Posthuman Blues

I've referred to Jason Sheets' commentary here before. His post today is incredibly trenchant. Read it now.

Done?

Jason has nailed a major reason for my antiwar protest reticence: I agree with the basic sentiment veing voiced by protests, but a somewhat more nagging portion of my brain is appalled at how big and dumb they are. Don't take this as "waffling" on the Iraq issue. I think the Dubbya administration's invasion of Iraq is monstrously wrong-headed. And I don't think that protests are necessarily anachronistic. But they need to mutate; like Jason, I'm tired of the trite slogans and simplifications that fuel the wrath of the prowar crowd.

In an earlier post, I suggested that Americans are unable to digest a concept that can't be reproduced on a bumper-sticker. But that holds true for the antiwar "movement" as well as for the Bush-loving God 'n' Country crowd.

Unfortunately, large gatherings of angry people are not amenable to subtlety. Doubly unfortunately, most people are immune to subtlety anyway. The Iraq war is a multilayered malignancy with a host of ugly (and complicated) geopolitical nuances and needs to attacked as such. So we're left with the confounding problem of "wising up the marks." And quite honestly, I don't think we'll succeed.

Maybe after a few more civilians have been casually butchered and the forerunner of the U.S.'s quasi-occupational government is doing its thing, a few more people like Jason will have the nerve to address this atrocity sensibly. In the meantime, we'd be well served to abandon this idiotic fascination with "good" and "evil" that's predictably entered the wartime lexicon. Dubbya might inhabit a storybook universe governed by religious abstractions, but that doesn't mean you have to fall for his speeches.

In the cartoon language of placard-wielding street protesters, "Support Our Troops -- Bring Them Home" makes a certain amount of sense. I've expressed the same sentiment in this blog. But Jason's right: these people weren't drafted. Even in a society that promotes xenophobia and the pragmatic fiction of absolute good vs. absolute evil, it doesn't take a whole lot of brains to realize that signing up with the armed forces just might mean being forced to kill people for reasons with which you may not personally agree. Ideally, by retooling the Orwellian machine that passes for "education" in this country, there will simply be no troops to order into battle.

And, one hopes, no soulless control-freaks to condemn them to slavish "patriotism" in the first place.