Selling Satan: Iraqi War Dead and the Collateral Damage to America's Soul

By Phil Rockstroh
Created Oct 25 2006 - 8:40am

Headline (Reuters): "United States numb to Iraq troop deaths: experts [1]"

"O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked
analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its
cunning duplicate in mind."
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

All human beings have a talent for the denial of the more unpalatable
aspects of ourselves, but we Americans have turned denial into a form of
collective genius. There is no need to burn books, if the public is too
ignorant to know they exist -- or too benumbed to resonate with their
content.

Regarding the death of well over half-a-million Iraqis, the majority of the
citizenry of The Corporatists States of America have experienced a
comparable degree of regret and remorse that their oligarchic overlords
experience when topping-off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel
purchased with money plundered from their employee's retirement accounts ...
Sans conscience above -- sans conscience below.

Dante posited Limbo (that quiet suburban community ringing Hell) was a place
reserved for those who evinced indifference to the world around them. It
would seem our corporate/consumer version of Damnation (which now includes
Casual Fridays in Hell itself) requires prescriptions for anti-depressants,
urine tests, and Reality Television competitions to enter its inner most
circles.

As stated, human beings have always possessed an immense capacity for
self-deception -- but, at present, we Americans can no longer afford stupid,
naked monkey business as usual: The stakes are too damn high. When we, as a
people, cannot or will not connect the needless deaths of well over
half-a-million Iraqis with the oversized motor vehicles in our driveways,
the situation has grown dire indeed.

How can we go on this way? At this point, a guilt-induced, collective
nervous breakdown in the middle of our morning commute would seem to be in
order.

By existing in this degree of denial, what have we conjured? What sort of a
society do we call forth when our lives are as isolated, benumbed,
inauthentic and devoid of conscience as they are at present? The answer is:
We're living in the midst of it -- this hideous era of pervasive flimflam
and permanent war. Call it: The Haliburtonization of everyday life. Again,
as above -- so below.

We live in a nation dominated by salesmanship (commercial, political,
religious). Accordingly, the salesman's credo is: a facile mendacity trumps
a stubborn truth -- because an honest mode of being would cause the buyer to
become wary of the giddy lie of the pitch. Hence, complicity in its
duplicity is what the corporate/consumer state demands of us.

The salesman's counterfeit smile is, of course, camouflage. Beneath it is
hidden a face more closely resembling that quintessential corporatist and
Haliburton-allumni-in-good-standing: Dick Cheney; his joyless, thin-lipped,
psychopath's half grin is the true countenance of our death-enamored empire.

A salesman's repertoire of manipulative enthusiasm and sham amiability
fronts the whole criminal enterprise. Is it any coincidence that Las Vegas
and prisons are the fastest growing population centers in the United
States? -- We've become a country comprised of clip-joints and jails -- a
land of suckers and criminals -- with a cultural landscape peopled by
corporate scam artists, congressional bagmen, and war criminals (hiding in
plain sight in the highest offices of the land). It's a natural progression,
due to the fact that capitalism has always depended on a predatory class of
sociopaths, has always relied upon thievery and murder, and, therefore,
needs an endless supply of suckers and victims.

Yet, most of us Americans are no one's victims. Any con artist worth his
smarmy smile is aware of this fact: As a rule, a mark is made the victim of
his own greed. Moreover -- by means of our complicity in allowing our
identities to be molded by a culture dominated by proliferate propaganda,
empty salesmanship, and our own lies of omission -- the fate of a hapless
mark, bamboozled by self-inflicted selfishness, is the criteria we live out
daily. Apropos, we're now condemned to shuffle through our lives as
somnambulating ciphers, dim denizens of a world made manifest by
mountebanks.

We should be cautioned. History reveals: What a nation inflicts upon the
world -- its own people will, sooner or later, inflict upon each other.
There is no need to warily scan the horizon line for its arrival, because
we're already living in the midst of the angst and emptiness we have
wrought. Ergo, when dreams mean nothing -- when words and images are
rendered meaningless -- our lives reflect these dismal states.

Words, images, and dreams are our internal analog of the vast, manifold, and
incomprehensible sublime of the cosmos. When we dream: We are spiraling
supernovas and spindling stalks of slime mold. We are schools of silent fish
and we are the fulmination of thunder. We are uniquely ourselves; yet, we
also contain all of existence. To lose our dreams is to lose our soul.
Hence: To have the verities of our inner selves twisted and distorted
towards the selfish ends of corporate capitalism and the dishonest agendas
of mass media-driven political discourse is to become estranged from
passion, empathy, and imagination; thereby, we grow inured to phrases such
as preemptive war, collateral damage and acceptable losses -- expressions
that we should find repellent, if not, flat-out mortifying.

If not, then it should follow: We should change the names of the civilian
casualties of war, inscribed upon their respective tombstones, to simply
read "Collateral Damage." Moreover, narratives of bereavement should sound
something like this: "You see, when the bombs of the Preemptive Warriors
fell on our home -- our child, now named, 'Collateral Damage,' was asleep in
her crib, and she became 'our little Acceptable Loss.'" Now try this: See
how the statement above sounds when you substitute the names of your
loved-ones -- or even the names of your pets.

In opposition to empathy, the corporatist mode of being instructs us that
human life, like material objects, exists merely to be used, used-up, then
discarded; nature is to be subdued, exploited, and decimated; trees --
toppled; rivers -- dammed up; mountains -- ground down to silt; words --
degraded, attenuated, and stripped of meaning. Finally, they will come for
us.

Instead, what if we were seized and shook by shamanic visions sent to us
from an ensouled earth that had grown enraged by our ignorance and
indifference towards its plight? What if these fantastic and terrifying
narratives warned of dire events and augured destruction, in which, oceans
rose, hurricanes churned, glaciers melted, the very young and the very old
perished from extreme heat and cold, as clouds of pestilence descended upon
the land?

Are these visions crackpot ravings