The Thing(s) about Libya

The president's speech on Libya just concluded, and I'll admit first and foremost that I did not watch it. I was far too busy baking a superlative batch of chocolate chip cookies. But seriously, what's the point – when you actually view politics with the omniscience of experience – in even bothering to follow what the president says, or what barbs are exchanged during press briefings, or what story Brian Williams decides to open "Evening News" with. All of them, regardless of their medium or message, communicate the same basic subservient attitude regarding Washington policy, particularly when the issues of warfare are concerned. That's one of the main reasons that I am wholly apathetic regarding the erection of the Times' pay wall. Why would I care about a supposed block to the news of a rapidly deteriorating news corps?

But anyway, back to Libya – the content of the speech, so far as I can tell, is nothing new. America is special, we're defined by certain rights and privileges, and we'll defend those at all costs. Thank you sir, may I have another? When will we finally begin looking through all this rhetoric and see those kinds of messages for the muddled, hypocritical rhetoric that they are? The US is not content watching the poor citizens of oil-rich Libya die at the hands of their lunatic leader, but we're perfectly content stationing our Fifth Fleet on the docks of Bahrain, a country that recently sniped peaceful protestors from rooftops.

Go down the line of US foreign conflicts, and you find similarly jarring contradictions. We invaded Iraq because Saddam killed his own people, even though we actively supported those efforts in the '80s, and, even worse, completely ignored a Shia uprising in Basra following the Gulf War, an uprising that Saddam Hussein brutally quashed with helicopter fire, killing of Shias. The people of Iraq are not stupid. The people of Bahrain are not stupid. They know full well the extent of American privilege, and the sad truth that, given the circumstances of their violent repressions, neither country presented a valid enough reason for the US to dirty its hands with the cruel dictators of their world. And we Americans seem to be ignorant to realities of these issues.

Chris Hedges has said that one of the reasons that so many Americans can flippantly disregard foreign losses in American conflicts is because they have not, as he has, stood over the piles of bodies that result from such squabbles. Naturally, he's right (Hedges is among the more brilliant men of his generation), just as Adorno and Horkheimer were right 70 years ago. We are enshrined in a culture of illusion that is far too potent to think otherwise, a culture where spectacle and greed far outweigh substance and empathy.

And there seems to be no way out.