The "Fabulous" Disaster

Yesterday, while watching Ronald Dumsfeld give his Lou Gehrig speech, I was dumbstruck.

Metaphorically speaking, all the self-congratulation brought to mind a kind of egotistic contortionist act, with the amount of smug backslapping he was doing. The man must be double jointed.

"Sgt." Dummy, who never saw a second in the green machine,and never met a defense contractor he didn't like, sends thousands to their death because, well, he never got over the cold war. After all, what does an asshole like this have to do without an shadowy monolith to obsess over. Its Rocky vs. Ivan Drago, or rather, Hulk Hogan vs. The Iron Sheik.

The thing is, Asshole is also a romantic in the pulpy-ist, kitchy sense of the word: He loves the unmediated images that capture so many of his ilk, the kind of Father Knows Best certainty that comes with revisionism. A golden age, if you will, when things were black and white. America in possession of moral supremacy. The UNITED STATES that liberated Europe. Hell, he even described the "liberation" of Iraq like he was Ed Herlihy describing Paris being liberated, possibly oblivious the the glaring differences between Paris in 1944 and Iraq in 2003.

He knows full well, of course, that the United States then no longer exists, and that its people like him that destroyed it, with Eisenhower prophesing his coming. The America of corporatism, of lazy, unmediated mediation, concerned more with casting iconography over icons, the shadow over the light, the lipservice of democracy over the actual voice of the people.

Since that mid twentieth century apex, this America has gotten into the business of churning out war criminals; McNamara, Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger-quite a rogues gallery, though history may reveal the current administration as being far more pernicious. Certainly there are those who are already demanding Dummy end up in front of the Hague. Since none of the above ended up there, I doubt he will, either, since that would mean that this country has done wrong as well as right, and Jim Anderson was always right and true, no?

Then it hit me: Dummy probably feeling kind of Sinatra, a "My Way" kind of mood. Certainly, the scappy, defiant tone in that song would be something Dummy feels like he's entitled to.

However, I'm more inclined to let Old Blue Eyes out this association, because the Chairman's rendition had a certain simpatico to it, a touch of regret, something Dummy cannot even fathom. So, in my imagination, Sid Vicious's version is more apt. Afterall, Vicious was another deluded idiot who saw the world in black and white as well. Plus, the video would suit Dummy's personality to a tee.

I'll close with this Bob Dylan quotation:

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain