2003-05-03 - 12:18 a.m.
I made the mistake of reading the paper again today. Here is the thing I can’t get over about the journalistic assessment of the war: the garish descriptions of Saddam Hussein’s boundless excess, plush palaces, and fancy furniture. I know that there are a million other things to feel enraged about, and perhaps a lot of them much more significant and weighty than the way U.S. journalists discuss Hussein’s wealth. However, it’s this that gets my goat lately, even more than the victorious assessments of “freedom” realized, even more than the asinine proclamations of martyrdom. Maybe it’s the absolute transparency of this degree of hypocrisy, that we live in a nation of such violently disproportionately distributed wealth, and yet the so-called objective voices of journalists disapprove deeply of the gilded palaces in the midst of a poor nation, shaking their heads and tsking collectively. I know I mentioned this in an earlier entry, but I’ve felt increasingly frustrated and infuriated at the continuing references to Hussein’s wealth and corruption. Not that I disagree. I don’t, I’m as horrified by extravagant wealth in poverty-torn nations as these writers seem to be in their dramatic phrasings. However, I am even more horrified by the denial and double-standard exercised by a nation that can’t even seem to maintain a credible welfare system, that deals with poverty through incarceration, and that still pretends that it’s A-OK that a few fancy-pantses earn more in an hour than most will see in a lifetime. And WE feel disgust at a dictator’s wealth? Is it that wealth amidst poverty itself is objectionable? Or is it wealth that exists outside of the boundaries of U.S. soil that disgusts? Or wealth in a nation that the U.S. is trying to choke of capital and power? Or wealth in the hands of an individual who is not meeting the needs of the U.S. capitalist status quo? It’s creepy to feel like the parallel between Iraq’s small, privileged class and the U.S.’s larger, put probably even more privileged class is SO incredibly obvious to me and those that I talk with most frequently… but then to feel like the joke is totally lost on most. It’s yet another moment, and I experience these moments all of the time, that I feel like my entire existence is actually on a different planet and in a different plane. Yet, I move through this earthly world, and there is nothing between the two that seems translatable or comprehensible in either direction.
