The utter ignorance!

The utter ignorance and one-dimensional nature of the human animal continues to astound me. This war, the spin placed on the reasoning for it, the religious fervor with which people attach patriotism to everything and anything related to it and the absolute blindness that accompanies it, continue to be a source of frustration. How, given the current climate, anyone could possibly believe that this war has a pleasant outcome awaiting its end I am at a loss to explain.

Currently the Sheehan situation has reached critical mass. People who saw her as no more than an annoyance are now massing, like so many swift boat veterans, to dispute and discredit her. She is simply a mother who lost a son in a war that is very obviously un-winnable.  She is an American citizen exercising her right to protest what she and many others believe is a wasteful, obnoxiously arrogant exercise on so many levels. I knew as the media attention intensified, as the focus on Bush and his inability to address directly, both the rational behind the war and the obvious quagmire we have found ourselves in because of it, that this backlash would begin.

A group calling itself something akin to “You don’t speak for us you communist lesbian traitor” has been staging a counter demonstration in Crawford. Of course, our brave media is there, making yet again another mountain out of an ant hill. The pictures of these people shoving Sheehan’s “propaganda” into (ironically) Oil barrels, burning then and giving nonsensical, religious-patriotic hybrid speeches, the sound and the fury, signifying nothing. I watch as “patriots” give speeches about the price of freedom, having little or no understanding of what that concept has to do with the current war. I watch as a man violently smashes what I suspect are Sheehan’s signs of protest, I wonder how he managed to get his hands on them. Was it through subterfuge? Was it covertly snagged from a weak bladdered protester who as they looked for someway to relieve themselves returned to find their personal property had been absconded with, or are the signs simply reproductions made by the counter-demonstrators, destroyed symbolically as they were created. Camp reality indeed.

I fully support anyone’s right to protest  and that includes counter protests, but at the very least, have some basis in fact for what you plan to present when you do. I remember seeing Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! on Showtime and watching as they sent someone to question environmentalists about the things they were insisting, none of the people interviewed could answer the simplest of the questions asked of them. And when asked to sign a petition against water, many of them oblivious to the chemical signature of the most precious element, signed without question. Yes ignorance is alive and well on both sides of the political spectrum.

Camp reality, more like camp groupthink. I just saw a bit more detailed report about the counter protests and as usual for many on the right, reactionary is the first word that comes to mind. “Texas doesn’t want you!” and the now familiar mantra of you’re with us or against us, sounding clearly. So much for the issue at hand, anyone want to sign my petition banning common sense.

I can’t truly believe that this isn’t another swift boats type of thing. Someone in the Republican Party, one of the spin-doctors who so cynically spun Kerry’s record must be behind this show of jingoism. There is no apparent leader; for one thing, the fact that only random faces have emerged in this counter-idiocy gives me pause. It leaves no one to point to as the mastermind, and like the sleeper cells of Al Qaeda and with no small amount of irony the right wing militia movement and the racist “Sword and arm of the law” and so many other “patriots” have employed many of the same methods. That the mainstream has in a very real way conducted themselves in the same fashion only illustrates the fact that there is very little self-awareness in fanaticism, whether it be religious, racial or in this case, patriotic.

Give me something I can chew on, give me facts not slogans. If you support the war then why? Give me something substantive, if you are able. Don’t tell me that I support the terrorists because I don’t. Don’t call me a traitor, because I’m not. Tell me, convince me that I’m wrong, with facts. The last refuge of the scoundrel is to not care what the opposition thinks, to be blind to the logic and fall prey to emotionalism and patriotic fervor. The evidence of a bad ending is written on the walls of the bombed out buildings of Tikrit, and if we fail to see it we are just as guilty of the former dictator of Iraq.

While all this is going on the debate rages over the application of the Psudeoscience of intelligent design. How are these things connected you might ask. They are connected at the root of the human capacity to justify ideas that have become a part of our culture without rational examination. In this case, they are using the application of science to justify an approach, which is wholly unscientific. Intelligent design states, in a nutshell, that organic life is far too complex at its higher stages to have developed without some guiding hand. This co-opting of science to justify creation is just the latest attempt to sway our institutions of learning away from teaching theory to teaching myth. The same sort of unconscious drive to explain the unexplainable that leads us to question our existences is present here, but what is missing is the rational thought and extrapolation of evidence present in scientific inquiry, what it is replaced with is a creationist explanation of evolution. Instead of digging deeper and believing in the value of inquiry, the easy explanation of God as the essential element is inserted.

The same rational that dictates the ceasing of rational thought where science is concerned is at work in the machinations of war. The examination only goes so far until there is no thought left, only compliance.