or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
March 29, 2006
Fuck The Oil
There's a new movie being shown next month in New York called The War Tapes. It was "directed" by Deborah Scranton, who gave cameras to a New Hampshire National Guard sent to Iraq for a year starting in March, 2004, and asked them to film whatever they wanted.
There are a few clips online. The one at the bottom (labeled "Asscrack") reminded me of this interview with Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq back in 2002:
Kroft: Mr. Secretary, what do you say to people who think this is about oil?Rumsfeld: Nonsense. It just isn't. There are certain things like that, myths, that are floating around. I'm glad you asked. It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.
Here's what two members of the Guard unit say in the clip:
Soldier (off-screen): Can we build a wall around the country and leave?
Sgt. Zack Bazzi*: Wall? Just leave it alone and leave. Fuck the oil, man. Fuck that. It's not worth it. I'll walk everywhere in the U.S. I'll recycle everything, dammit. I'll even drive a Honda Insight. The little hybrid thingys.
Soldier (off-screen): Fuck that.
Bazzi: See, look, you're the reason we always go to war, Bauer. You with your little Ford F-1000s.
I hope Secretary Rumsfeld has since been able to straighten out these terribly misinformed soldiers.
(Note that Bazzi is misinformed about one important thing: our mideast policy doesn't have to do with access to oil, which we would have no matter who runs things. We don't have to go to war in order to buy gas. But we do have to go to war for CONTROL of oil and oil profits.)
*Based on this page about the Guard unit, I think it's Bazzi talking, but I'm not sure.
Posted at March 29, 2006 02:31 PM | TrackBackNational Guard soldiers make me even sadder than the others, b/c I know a lot of them might have honestly thought, when they signed on, that they were going to do real stuff like deal with Katrinas and fight bad guys *here*, which makes a little more sense from the defend-your-Republic point of view. I know the only Iraq-related death that I personally knew had something like that in mind when he signed on as a very young man.
I must say, I have stopped believing in the oil war explanation. I think it's at least equally due to the war industry itself, a sort of self-sustaining darwinian meta-creature.
I think US/BushCo/PNAC foreign policy is based on the maxim that he who breaks the most stuff he found in good working order wins. Wins what, I'm not sure.
Posted by: Jonathan Versen at March 29, 2006 03:30 PMA broken future?
Posted by: Pyrrho at March 29, 2006 07:06 PM
