My
Year Of Living Americanly: Mt. Rushmore - How American Is
That!
18 September 2010By Jane Stillwater
I used to think that if only I could go off to all the
hot-spots in the world where American troops or
"advisers" are stationed, then I would be able to
understand American imperialism better and thus be in
a better position to explain to my fellow Americans
that, despite all its glittery promises and
John-Wayne-style bravado, American imperialism is
essentially a BAD thing -- one that will come back to
bite them in the [bottom].
But after spending many years going to places like
Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Myanmar and sub-Saharan
Africa, I have finally come to realize that perhaps it
is even more important to trace all these imperial
catastrophes back to their actual source -- the
Americans who stand by, do nothing and allow all this
[dookie] to happen in the first place.
So I set out to explore and discover the belly of the
beast itself -- America. Whew! That's a very big job.
Of course we all know that the real heart of America
is in Branson, Missouri, but I haven't been able to
afford getting there yet. But I did go to Detroit,
Michigan -- and was totally impressed by the courage
its residents are showing as they try to pull
themselves back from the brink of economic disaster.
You can almost hear the sucking sound there -- as the
wealth of cities like Detroit gets vacuumed away to
desolate places like Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan,
and into the bank vaults of Wall Street.
And my main memory of Las Vegas was of its poor sweet
over-worked cocktail waitresses -- trying to look sexy
when they have sore feet, hungry children at home and
almost no chance of seeing sunshine except on their
day off.
Then I went to Disneyland. Can't get much more
American than that. And in October I'm going to
Boucher-con, the famous mystery writers' and fans'
convention in San Francisco. And I also went up to
Clear Lake last month -- which isn't clear any more.
Nothing but algae. And I worked as a volunteer film
extra in a bunch of Bay Area movies. That's American
too.
And now I'm going off to Mt. Rushmore. How American is
that!
(Later -- much later): Now I'm here at Mt. Rushmore --
after having gotten lost at the San Francisco airport
and having almost missed my plane to Rapid City. But
I'm here now. And it was worth it. Mt. Rushmore is
awesome. It is HUGE. And you just gotta love the Black
Hills.
I also saw a monument to Chief Crazy Horse today. It's
about 20 miles away from Mt. Rushmore -- but it's even
bigger yet. Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt AND
Lincoln could easily fit onto just the side of Crazy
Horse's head. The largest sculpture in the world, it's
been a work in progress for the last 62 years and they
figure it will take another 60 years to finish it.
When completed, however, it will take up the space of
a whole mountain.
"Where is your land now?" someone had jeered at Chief
Crazy Horse after he had fought and then surrendered
because his people were being killed by the U.S.
military and because the buffalo they needed to live
on were also being slaughtered by the occupying forces
in order to starve the tribes into submission. Crazy
Horse had begun resisting the U.S. military occupation
only after he had been given no other choice.
And Crazy Horse answered, "My lands are where my dead
lie buried."
PS: Speaking of the Afghan money pit and where dead
people lie buried, Scottish journalist David Pratt has
just written another article about Afghanistan that I
think is essential to read if you want to have ANY
concept of what's going on over there right now.
Bush, Cheney, Obama and Petraeus, please take note --
especially of the article's last sentence. "The third
message came from an old Russian friend and former
intelligence officer in the Soviet army who served in
Afghanistan in the 1980s and who now works as a
security adviser there. It read: “It’s like the rerun
of an old movie for me, the same blunders, the same
tactical mistakes … but at least we knew when it was
time to get out.”
Here's the article in its entirety, with Pratt's kind
permission (as originally printed in the Glasgow
Sunday Herald):
Now civil war looms for the lost cause that is
Afghanistan:
We are losing the war in Afghanistan. It’s as simple
as that. If I were a Taliban or insurgency commander
right now, I’d feel pretty upbeat about the way things
are going. While you’d be hard pressed to notice it –
given all the papal hullabaloo – Afghanistan faces a
crucial parliamentary election tomorrow.
This time around there has been nothing like the
political fanfare emanating from Kabul, Washington and
London, as happened previously when we were told
Afghanistan was taking its first tentative steps
towards democracy. The reasons are simple. First, the
election will be riddled with fraud and corruption.
Secondly, the Taliban will show once again it can
strike with comparative impunity. And, thirdly, those
international bodies, such as the United Nations,
tasked with helping Afghans realise what free and fair
elections actually mean have bottled it and bolted.
Sound familiar? It should, given that this time last
year we faced much the same situation with the
presidential vote. The significant difference on this
occasion, however, is that everyone is keeping their
political heads beneath the parapet in the certain
knowledge that once again we will fail to deliver for
the Afghan people and no-one wants to be blamed.
Every day in the news from Afghanistan, in the
comments from our military commanders and the evasive
doublespeak of our political leaders on troop drawdown
and withdrawal, you sense the tide is changing. And
all the time the Taliban are gaining at every turn.
Indeed, the evidence on the ground already shows that,
far from being on the back foot, the insurgents are
advancing and holding territory in provinces such as
Wardak and infiltrating the north of the country in
places like Kunduz and Badakshan, turning what until
now have been comparatively subdued regions into
resurgent battlefronts. In all, it seems a case of one
step forward and two back.
Today, it’s not so much a sense of mission creep as a
creeping sense that the mission is lost. Take
tomorrow’s election as a single example. In the
aftermath of last year’s presidential vote, as many as
1.2 million votes were said to be illegal. In its
wake, the UN and others swore they would do better
next time. Yet, according to Johann Kriegler, one of
only two foreigners on Afghanistan’s Electoral
Complaints Commission, over the next few days we can
expect pretty much the same, if not more, widespread
ballot rigging and intimidation than before.
And where do we find the UN precisely at the moment we
need it most? Heading for the hills. Well, not the
hills exactly, given that they’re full of Taliban,
more a case of over the hills and far away. Throughout
the past week or so, the UN has evacuated what it
deems as non-essential staff for fear they might be in
harm’s way from Taliban violence during the elections.
In all, that’s about one-third of its entire
international workforce in Afghanistan. Or, to use UN
speak, a “reduction in its footprint”.
“We are going to be particularly careful as the
Taliban have announced they will attack anyone
involved in this election and we are very much
involved,” explained Staffan de Mistura, the head of
the UN mission in Afghanistan. Really? Well, perhaps
you’re not quite involved enough, Mr de Mistura. Why
is it every time we put the Afghan people through the
rigours of the democratic process, instead of standing
its ground, the UN sticks to its wimpish last in,
first out approach that has characterised so many of
its international missions?
To be fair, though, the UN is not alone in bending to
Taliban intimidation: many other international
election monitoring groups have also given up on full
“observation” missions, rendering tomorrow’s ballot
next to useless. This is bad news at a time when, more
than ever, ordinary Afghans need reassurance.
That said, many already sense we have all but thrown
in the towel and are doing nothing more than going
through the motions of leaving without losing face.
While in the country last month, almost every Afghan I
spoke with, from Badakshan in the north, to the
capital, Kabul, was desperately pessimistic about the
future.
Already people across the country have picked up on
our own faltering sense of political purpose, and are
psychologically steeling themselves for what is almost
universally accepted as the coming civil war once
we’ve packed our kit bags and left. And we’re not
simply talking about the Taliban here.
Around Kabul’s more “fashionable” neighbourhoods,
extravagant new houses built on the enormous profits
of the illegal drug trade are testimony to the
financial and political power of war lords who run
private militias and “security companies”. It is these
often bitter rivals, not just the Taliban, that
ordinary Afghans believe will plunge them back to the
dark days of the 1990s when civil war laid waste to
much of Kabul and paved the way for the rise of the
Islamic extremists.
Having been there many times during those anarchic
years, listening to Afghans today draw parallels with
those times, I well appreciate their fears.
Speaking earlier this week about tomorrow’s election,
Major General Nick Carter, who commands NATO troops in
southern Afghanistan, described Kandahar as resembling
Moscow in the 1990s, with “mobs, mafia and protection
rackets” running madrassas, boarding houses and
private security companies.
General Carter has every reason to be worried, given
that it’s probably fair to say much of the country,
whether under government or Taliban control, is
threatened by a similar incendiary brew.
They say that the devil is in the detail. If that’s
true, then perhaps the detail in three email messages
I received over the course of the past few weeks gives
some intimate sense of the prevailing attitudes to the
war in Afghanistan and where the country might be
going in the future.
The first was from a US Army helicopter ambulance
pilot, whose unit I spent time with in the country. As
his deployment comes to an end, he told me of the
physical and emotional toll the war has taken on him
and his comrades, and how much he now just wanted to
go home and never see Afghanistan again. The second
email was from a young Afghan woman, who described how
men with guns – not Taliban – are terrorising the
neighbourhood in Kabul where she lives. The third
message came from an old Russian friend and former
intelligence officer in the Soviet army who served in
Afghanistan in the 1980s and who now works as a
security adviser there. It read: “It’s like the rerun
of an old movie for me, the same blunders, the same
tactical mistakes … but at least we knew when it was
time to get out.”
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/guest-commentary/now-civil-war-looms-for-the-lost-cause-that-is-afghanistan-1.1055745
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