Ten years ago last week, Colin Powell stood up before the United Nations and fed his reputation, his credibility and his honor into a chipper-shredder. The good soldier to the last, he took the flimsy tissue of the Bush case for war with Iraq to sell to a dubious world – and an utterly credulous American media.
People forget. The Dixie Chicks were damn near crucified for telling a foreign audience they were embarrassed that the President was from Texas – again, the cult of Texas supremacy even in its most liberal adherents, what are the fucking odds – while “eventheliberal” MSNBC cancelled its highest rated program and fired its host, because Phil Donohue had expressed ambivalence about the case for war. People who had the slightest doubt about the parade of security theater in this country were shouted down as insufficiently serious about the threat of Terror – and didn’t die of irony overdose. And then, with malice aforethought and a complete lack of reason and logic, we went forth into Iraq and shat the bed.
Thousands of Americans dead. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. A client state established for Iran. Osama bin Laden left alive another eight years. Afghanistan neglected to fester into violence.
No accounting. No accountability. The GOP had its ass royally handed to it in three of the five subsequent national elections, with Bush’s 2004 election drowned by both of Obama’s wins, but the GOP never changed course, never expressed regret or remorse or doubt, and indeed, has since made a virtual rerun against Iran the necessary touchstone of its foreign policy (that is, the foreign policy that hasn’t already been outsourced to apartheid-minded Likudniks in Jerusalem).
Being part of Conservative, Inc means never having to say you’re sorry. Or worse yet, that you were wrong.
This comes to mind because of another situation. One that has left me exhausted and physically depleted in a way I can’t remember work doing for a long time. One that has evoked frustrations and exasperations and rage that sent me out the door at previous employers. A situation brought about by a similar lack of understanding basic facts, failure to prepare, failure to plan, and an insistence on rushing in on a wave of panic with eyes tight shut. And once again, there’s going to be a price to pay and it will be paid over a very long time frame. It’s fried me and it’s frazzled me in ways I’m not particularly proud of, and it’s leached into my life outside work, which is a huge huge no-no these last five or six years.
I’m not particularly interested in wrecking myself for other people’s fuck-ups at this point in my life. And I am absolutely not willing to do so in a customer-facing position. And let’s be honest, given the current state of technology, mine is a job with maybe ten years of life in it. Unless you know of corporate IT positions in the field of “smartphone and web browser support.”
The world has moved on and it’s time I started thinking hard about what that means for me. Of which, catchphrase, more later.