CSotD: The Persistence of Futility
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I haven't seen a lot of Benghazi cartoons that — even when I agreed with them — weren't kind of obvious. So I like this Kevin Siers cartoon because it's also delightfully silly, and that may ultimately be more effective than trying to drive home the point that the Benghazi brigade cannot possibly have any serious goal other than obstruction.
Which anyone with a lick of sense already knows.
I mean, if you're going to preach to the choir, you might as well give them a laugh.
There is a deep sense of futility in the resurgence of the Benghazi trope, the feeling that every time there is proof that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that 9/11 was not an inside job, that we really did land on the moon, somebody pulls up yet more "proof" and we're off to the races yet again.
So now the Republicans have found more "evidence" that will surely reveal, at last, the truth about Benghazi.
It is futile to point out how many worse intelligence failures have occurred under other presidents, both Democrat and Republican.
It is even more futile to try to argue that the Benghazi compound was a CIA spook shack and that, naturally, there are cover stories drummed up to protect our intelligence operations, or to remind anyone of the politically-motivated betrayal of Valerie Plame.
The greatest futility of all is to appeal to decency and patriotism, to point out, as Jane Mayer did in the New Yorker, that, when 241 Americans died in the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut,
"Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House … demanded an investigation — but a real one, and only one. Instead of playing it for political points, a House committee undertook a serious investigation into what went wrong at the barracks in Beirut. Two months later, it issued a report finding “very serious errors in judgment” by officers on the ground, as well as responsibility up through the military chain of command, and called for better security measures against terrorism in U.S. government installations throughout the world.
In other words, Congress actually undertook a useful investigation and made helpful recommendations.
Doesn't matter. Isn't relevant. Didn't happen.
I don't find it at all surprising, or particularly upsetting, that there are delusional cranks out there with ridiculous theories, people who feel they are smarter than anyone else because they've found the secret that nobody else has discovered.
There were always cranks in the barber shop or at the end of the bar, who called FDR a Jew, and they were perfectly confident, first of all, that being a Jew was universally accepted as a bad thing, and second, that his family's multigenerational affiliation with the Dutch Reformed Church was some kind of sinister cover-up.
But nobody in a position of political power actively encouraged them to believe such nonsense.
As it is, while we're all excitedly seeing the prophesies of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon come true, we're ignoring, at our peril, a seer whose vision is also bearing fruit.
It's probably too late to teach "1984."
The novel drops its dystopian vision down fully formed upon the audience, so that Big Brother and his entire system are seen as the fault of someone else, of a previous generation, not your own, and so you read it at a distance, as fantasy.
Instead, we should teach Ionesco's "Rhinoceros," a classic piece of theater of the absurd in which great, stupid, destructive, lumbering beasts begin to appear, at first in the distance, almost as a rumor or a vision, and then closer, and then here, until the characters in the play themselves begin to transform into beasts, and, worse, to explain why it's okay.
Because that is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper. And an earnest explanation.
I suppose the Benghazi cartoons are like the "Bring Back Our Girls" memes and all the emerging, uninspiring, cartoons on that topic. And there's little difference between holding up the words and drawing a cartoon about it, because there's nothing much to be said beyond "bring back our girls."
And, even if there were, nobody in Boko Haram is going to even see that stuff, much less be swayed by it.
But that's not why you do it.
You do it to maintain the focus of people who should be doing something, even if there's little to be done.
You do it to maintain your own sense of decency, and to encourage others to maintain theirs.
This is a watchbird watching Darrel Issa
This is a watchbird watching YOU.
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