The Fall of Afghanistan

While we're coping with pandemic horrors here in the United States, we have to cope with the horror of our foreign policies failing as our decades-long military and political intervention into Afghanistan falls apart. 

To quote Mike Jason at the Atlantic (paywalled): 

Watching the rapid deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan—the Taliban have captured a third of the country’s provincial capitals in the weeks since the U.S. military pulled its troops out—has evoked a feeling of déjà vu for me.

In 2005, I was an adviser to an Iraqi infantry battalion conducting counterinsurgency operations in and around Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of Iraq during one of the most violent periods in that conflict. It was difficult to have any hope at the time. I returned to Iraq in 2009, this time in Mosul, where my unit advised and supported two Iraqi-army divisions, one Iraqi-federal-police division, and thousands of local police officers. This time, I sensed more progress: Leaving Iraq in 2010, I felt we had done a great job, turning a corner and building a capable and competent security force. A year later, I found myself in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, recruiting and training Afghan police units and commandos. After nine months there, I again rotated home thinking we had done some good.

I would be proved wrong on both counts. In 2014, by then stationed at the Pentagon, I watched in dismay as the Iraqi divisions I’d helped train collapsed in a matter of days when faced with the Islamic State. Today, as the Taliban seizes terrain across Afghanistan, including in what was my area of operations, I cannot help but stop and reflect on my role. What did my colleagues and I get wrong? Plenty...

To quote John Cole (who served out there) at Balloon Juice:

What is happening right now in Afghanistan is horrifying. It’s awful. Tens of thousands of people will be slaughtered, the women and children of the area will be sent backwards in history hundreds of years, chaos and brutality and backwards ass theology will rule the day, and it will be awful for a long time to come. And it was all entirely predictable and completely inevitable...

We’ll see a lot of blame thrown at Joe Biden over the next couple of months, and no doubt right-wingers will blame him for “losing” Afghanistan, but most of it is bullshit. Are there some things that could possibly have been done better? Sure. Much of the bitching by our warrior class is focused on the timing of the withdrawal (often ignoring the fact that it was Trump who set the original date), saying we should have waited until the winter when the majority of the Taliban will be at home and it won’t be “the fighting season,” the name for what you and I know as summer and fall. And I suppose he could have. And then we would be reading all of these headlines next spring and summer instead of right now. That’s the thing about delaying the inevitable, it is, in fact, just a delay. This was going to happen no matter when we left and there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me otherwise...

I'd quote from Fred Kaplan at Slate, but he's behind a paywall I haven't subscribed to so all you get are the links. But he's pretty pissed and bummed as well.

So what the hell went wrong with American intervention in Afghanistan?

If you ask me, it all went wrong at the beginning when we charged into Afghanistan back in 2001.

We went into Afghanistan not for any humanitarian reason, not to stop the Taliban's horrific abuse of women. We went in because September 11 happened, Osama Bid Laden pulled off his big attack on the United States and wounded us far worse than any enemy nation ever could. And so wounded, and angry, and vicious, and blind, we charged into the country that was giving him safe haven in order to hunt him down and punish his extremist allies.

We went into Afghanistan out of revenge.

We didn't go in with a grand objective, and we certainly didn't go in with a coherent plan on how we were going to get out of Afghanistan in a timely fashion. We had no exit strategy in the first place.

Oh, our political leadership - George W. Bush's administration at the time - thought they had a plan: clear out the Taliban, kill Bin Laden, install a puppet regime that would perform like a westernized democracy (but really leave in place a corrupt autocrat), and get out. 

Except we never did any of that right.

We couldn't clear out the Taliban because the Taliban had allies right across the border in Pakistan, where they could hide out because Pakistan was technically an ally of the United States and we didn't have the political might to force Pakistan to abandon the Taliban to us.

We hunted Bin Laden alright, at least as far as Tora Bora, but then for some goddamn reason Dubya's administration let him slip away. It was left to the next administration under Obama to bring justice to one of the persons most responsible for 9/11, but by then it had been TEN YEARS during which our occupation of Afghanistan had turned into a quagmire far greater than Vietnam.

As for our nation-building efforts to stabilize a nation that had been literally The Graveyard of Empires for 1000 years, let's refer back to Mike Jason: 

From the very beginning, nearly two decades ago, the American military’s effort to advise and mentor Iraqi and Afghan forces was treated like a pickup game—informal, ad hoc, and absent of strategy. We patched together small teams of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, taught them some basic survival skills, and gave them an hour-long lesson in the local language before placing them with foreign units...

But from my tours in Iraq through to my time in Afghanistan, larger systemic problems were never truly addressed. We did not successfully build the Iraqi and Afghan forces as institutions. We failed to establish the necessary infrastructure that dealt effectively with military education, training, pay systems, career progression, personnel, accountability—all the things that make a professional security force. Rotating teams through tours of six months to a year, we could not resolve the vexing problems facing Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s armies and police: endemic corruption, plummeting morale, rampant drug use, abysmal maintenance, and inept logistics. We got really good at preparing platoons and companies to conduct raids and operate checkpoints, but little worked behind them...

Over these past 20 years, there have been many failings. We checked the box when it came to saying that we had trained our partners, spun a rosy narrative of progress, and perhaps prioritized the safety and well-being of our troops over the mission of buttressing partner capacity... We didn’t send the right people, prepare them well, or reward them afterward. We rotated strangers on tours of up to a year and expected them to build relationships, then replaced them. We were overly optimistic and largely made things up as we went along. We didn’t like oversight or tough questions from Washington, and no one really bothered to hold us accountable anyway. We had no capacity or experience with some of our tasks, and we stumbled...

In short: We failed to nation-build in Afghanistan because nobody at the political level - not in Washington DC and not in corrupt Kabul - took it serious enough to follow through. We got stuck going through the motions, posing for the cameras, cheering on the minor successes while sweeping the major disasters under the rugs.

Even shorter: We had no exit strategy.

Unspoken in all of this was how Bush the Lesser shifted focus away from Afghanistan onto the more "glorious" and desired target of overthrowing Saddam in Iraq. While we were still engaged on the ground in Afghanistan, our military under Rumsfeld - and pushed along by Dick Cheney (aka Halliburton's Best Bud) and other neoconservatives eager for war as a profiteering scam - pursued an invasion of Iraq that was under-manned and under-planned, and ended up becoming a quagmire just like Afghanistan did. But where the disasters in Iraq made the front pages - thanks to the Big Lies of WMDs that turned out to be fake - the disasters in Afghanistan got shunted to Page 16 of the newspapers and rarely talked about on the cable pundit shows: It all turned into a forgotten Shadow War that nobody cared about.

And Afghanistan turned into this Thing That Would Not Go Away for the administrations that followed Bush the Lesser's into the White House and Pentagon. Obama inherited this mess, and went through enough headaches evacuating Iraq that getting out of Afghanistan seemed impossible. He ended up pursuing a military agenda of getting after Taliban leadership with drone airstrikes, but it never broke the will of the Taliban itself. Like the Viet Cong did to LBJ and Nixon, the Taliban realized they didn't have to beat the United States, they just have to outlast us...

Leading up to trump taking over in 2016. A blustering amateur at foreign policy and nowhere near being "smarter than the generals," trump made the big show of figuring out a ceasefire plan with the Taliban in 2020... which was so full of loopholes that the Taliban are exploiting in 2021 as they retake most of the major cities. The peace deal was more trump's attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize and win over voters for 2020 than it was a serious attempt to broker a lasting peace in a part of the world that's known only war for generations.

Again, we had no exit strategy.

We were blinded by rage when we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and we are now stumbling out blind and drunk 20 years later with nothing to show for it but the tears and blood of the Taliban's victims.

Are we doing enough now to help evacuate the thousands of Afghanis - especially women - who are going to suffer under Taliban rule? Because we can't stop them from retaking that nation. It's no longer a question of "If" but of "When."

And are we ever going to learn our lessons as John Cole asks of us:

...There is a reason terms like “mission creep” exist. There is a reason when I was a young E-3 my tank commander and Troop CO gave me reading lists, and included on those lists were books like Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and A Bright Shining Lie and All Quiet on the Western Front and About Face and so many others that sit on my bookshelf to this day. There were lessons to be learned. And we didn’t learn them, myself included. I will grapple with my own culpability the rest of my life.

And I know that my seeming nonchalant writing here about this can seem smarmy and irritating, and I hope that is not what you are taking from this. It’s horrible. I feel terrible for all those innocents. I feel terrible for all our guys who served there and are dealing with trauma and injuries, barely getting their lives back together finally, only to turn on the tv, stare at the horrible images unfolding while glancing at the scarred stumps where their legs and arms used to be, realizing everything they gave everything for has turned out to be nothing.

But while this horror is occurring right now, we can still take advantage of the opportunity to learn this lesson once more. Maybe this will save us a couple generations of needless military adventurism, like Vietnam did before we went and fucked up our memories in Gulf War I and thought war was easy again. Stop listening to the war pigs. Ignore them. Stop listening to the Kagans and Ledeens and the Cheneys and the Kristols and the Tom Cottons and the Friedmans and that one curly hair young twat name Michael something or other who was all over the tv in the late aughts. Don’t let this happen again...

It's all tragic, there's nothing we can do - other than to continue pumping in more bodies and spilling more blood - to stop it, and we're likely setting ourselves up for the next cycle of international terrorism that will drive us back into roaring rampages flattening the countryside and solving nothing.

Even Charlie Wilson saw this coming and nobody else cared enough to stop it coming.

WE FUCKED UP THE ENDGAME.

Update: Not more than thirty minutes after I posted this, reports are now out that the Afghan President has fled the country, and the Taliban are in Kabul itself. This is a nightmare.

Presidential Character: Week Forty-Three, The Phantom President

This blog began during the George W. Bush tenure (back under a different name), so don't be too surprised if you go back through the archives to find some of the then-current complaints I had about someone I consider (present tense) the worst President ever (although I will need to update the Labels to have the tabs more search-friendly).

Any animosity I have towards John Tyler, Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Charles Logan are tempered by the distance of time and the fact that Logan's fictional (and on a show I never watched, I had to Google the name).  For the likes of LBJ and Nixon I will grant the horrors of their tenures but still allow some sympathy for tortured souls, ambitious men who tried but were left wanting (and wrecked the nation in the process).

I have more sympathy for the likes of US Grant, Herbert Hoover, Martin Van Buren, James Madison, Jimmy Carter, and Millard Fillmore.  Good men stuck in jobs they were ill-suited to serve.

Also, don't talk any smack to me about Chester A. Arthur or Harry S. Truman, or I will have to take you out back and hurt you.  I know already you'd better not be talking smack about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt.  Those badasses will rise up and smack you in response...

But here I am, having to give as unbiased a review of Bush the Lesser as possible, considering this is meant to be a review of the man's Presidential Character given in the vein of Prof. James David Barber (who died in 2004, right in the midst of Bush's two terms).

So for this I ought to do some honest research: refer to others as references and use their understanding and expertise to counter-balance any bias I may have of the sonofabitch former President.

Some external research looking for others who are of a mind to review Presidential Character pointed to John Dean, he of the Watergate era, writing a review of Mitt Romney and comparing him as an Active-Negative much like he viewed Bush the Lesser:

Barber's active/positive criteria requires a "relatively high self-esteem (with) … an emphasis on rational mastery," which is not Bush. Bush no doubt loves being head of state, enjoying the pomp of his high office, as well as the politics of the presidency. Yet there is no evidence he even likes being head of the government (for it involves far more intellectual rigor than Bush enjoys). In fact, Bush is like Nixon in that he gets out of the White House every chance he has to do so.

There is an abundance of evidence (from simply watching television coverage of the seldom smiling, often annoyed, forehead-wrinkled Bush) that demonstrates that Bush reaps a "relative(ly) low emotional reward" from the job -- to quote one of Barber's active/negative criteria.

Indeed, Bush clearly fits many of the traits that Barber relies upon to define his Active/Negative presidents. For example, Bush has a "compulsive quality, as if … trying to make up for something or escape from anxiety in hard work." Consider how he has immersed himself in continuous campaigning throughout his first term, while Cheney minds the store. (notice the underline I added, we'll get back to this point later)

Problem with that is that Bush's personal traits don't consistently align with an Active-Negative.  (I also noted Mitt wasn't so much Active-Negative as Passive-Negative running out of a sense of Duty, which is why I'm wary of Dean's evaluation here)  Dean noted how the close observers saw Bush "enjoying" the perks and activities of being President and with a brush-off disregard those observations, focusing more on Bush's obvious dislike of the workload of the Presidency itself.

What Dean also ignores is the case history: Bush's background leading up to the Presidency, the man's work history as a businessman and Texas Governor.  Barber himself at least delves into such details when he wrote his evaluations.  If we do the same for Bush the Lesser, what we can glean from those descriptives is a Bush that's not really that ambitious outside of proving himself to one man: his father, Bush the Elder.

George W. talked mostly about his dad, admiringly, of course. About how GHWB had been a World War II fighter pilot who, upon graduating from Yale, left the safety and comfort of the eastern establishment for Midland and the oil works. As an aside, we also talked about W., how he, too, had gone to Yale, learned to fly fighter jets, and moved to West Texas to make it in the oil biz. He wasn’t exactly bragging, but he was letting me know that he, too, was accomplished, although he seemed well aware that his life so far was one writ small compared with his dad... (Walt Harrington)

Stories abound regarding Bush the Lesser as a failed CEO: starting up Arbusto but getting hit by the 1979 Energy Crisis; getting bought out by one energy firm before getting bought out by another in Harken Energy, getting put on the board of directors as part of the deal; questionable loans and stock selling practices while at Harken; getting into an ownership group with the Texas Rangers that itself had questionable financial issues involving stadium deals; finally working up enough political credit to run for Texas governor in 1994 and garnering a win while his (more successful at business) younger brother Jeb failed the same campaign in Florida.  Throughout all of this was a man who, while showing some ambition, did not show the self-discipline and exacting drive that a lot of other A-N types - Hoover, Johnson, Nixon - displayed in their pre-political years.

The stories also describe a George W. Bush being congenial, talkative, glad-handing, joke-making, back-slapping.  Harrington's article points out the various run-ins the writer had with the Bush family throughout both Bushes' administrations (and periods before-after), where Bush the Lesser's personality from the first meeting was "...friendly, funny, bantering, confident man, a regular guy. He was easy to like, and I liked him..." with few exceptions noted afterward.  This is not the mark of an Active-Negative (anyone calling Herbert Hoover or Richard Nixon a back-slapping "life of the party" has had one drink too many, thankyouverymuch).  It is, in fact, much the mark of a Passive-Positive.

Molly Ivins - she of the hard liberal viewpoint of Texan and national politics, and someone I read from college onward (about 1992) - wrote a book during the 2000 campaign on Bush the Lesser titled Shrub: the Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.  While critical, Ivins and her co-writer Lou DuBose pointed out Bush himself had positives: he was comfortable working campaigns, having been involved in so many of his father's and that circle of friends since the 1970s; while hard Right on social issues wasn't personally hateful towards the usual targets, which made Bush successful with Hispanics and even Black voters (well, compared to other Republicans) in Texas; made friends in all the right places in Texas - corporate headquarters - and knew how to keep those friends.  That Bush the Lesser, on a personal level, was a likable guy: similar in traits to previous Pass-Pos types like Harding and Reagan.

Ivins and DuBose made note of the fact that in Texas, there's a lot more power to the state legislature than the governor's office: while Bush had an agenda - one that took care of his business and Christian allies - he had to defer often to the other branch of government.  Being a Passive-Positive makes that an easy task: he just uses his Congeniality traits to make his presence known and apply just the right kind of back-slap and handshake to make everything work.

What Ivins also noted was Bush the Lesser's utter lack of interest in actual governance: while personally active, almost hyperactive - something that got George Will to think Bush was Active-Positive, which again was a too-simplistic reading of Barber's charting system (Active doesn't mean active, it means "likes to govern") - Bush himself would get bored at meetings and did not take the time to keep up with paperwork.  While Active-Negatives may hate the job they're doing, they actually focus on that job due to their driven sense of "I Must", by using the power of the Presidency to achieve some self-resolution.  Bush never really did.

Bush's ambition for the Presidency was almost Passive-Negative out of a sense of Duty: it was what Bush the Elder did, so Bush the Lesser had to do it too.  But that single P-N instinct goes against everything else Bush demonstrates - P-Ns don't like politics at all, while Bush enjoyed and endured it - so it's clearly not his primary trait (Barber does allow for the fact that the Traits are not exclusive to one Character or another).  Passive-Positive, with that Congeniality - that obsession with being Well-Liked - is the only Presidential Character that makes the most sense.

So if Bush the Lesser was really a Passive-Positive at heart, something that Ivins points to, why was Dean so convinced that Bush was really an Active-Negative?

Because much of the Bush administration was a disaster of obsessive secrecy, reckless war-making, and abuse of powers that one regularly sees in an A-N administration.

Mind you, Passive-Positives preside over scandal-plagued tenures - Reagan's was chock-full, as was Harding's and Grant's - but for different reasons than an Active-Negative's such as Johnson or Nixon.  Pass-Pos' scandals are due more to the nature of such Presidents allowing their cronies free range to embezzle and indulge, whereas A-N's scandals stem from the President's own personal faults and obsessions.

Bush's tenure as President did include a lot of that indulging - through policy positions on massive tax cuts (not themselves scandalous as they were legal... just damaging to the federal budget because those tax cuts created massive deficits we've yet to pay off), hiring on people from his circle of friends to comfortable positions in government that they were fully unqualified to serve - but that administration also presided over such things as a secretive energy policy that never received public review, failed to work with a Congress that was even controlled by their own Party and at points outright lied to that Congress (or worse failed to testify at all), and pretty much lied to the Congress, the American People, and the world when it came to the reason for invading Iraq over "weapons of mass destruction" in dictator Saddam Hussein's "possession."

And that's not even going into the lies about the start of a torture regime during the War on Terror against Afghani, Iraqi, and other Muslim/Asian peoples.

These are the kind of crimes an Active-Negative - angry, self-serving, self-destructive, illegal - would inflict on themselves or others.  Not necessarily something in Bush the Lesser's demeanor (he would rail about the media's attacks on his father during the Elder's troubled administration, but that was not really self-serving nor self-destructive: at the end of the day Bush would deal with that same media).  Bush prided himself on being a "uniter, not a divider" and in public and in policy would act that way.

It might help to understand that a Passive-Positive President is by nature too trusting of his allies and cronies: Harding is a perfect example.  It's often noted in a Pass-Pos administration the tenor of the office defined more by an underling or group of underlings (much like Franklin Pierce's seemed more dictated by his Southern Democrat allies, and Reagan's with regards to the Iran-Contra scandal).  With that consideration, also note that during Bush the Lesser administration we had the most politically-powerful VICE President our nation ever saw in Dick Cheney.

As noted elsewhere, Vice Presidents are usually ill-remembered and isolated from the Presidencies they serve under.  They're also usually political disasters when ill-considered and the President dies/leaves office to their charge.  Before the 20th Century, the Veep's office was where political careers went to die (and a good number of Veeps did die in office, but that's another story).  Most Vice Presidents were barely involved in their President's administrations (Presidents favored their Cabinets more often): the only noteworthy Veep (before the 25th Amendment and the Cold War that conjoined it) that did work with his boss was McKinley's first Vice President Garret Hobart.  Everyone else was hidden away and only let out in times of Senatorial deadlock.

Even with the advent of the Cold War, and the necessity of a Vice President being more involved and more informed, the man working as Veep had to subsume his political ambitions and personality traits in order to work with the more dominant President.  Bush the Elder a perfect example: even with Reagan being a Passive-Positive, Bush respected the chain of command well enough to work within the administration rather than pursue his own Active-Positive interests (outside of whatever role he had in Iran-Contra).

Cheney was different.  Cheney seemed to dominate Bush the Lesser's administration the minute he was given any authority by Bush, and that even began during the 2000 campaign.  Entrusted as a family friend of his father's, Bush put Cheney in charge of finding his Vice Presidential ticket balancer.  There seemed to have been a review process but in the end the selection was... Cheney himself, which puzzled people then but makes more sense when you look at Cheney more closely.

Cheney's biography and personality fits so neatly into an Active-Negative character: aggressive, secretive, driven.  That he was there at the end of Nixon's administration highlights the influence that event had to have on Cheney's political world-view.  As Nixon believed, so too did Cheney in the idea of a "unitary executive theory" that a President must be all-powerful, all-controlling (this was also a Wilsonian stance, so you might notice an A-N trend by now) and never in the wrong (that when the President does it, it's not illegal).

This was a man who was perfectly willing to tell a fellow politician on the floor of the Senate to "go fuck yourself."  Granted, this wasn't a full-on assault with a walking cane, but certain rules of decorum apply (you're supposed to save that for the parking lot).  This was a guy who told a fellow Secretary of Treasury that "deficits don't matter (regarding more massive tax cuts that even the Secretary felt were unneeded).  This is our due."

This was a man who chaired the secretive energy policy meetings.  This was a Vice President who had his office and had his friends in the Defense Department set up a competing "investigative office" to undercut CIA intelligence that didn't fit their "Iraq Has WMDs" narrative.  This was a Veep whose Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby was indicted for his role in revealing the classified identity of a CIA agent whose husband had publicly questioned the WMD story.

This was a Vice President who used his unprecedented level of authority to ignore standard procedures on a regular basis.  When confronted by the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office - the ones who handle and store classified materials on a daily basis, mind you - about refusing to turn over materials starting from 2003 into 2007, Cheney did his best to eliminate that part of the National Archives altogether.  Cheney's argument?  As Vice President serving both Executive and Legislative duties (as President of the Senate), he was exempt (the "Fourth Branch" of government argument).  Basically claiming he didn't have to answer to anybody.  Not even to the President.

What Cheney did as Vice President is one of the reasons I'm very keen on the idea of getting rid of the Vice President's office.

That Cheney was able to get away with this had a lot to do with the Passive-Positive nature of Bush the Lesser.  When other Pass-Pos types served, they rarely had an Active-Negative on Cheney's scale of ambition before.  You can discount the 19th Century Pass-Positives since during that century the VP role was disconnected from their administrations from the get-go.  Harding's Veep was a Passive-Negative (Coolidge).  Reagan's was an Active-Positive who may have wanted the authority but respected the political system to ever over-reach like that (Bush the Elder, who later on publicly questioned his old friend Cheney's arrogant behavior).  Other Active-Negatives serving as Vice President (Johnson and Nixon) served under constraining Presidents: for Nixon it was under a Passive-Negative Eisenhower whose dislike of politics would have limited the White House's powers; for Johnson it was under an Active-Positive like Kennedy who had confidence in his own administrative powers and preferred the advice of others that Johnson loathed (little brother Bobby Kennedy, for example).

Cheney's Active-Negative traits flourished because he knew in a way he'd have all the powers of the Presidency without any of the accountability (which would fall to his boss George W. Bush).

To this shadow Presidency a good amount of Bush the Lesser's woes can be laid.  While Bush himself remains complicit in a lot of the crimes committed under his administration - signing off on an unnecessary war and occupation of Iraq, signing off on a torture regime, signing off on a tax-cutting program that induced massive government deficits, allowing an alarming number of incompetent players within the Republican ranks to gain too much authority and influence that taints the party to this day - Cheney had his hands all over a lot of those programs and disasters to begin with.

The dark heart at the center of Bush the Lesser's failures is Cheney.

Next up: Gonna steal this from Sullivan:  Meep.  Meep.

The Numb Decade

Not only is December a time of yearly reflection (Best Of, Worst Of Lists abound), but anything -9 on the calender gets to be a time of looking back upon an entire decade... 1989 focusing on The Eighties, 1999 focusing on The Nineties (overwhelmed by a case of centennial reminiscing for the whole 1900s). So now it becomes time to look back upon an entire decade: the 2000s, also known as the Aughts.

Each decade comes to be known for a particular theme: 1930s = Depression/pre-War years; 1940s = The War Effort; 1950s = Rise of the Boomer teens, Rock music, The Atomic Age; 1960s = New Frontier/The Nam/Woodstock Nation; 1970s = Nixon, Disco, Urban Blight, National Malaise (in short, the 70s Sucked); 1980s = Reagan Era of Good Feelings; 1990s = Post-Cold War/Dawn of the Internet; 2000s = ?

This came to me when I posted a comment to Flick Filosopher's post asking which film defined this decade. After giving it serious thought, I came to realize that a lot of the movies - even the good movies - seemed bereft of passion, of any amount of dedication to craft on the part of film-makers. It was just... throwing mass spectacle up on the screen and trying to see what sticks. I realized the films of this decade all suffered - and for the ones that tried to enjoy themselves - from a form of numbness.

This got me looking at the decade itself. And indeed, there was a kind of "God, Please, just let this go and not bother me anymore" feeling encompassing all. The era of scandal-plagued Clinton years finally awashed with Clinton Fatigue (just stop yelling about the BLOWJOBS, you wingnuts!). We got as a result one of the most dull, predictable Presidential campaigns in 2000 that ended up with a jaw-dropping questionable vote count (the Butterfly Ballot doomed us all) in my home state of Florida (I was in Broward - Ground Zero 2000 - for the insane recount) that ended with a questionable result (Bush wins in a 5-4 vote). By the end of all that, people just wanted to move on...

And then 2001. No space odyssey for humanity. Just a coordinated terrorist attack that killed thousands and drove the United States into the GWOT.

Everything in the political arena was pretty much consumed by the War on Terror, which mutated into a War on Iraq, which mutated further into an Occupation of Iraq and a growing schzoid madness in our Mainstream Media (half obsessed with justifying an increasingly unjustifable invasion and occupation, the other half terrified of being label unpatriotic). In the meanwhile, a GOP majority in control of Congress and the White House went on a spending spree that would have made LBJ blush, disregarding ethics and regulatory concerns (even in the wake of a massive corporate scandal involving Enron, WorldCom, criminal accounting tricks and more). All concerns for reform: none, and that lack of concern fed down into the whole of society, to where everyone is just shell-shocked at the large unemployment, the growing corpulence of the financial industry even in the wake of a global recession they caused, and pretty much everything else.

We're at 10 percent unemployment, and despite the Media talking heads trying to convince themselves the worst is over, there's good signs the worst ISN'T over. And yet, no one's marching in the streets about that. We've got more unemployed people since the 1930s and the streets are not crammed with protestors screaming for jobs, for job security, for ANYTHING from the government to help us.

The only ones marching? Teabaggers. And *they're* obsessed over SOCIALISM ZOMG, or Obama's BIRF CERTIFICATION ZOMG, or DEATH PANELS THAT DON'T EXIST ZOMG. In short, they're obsessed over b-llsh-t stuff that ain't true.

We're facing massive economic collapse with our current health care system, but the bill is close to death in the Senate all because of egotistical morans wanting their pretty pony presents. And past the outrage on the progressive blogs and on Olbermann's show, what else? Again, the streets are empty of people FOR the health care reform. Even though there's good evidence there's a lot of people out there who WANT AND NEED it.

It's like there's a kind of numbness in us. A refusal to work ourselves out of our homes, our cubicles. Not entirely fear of losing our homes or jobs, even though that can (and will) happen (if nothing gets fixed). Not enough anger, perhaps. Definitely not enough passion to see it done.

I dunno if it was the Clinton Fatigue from the 1990s that led to this kind of political apathy of letting the loudest idiots win the arguments just to let it end, even when those loudmouths are criminally wrong. I dunno if it was 9/11. I dunno if it was the Bush administration letting its ignorance and toadying permeate into our cultural consciousness. All I know is, we've been numbed into a lull. As a nation. We're just sitting here, waiting for the end. Of what, we all know. But we're at the point we don't care.

And that doesn't even terrify me. It did, once... See?