Here’s an interesting scenario. Imagine that someone arrived at your farm one day and suddenly declared it to be someone else’s farm.
“Colonialism,” you’d say.
Let it ride. This kind of thing is happening all the time. What can you do about it, anyway? What can anyone ever do about colonial conquest? Shit happens.
Yes, the world’s heart bleeds. We revisit the Bible and the tales of how Pharaoh oppressed the children of Israel. People feel oppressed. Bombs go off. Things are bad, but that’s how it is.
Or is it?
Someone invades your farm. She or he has no business there. As far as they are concerned, you also have no business there. This is Israel. This is Palestine. This is the Middle East. This is also Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and a bunch of other countries you could mention. Nothing makes any sense. So why try to make sense of it?
It really is an interesting scenario. If it was playing out in Ontario, or modern, pale Australia, for example, it would attract a more particular kind of attention. Or in Yorkshire, England. Or in up-state New York in the United States. Or in California, where the most hectic, unlikely scenarios for the human condition are penned and transformed into celluloid, and nowadays downloaded instantly on to DVD for mass consumption.
But it is playing out in the Middle East, Africa, Asia or thereabouts, where the rules of engagement, socially, politically or militarily, are not the same.
Anyway, it’s an interesting scenario.
This thing about the US invading Saddamised Iraq and then pulling out unceremoniously (I mean without any ceremony) and supposedly ditching, landing or dumping the unprepared, overstuffed, under-represented rump of the country’s un-elected leadership to carry the can for the disaster that was already unfolding (in terms of bombs, rockets, mine fields and other sorts of catastrophes that have become part of the profile of what we call the Middle East) — this is what I call an interesting scenario.
As Gil Scott-Heron said: “This ain’t really your life/It ain’t nothin’ but a B-movie.” And it ain’t.
The only way to take it all on board is to regard it as some kind of bizarre, experimental movie in progress, written, produced and directed by a bunch of narrow- minded but well-endowed amateurs. If you are well endowed, of course, you can do what you like. Including taking over the movie industry, and telling the general public what to go and watch, and what not to watch.
So we sit here this week and watch the US government supposedly handing over power in Baghdad to a bunch of grey Iraqi men in grey suits (apart from one well placed sheikh in sheikhish rig who claims to be the president). Every move is tightly controlled. No camera angle is left to chance. In fact, the public is not invited to the party in any shape or form, just in case one or other member of the general public turns out to be wearing a bomb in his or her underpants. This is shady, backstage business, conducted in suitably muted, shady, backstage fashion.
One could go on forever. The reason one goes on at all about this whole charade is that it all unfolds without any apparent show of protest from the representatives of the paying public. A smug, understated handshake between George W Bush and Tony “Blah-blah” Blair in Turkey, and their whole cynical, criminal, excessive-force escapade in the Middle East is swept under the proverbial Oriental carpet.
We should be afraid. We should be very afraid. And I guess that is what the intention of the whole manoeuvre has been — to make us all afraid, as if we were watching a movie that revealed our own worst nightmares. Afraid of the grey men in their grey suits who can unleash havoc as and when they please, and not be called to account by the nannying, ninnyish United Nations, or anyone else, for that matter.
Big Brother, if anyone ever had any doubt, is alive and well and living where he has always lived — not behind a mythical Iron Curtain, but right there on the threadbare rug in your own living room. Big Brother has taken control of your mind through your television set. You would be a fool to doubt this.
The poor, battered people of Iraq have not been invited to rejoice in their newfound freedom from terror and oppression.
On the contrary, they have been told to shut up and take what is coming to them. The only slight variation in the scenario is that they now have to take responsibility for the disaster that has become their daily bread and butter.
The lesson is that the rest of the world (you and me included) has also been invited to take note and start behaving accordingly. Big Brother is breathing down the back of your neck, and has no intention of allowing you to live by your own lights.
So, as I say, it is an interesting scenario. There have been no weapons of mass destruction discovered in Iraq, nor any smoking gun linking the odious Saddam Hussein to anything more than the colonial governments that put him in power, and then lost patience with him. Let alone the shady, colonial-inspired al-Qaeda network.
Saddam was a bit player in a B-movie. Now he has to pay the price — supposedly at the hands of his own people, but in reality at the behest of his own producers: that is, Hollywood.
Yeah. As Gil Scott-Heron said: “This ain’t really your life/It ain’t nothin’ but a B-movie.”
Rejoice, Iraq. (Such as it is.) The B-movie, as represented in the mock-heroic figure of the late Ronald Reagan, is about to become your reality forever.
Enjoy.