The day this war began, I took myself to the movies to see "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore's stunning Academy Award-winning documentary exploring American violence and the "culture of fear" which begets it.
Sitting in the darkened theatre, I allowed myself to be distracted and diverted from the thought of being a citizen in a country whose leadership does not reflect my wishes.
With its acute, and acerbic, distrust of America's corporate power excesses, Michael Moore's earlier cinematic masterpiece, "Roger and Me," gave him a justifiably anti-authoritarian reputation. However, you might be surprised to know Michael Moore himself grew up in a gun family, and currently counts himself a "Life Member" of the NRA.
So you can't dismiss him as merely just another biased anti-gun liberal stalking Charlton Heston.
If you see just one film this year, make it "Bowling for Columbine." Besides the Oscar for best documentary, the flick snagged Best Original Screenplay of the Writers Guild, and received nearly three dozen other awards, including 2000 documentary filmmakers around the world voting it "Best Documentary of All Time."
Coincidentally, the very same day I'm sitting at the movies watching Michael Moore get a gun as a premium for opening up a CD account, I spent a dispiriting chunk of the morning and afternoon visiting banks around Philadelphia, only to discover interest rates for CDs are, thanks to Greenspan and cohorts, nearly nonexistent.
I felt looted – and they didn't use guns. Nor do banks in my city give out guns to take up the economic slack. Not even water pistols.
So, while interest rates benefiting working people have been gutted and almost obliterated, Bushwa, our putative president, makes political hay from tax cuts for the rich.
What Michael Moore's movie provides is context for our newest national nightmare – and probably our next, and the next after that. In his view, America is the Great Meddler. His documentary, and his website, itemizes this 50-year sequence of American intrusion into the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and I quote:
- 1953: U.S. overthrows Prime Minister Mossadeq of Iran. U.S. installs Shah as dictator.
- 1954: U.S. overthrows democratically elected President Arbenz of Guatemala. 200,000 civilians killed.
- 1963: U.S. backs assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem.
- 1963-1975: American military kills 4 million civilians in Southeast Asia.
- Sept. 11, 1973: U.S. stages coup in Chile. Democratically elected president Salvador Allende assassinated. Dictator Augusto Pinochet installed. Five thousand Chileans murdered.
- 1977: U.S. backs military rulers of El Salvador. Seventy thousand Salvadorans and four American nuns killed.
- 1980's: U.S. trains Osama bin Laden and fellow terrorists to kill Soviets. CIA gives them $3 billion.
- 1981: Reagan administration trains and funds "contras." Thirty thousand Nicaraguans die.
- 1982: U.S. provides billions in aid to Saddam Hussein for weapons to kill Iranians.
- 1983: White House secretly gives Iran weapons to help them kill Iraqis.
- 1989: CIA agent Manuel Noriega (also serving as president of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington. U.S. invades Panama and removes Noriega. Three thousand Panamanian civilian casualties
- 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait with weapons from U.S.
- 1991: U.S. enters Iraq. Bush reinstates dictator of Kuwait.
- 1998: Clinton bombs "weapons factory" in Sudan. Factory turns out to be making aspirin.
- 1991 to present: American planes bomb Iraq on a weekly basis. U.N. estimates 500,000 Iraqi children die from bombing and sanctions.
- 2000-01: U.S. gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan $245 million in "aid."
- Sept. 11, 2001: Osama Bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to murder 3,000 people.
Catastrophic, and chilling.
Meanwhile, I'm not alone in questioning this so-called "war."
"What's left to say about such dreadfulness?" says "Addy," the editrix.
"The most lop-sided war since Italy invaded Ethiopia, and like that slimy chapter of Europe's history, a harbinger of things to come," says "Beuwkes," a D.C. magazine consultant and speechwriter.
Naturally, not all are appalled. Some even view it as ... a compelling performance. "Thom," a San Francisco artist-archivist, who's been watching the war on television, related to it like sports: "Gonna go watch Bombs over Bagdaddy."
If you'd like to exercise your rights as a citizen to protest what you believe is an unjust war, check out PRAWN's Mass Mobilization Against War On Iraq, one of many massive demonstrations Sunday, March 30.
And, as MoveOn.Org points out, "Our minds immediately and naturally turn to the humanitarian disaster that will most likely follow from war in Iraq. The Bush administration is woefully unprepared to face this need. Privately funded organizations like Oxfam are the only ones with the patience to truly do what it takes to help a war-torn region rebuild. It's up to us ..."