Complicity, or, the Willing (and Unwilling) Executioners in Uganda-- and Grand Rapids

But what's one more genocide? More than a thousand people are dying every week in Northern Uganda, in the concentration camps they've been herded to by their beneficent government-- "three times the death rate in Darfur."

It goes without saying that the proposed laws affecting gays in Uganda are monstrous, bugfuck crazy. Friendly heterosexuals and simple humanity are outlawed as well-- the law "also criminalizes failure to report relevant offenses." "Citizens, including health workers and civil society organizations" are compelled "...to report anyone they suspect of being homosexual." Right-wing American churchmen profess to be embarrassed by their Ugandan protegees, and that bunch swallows camels and strains at gnats without a blush.



This new murder in the heart of Uganda is just a reminder that Amin never acted alone. The thing is, we have a fantasy that the Bad Man went away and all the bad went with him. We tell our children a bedtime story that Hitler killed the children, Amin chopped up the women, some guy Stalin turned the poets into little mounds in the snow. But not us, not us! One of these days, some scholar will add up how many innocent people G.W. Bush killed to stop Saddam Hussein from killing innocent people. The historian Lucy Dawidowicz had a neat phrase, "Cain in corporate embodiment", a phrase Erik Prince might want to invoke when Blackwater (I mean, "Xe") has its day in court.


Without their admiring executioners, your average genocidal maniac is just some nut yelling on a street corner, a frustrated lurker in parking lots. Should we, as a critic asked of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, "separate the Germans from the Nazis"? Does cutting out a cancer guarantee that it hasn't spread?


"The more frightening question is why and how so many chose to follow Hitler. I do not necessarily mean the German people, per se, but the thousands of bureaucrats, managers, and soldiers who physically carried out The Final Solution, knowing exactly what this entailed and what it signified. Hitler seized the opportunity offered by the political and social situation to institutionalize his personal evil...without followers, millions of Jews (and Cambodians and Indians and so forth) could not have died. The evil that is so hard to face goes well beyond Hitler to a place that no one could truly wish to discover." (Diane L. Schirf)

I've known a few Holocaust survivors, tattoos on their arms. The only Nazi I ever met, an engineer with the Luftwaffe, told me they heard about the genocide "but they were the kind of crazy stories you hear in the military, nobody took it seriously". How much do I pretend not to know about what we enabled in Cambodia and Chile, how many old folks and babies and dogs and cats were torn to shreds and reported as "collateral damage" in my lifetime, how much of that was done for my "security", a favor I neither asked nor wanted?

Bikini Exorcism!

It was called giving the public what they want.
If these panels from the Seventies showing Josie of the Pussycats undergoing demonic possession aren't bizzarely funny, then I don't want to know you. (And Linda Blair? Call me?)

As a Dog Returneth to Its Vomit, Part... I've Lost Count

Ah, there's nothing like vaudeville. Every time I think the Bush vaudevillians can no longer astonish me, when I think they've run out of tricks, one of them makes my jaw drop in delight and astonishment yet again.

Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of our success in Iraq, has for the past two years been serving as president of the World Bank. He might have retired from the public eye, lying doggo in the bushes, as it were, but Lo!

It seems that Mr. Wolfowitz's lady friend, Shaha Riza, herself a former communications advisor at the World Bank, has, in the words of The Washington Post, "done exceptionally well in terms of salary in the last 18 months." Miss Riza left her $132,660 job at the bank about six months after Mr. Wolfowitz became her boss, in order to avoid any hint of impropriety or conflict of interest. In September 2005, she went to work for Karen Hughes at the State Department.

All well and good-- until it was revealed that she's still getting a six-figure paycheck from the World Bank... AND she was promoted to a managerial-level just before she left... AND instead of a $20,000 raise for the promotion, she somehow received a $47,340 raise...

So THIS year-- still working at State, not the World Bank-- Riza ANOTHER raise of $13,500, bringing her up to $193,590, which is $7,000 more, net, than the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes gross.

How does he do it? How does the man consistently make a shambles of everything he touches? How does this fifth column saboteur disguise his depredations as mere incompetence? What audacity! What arrogance! What a body count!

I hear the drums speak! They signal one another in the jungle night... they say the elephants are restless... they say that the other employees at the World Bank are very angry... the drums say the career employees are already unhappy with the one known as "Wolfie"... they fear his vengence will be terrible... they are sharpening their knives...

The poor schlub. And to think, he only went into this career for the chicks.

UPDATE: Mr, Wolfowitz says he's terribly sorry, and that it won't happen again.The White House says they still love him. His staff still doesn't like him. The State Department says Miss Riza has been working at Foundation for Freedom since September (but Foundation for Freedom still gets its money from State.) Me, I'd be much more sympathetic towards such a "painful personal dilemma" if it had occured on a shoestring budget.

6/6/6

Cross your fingers that no lonely soul in a clock tower does anything stupid today, or we're never going to hear the end of it.

I'm not talking about reasoned discussions of evil by Malachi Martin, or the demon-as-metaphor found in my own fiction, or the 68% of 2,201 adults surveyed online who told the Harris Poll they believe in a devil. I'm not even talking about the objective evidence before our eyes of demonic possesion: three minutes of gibbering from the Bizarro President, for example, or the Vice President barking and growling on Sunday morning TV with his hands clenched together to appear reasonable while barely suppressing the urge to tear his questioner's head from her shoulders, or almost anything that comes out of the mouth of John Gibson or Anne Coulter.

I'm complaining about people who ascribe significance to the number "666", waiting for mischief to occur on June 6th, 2006. Some of them read a book once, or stood next a book while someone else told them what it said.

Evidently, no one ever told them that the Gregorian calendar, rolling around to 6/6/6, is not the same calendar used in "biblical" times. I wonder how they count to 700? Do they skip a floor, like people avoiding the Thirteenth floor in a hotel? What happens if their purchases at Wal-Mart total up to $6.66?

Remember when everyone had to sit and nod and be polite about the most appalling nonsense, from Erhard Seminar Training to your stoner roommate droning on for hours about the dangers of mucus in the diet, or what your horoscope meant?

I remember my friend Dan Daniels trying to defend Truth from a superstitious crowd in a bar in Grand Rapids: "So if what we believe to be "true" is a bead on a wire, and "objective reality" is a spot at the center of that wire, and we can never quite balance the bead exactly at the center because of our own imperfections-- still, isn't it true that the bead can either be closer to the center or farther away, so that if I say, 'We're sitting in a bar in Grand Rapids', and you say 'This is an illusion, and our physical bodies are really spirit messages being beamed to us from Angels on Mars'-- well, isn't one of us going to be a little closer to describing reality than the other?"

"Oh, no," answered the woman he was questioning, "both interpretations of reality are valid and true."

That generation of tolerance for every opinion, being so open minded that our brains fell out, helped give us the dream world of Karl Rove and the Bizarro President, where "we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

We now have a culture so full of credulity and manipulation that actual events, real conspiracies, real massacres, real evil is disguised behind a hundred distractions and superstitions. Today the Bizarro President evaded his prom date with reality by proposing a constitutional amendment to protect us all from gay marriage, and everyone in the chattering class felt compelled to stop what they were doing and pretend this was important enough to talk about. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you a vital issue of Manufactured Importance.

That's something that drug addicts, and alcoholics, and persons possessed by minor devils do so well-- change the subject away from themselves, whenever the conversation gets too "real".

THEY USED TO LAUGH WHEN I SHOWED UP DRESSED FOR AN EXORCISM

This posted at Wonkette with the caption "Secretary of State Possessed by Demons". A bit late to the game, and not as conclusive as my own photo montage of Congressman DeLay posted earlier this year-- but then Wonkette is a political gossip blog, and demon-tagging is more or less our metier here at the Encyclopedia Esoterica. I'm just relieved that SOMEONE in the MSM is finally taking notice...

See Also: Demons DeLayed, Vaudeville Part One, Masters of Morality, Don't Question Me, Popular Self Delusion, et alia

Who said: "I'm a thief, and I'm a shitkicker, and I want to be famous!" Was it (a) Divine, or (b) G.W. Bush?

I thought I was on to something with my Dick Cheney/Red Skull/ Ming the Merciless/Patsy degenerating clone theory, or the Kirilian photographs that prove Tom Delay is demonically possesed. Now the once and future Wonkette, Ana Marie Cox, proves that Michael Chertoff is looking more and more like John Waters. How could I not have seen it before? You can tell them apart because John Waters is the funny and more humane of the two.

Abramoff Follies, Two: Demons DeLayed

Abramoff's circus was filled with former employees of the amoral Tom DeLay. According to DCEIVER at Wonkette, the house of cards began to fall when Mike Scanlon (DeLay alumni) was caught flaming it up with an attractive manicurist by his main squeeze Emily Miller (DeLay alumni), who in a rit of fealous jage dropped a dime on Scanlon, who then dropped a dime on Abramoff, who then...

***
It's been clear for some time that Thomas "I AM the federal government" DeLay is mad as a hatter. This is an incredibly powerful politician who could say things like: "it's never been proven that air toxins are hazardous to people". This is the man who said, in a debate on raising the minimum wage: "Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour [the minimum wage in 1996] are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist." And don't forget DeLay's explanation for not serving in Vietnam: "So many minority youths had volunteered that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like myself."

An alternate explanation-- one I favor-- is that Tom DeLay is demonically possessed. (See Robert Heinlein's story "Lost Legacy", collected in "Assignment in Eternity" for more information.) It is a source of wonder that the man has stayed in office longer than a week. The Texans I know have never voted for DeLay, and DeLay's skill at gerrymandering can only explain so much. It may be that Texans keep re-electing DeLay because they think he's funny, without realizing how damaging he is to the body politic. This is a state that still hasn't done the math on drunk driving, guns and fatalities, in a nation that thinks daytime TV will build responsible citizens.

Why oh why didn't we keep Texas out of the Union when we had the chance? Felt sorry for Sam Houston I suppose, and it all went for naught, since Houston died abandoned and disdained by his fellow Texans.

Jonathon Alter tells this story from 1995:
"I had heard a rumor about him (DeLay) that I figured could not possibly be true. The rumor was that after the GOP took control of the House that year, DeLay had begun keeping a little black book with the names of Washington lobbyists who wanted to come see him. If the lobbyists were not Republicans and contributors to his power base, they didn't get into "the people's House." DeLay not only confirmed the story, he showed me the book. His time was limited, DeLay explained with a genial smile. Why should he open his door to people who were not on the team?"

A Mr. Blunt looks to have the votes for replacing DeLay. Local swineherds are advised to keep their piggies away from cliffs for the next couple of weeks.

See Also: Vaudeville Part One, Masters of Morality, Don't Question Me, Popular Self Delusion, et alia