At the Heart of Darkness
It's not what you expect
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 8, 2002 -- Mt. Shasta (zeppscommentaries.com) -- It was yet another glimpse into the awful vacuity of the mind of George W.

Voice husky with conviction, eyes brimming with compassion and moral outrage, George paused in mid golf game and told the cameras, "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers," Mr. Bush said on the first green of Cape Arundel, at 6:15 a.m. "Thank you. Now watch this drive." Whereupon, in front of the confounded reporters, he calmly hacked at the golf ball. Sincerity is everything; if you can fake that, you can be president of the United States.

Too bad Rush Limbaugh isn't an honest reporter. If you think he played the video of Clinton chuckling after the Ron Brown funeral to death, imagine what he would do with that. Assuming, of course, he was actually honest, which means that dittoheads don't need to worry. They won't even HEAR about it from him, unless it's to complain that Democrats are making fun of Putsch again.

One of the big problems we have as a culture is that we tend to equate evil with malevolence. We expect them to be consciously evil, bad guys who run around stealing and hurting and loving every minute of it because they are, well, bad guys. And when we think of bad guys, we think of Adolf Hitler.

But those are fairly rare, and by themselves, not capable of much damage. Hitler's enthusiastic supporters were never more than a small fraction of the German population. His real strength lay in the fact that most Germans were perfectly willing to shrug and let the world go to hell in its own way. The Jews? Somebody else's problem. A war against Europe? Good. Maybe it will help the economy.

What lies at the heart of darkness? It's not darkness, and it's certainly not a heart. It is the indifference of the person who has decided that the best way to deal with life is with lazy cynicism.

Cynicism has no color. It is merely personal surrender wrapped in a sneer. Apathy has no heart. By definition.

Obviously, no person can care about everything. We all have to pick and choose the things we can care about and still maintain our sanity. Those of us who can't even do that get jobs as guards at the death camps, and tell ourselves that the job sucks - all that screaming and begging and shit - but the pay is good.

The man who switched so effortlessly from damp-eyed moral outrage on demand for the cameras to the more congruous vapid enthusiasm for his golf game was presented with the opportunity to stop Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda clear back in January of 2001. This opportunity came in the form of a detailed plan that President Clinton, who was deeply alarmed by the threat presented, formulated in the final months of his administration.

According to Michael Elliot, the Time Magazine journalist who broke the story, there were a series of 10 briefings staged for the incoming people under the aegis of Sandy Berger. The Clinton administration was aware of the threat terrorism posed and was anxious to not repeat the disdainful indifference of the departing Bush administration in 1993 that refused to fully brief the incoming Clinton people on OBL (which might have helped avoid the bombing of the WTC five weeks later).

Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, were given a series of ten briefings by Clinton's middle east experts. Berger reportedly sat in on the briefing about Osama bin Laden personally in order to emphasize its importance. According to Elliot, Berger told Rice, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al Qaeda specifically, than any other subject."

Rice, characteristically, now claims that she "had no memory" of any briefing where Berger was present.

In any event, the Putsch junta blew off the warnings and advisories from Berger and his team, and the rest, as they say, is history. They got around to looking at the data and material Berger had given them on September 4th, 2001, perhaps because they already had realized that something really big was about to occur.

Hey. Now watch this drive.

Now, of course, the admin is claiming that there was no well-formed plan, just some vague suggestions ("Watch for the tall skinny guy with the beard - he's a major league asshole.") And of course the GOP spin machine has been turning itself inside out over this, to the point where, two days after the story broke, one little right wing spinnerette on Usenet had the plan reduced to "some notes scrawled on the back of a MacDonald'shamburger wrapper."

So why did Putsch and his merry junta sit on this plan for eight months, despite what happened to Clinton because Daddy couldn't be bothered passing along information vital to the interests of America?

They sat on it because it came from Clinton, and Putsch was obsessed with being not-Clinton. He spent the first eight months being the anti-Clinton. He wasn't going to do anything that might remind anybody of Clinton.

Given that Clinton had heart, courage, intelligence, devotion and determination, that's a real pity, but then, I doubt George has any of those qualities anyway.

A lot of people think that Putsch wanted the World Trade Center attacks to happen so he could turn his administration into a dictatorship. I don't think that's true. I don't think he expected WTC.

I think he wanted a generic terrorist attack to take place so he could turn America into a dictatorship. For all the best reasons, of course: security, order, trains running on time, ALL that.

I suspect that after a couple of days, he just considered WTC, shrugged, grinned, and decided it just made his job that much easier.

But ask him if he is an evil person, and he would give you an indignant and sincere "Hell, no!" for an answer.

About all we can do with the heartless and colorless, the empty people at the misnamed heart of darkness, is not allow them to formulate public policy, since their inflexible response to anything that irritates them is to get rid of it in any way possible, preferable something cheap and easy. "Cheap and easy" solutions to social problems tend to be cruel and horrific.

At the heart of darkness there is no darkness but, rather, a colorless vacuum. And at the heart, there is no heart. The term heart of darkness is a misnomer.

Calling George W. an enlightened leader with heart is a similar misnomer.

Now, watch this drive!

Copyright © 2002, Bryan Zepp Jamieson.
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ISSN No. 1523-1690