (And no day is good which begins with Junior Brown's doleful face staring out at the day from the end of an otherwise forgotten dream.)

This is why people don't trust their government, why so many are unwilling to pay taxes, to pay their fair share, to ask the rich to pay their fair share. We are divided along cultural fault lines and conquered by the worst kind of economic imperialism. Picture Wal-Mart as a feudal empire, and ask why your tax dollars and charitable donations pay the health benefits of so many of their uninsured employees.

If George Bush isn't an idiot, he's up to something. And somebody benefits. It's not us, it's certainly not the soldiers in the field, and it's assuredly not the Iraqis. I don't know who it is, but I'd sure like to see somebody who knows the field follow the money down all its ratholes. Somebody's getting paid, and I think we're all getting played, no matter our political affiliations.

Happy Memorial Day.

Posted by grant on May 27, 2007 9:15 AM | Permalink