Eve of Destruction

I wrote this for Bartcop.com just after Al Gore had conceded the 2000 Presidential Election. Some of it seems oddly prescient nowadays, other parts...well, not as much. Should you want to get hold of an mp3 of 'Eve of Destruction' then you might find a copy on Adrian the Ageing Hippy's website.

I got home from work last night to hear that Gore was preparing to
concede the election to Dubya. My response was to get on Napster and use
Al's most famous invention to dowload an mp3 of Barry McGuire's 60s
protest song, Eve of Destruction. One line from that seems quite apt
right now:

'You tell me over and over and over again my friend, that you don't
believe we're on the eve of destruction.'

That seems to be the general reaction today. This isn't a crisis for
American and the world, just the end of a long-drawn out process and now
Dubya can go on and be President, while everything else in the world
will go on just as it did before. I'd love that to be the case, but it's
not. We are standing at the eve of destruction and Dubya and the real
powers behind the Oval Office throne are quite happy to take us all
there.

It's the destruction of the right to vote and have your vote counted.
Not just in America, but everywhere in the world. Corrupt governments
everywhere are now free to manipulate election results however they want
and the US has lost the moral authority to complain when it's won leader
has only got the job thanks to the inherent corruption of the electoral
process in Florida, even before the essential absurdity of the fact that
he got 300,000 less votes than the supposed loser. You can say what you
want about the importance of the electoral college, but that doesn't
hide the fact that in a democracy the winner is meant to be the person
who got the most votes. If Hussein, Qaddafi, Milosevic or Kim Jong Il
had been 'elected' under a similar system, I don't think there's have
been a similar reaction.

It's the destruction of people's rights to run their own lives, of
government's ability to run their own countries. The free market's in
charge now, my friends, and it's tough if you want to have your say
about how your services are run. Dubya's bought and paid for by big
business (most notably Big Oil) and do you think they want those pesky
little foreign governments poking their noses into how they run their
affairs?

The late, great, Bill Hicks, had a routine called 'One of the boys'
where he described his vision of what happened when you were elected
President. The winner was ushered into a room to be faced with the
'twelve industrialist capitalist scumfucks who really run the country'
and shown a film of the Kennedy assassination taken from the grassy
knoll. Any questions? 'Just what my agenda is?' One of the scarier parts
of a Dubya Administration is I doubt he even needs to be shown that
film.

Finally, it's the destruction of the global peace we've had since 1989.
I'm not saying that the entire world has been joining hands and singing
'Kumbyah' since then, but since the collapse of Communism in Russia and
Eastern Europe there's been no Cold War to polarise everyone into one
side or another of a global combat fought by propaganda and proxy. Sure,
we've had enemies since then, but no matter how much we want to inflate
Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya or North Korea into an enemy, they're just not
that credible as a threat to justify the obscene levels of defence
spending the military-industrial complex needs. Anyway, foreign policy
is a lot easier when you've got one big Bad Guy there to blame all the
evils of the world on (and of course, anyone internally who dares to
argue with you must be a sympathiser with them, and that makes it so
much easier to shut them up).

Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice need a big enemy to make
their lives easier, the only question is - who's it going to be? Who
gets to step up to the plate and be blamed for daring to stop the
triumphant march of American mega-corporations across the world?

China are the obvious candidates. After all, they're still nominally
Communist and if we leave them alone too long, they might just use their
size and resources to actually compete economically with the US and that
can't be allowed. But, they might just be too big to have as a potential
enemy, and trying to start a Cold War with them would harm all those
American companies that want to expand into that huge new market that
awaits them (why else are the 2008 Olympics 90% likely to be held in
Beijing, if not for the opportunity it offers to Nike?).

So, maybe it will be Russia again. After all, there's still enough
people around who remember when they used to be the enemy, so it can't
be too hard to build them back up as an enemy. But then, there's the
problem that we've all seen what a chaotic, corrupt mess Russia now is
and it's hard to see them as a potential enemy, especially when it would
stop Big Oil getting it's hands on those huge deposits waiting for them
in Siberia and the Caspian Sea.

So, let's go for another old enemy, who gave the military-industrial
complex two actual wars this century (and there's nothing better than an
actual shooting war for geting rid of all those poor people) - Germany.
And, of course, this time it's not just Germany on it's won but the
whole of the European Union. It already has a larger total population
and economy than the US, plus it's run by a collection of socialists and
Catholics (Britain, Germany and Italy all have Social Democrat
governments, plus the next French President is likely to be the
Socialist Lionel Jospin). Think I'm joking? There are already a lot of
Christian fundamentalists who think that the EU is the Beast, as
predicted in the Book of Revelations (after all, it was founded by the
Treaty of Rome, with all the Vatican connotations that implies) so why
shouldn't the wonderfully Christian US try and lead the world against
Satan's minions in Brussels and Strasbourg?

I'm hoping that I'll be proved wrong and that the Dubya Years will just
be four years of incmpetence and deadlock, especially after the Democrat
triumph in the 2002 midterms. But, they've already got away with
stealing one election, so what's to stop them doing it again.

Let's just hope that in January 2005, President
Kerry/Lieberman/Clinton/Gore (insert your favourite Democrat contender
as applicable) will take the oath of office, trying hard not to laugh at
Chief Justice Scalia as they do so, and then proclaim to the world that
'the Dubya nightmare is over'.

---