Commentary
Zarqawi’s head on the wall
By Charles M. Ashley
Online Journal Contributing Writer



Jun 13, 2006, 00:49




Tony Snowjob’s White House briefing on the putative killing of Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi was to say the least interesting in terms of what it suggests about the current resident [scroll down and smile seriously] at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and those who voted for him.

Next to Snowjob’s lectern was a huge gold-framed photograph apparently of Zarqawi’s very dead looking face all cleaned up for the terrorist’s last photo-op and looking finally peaceful at the end of a life "poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

One can understand why Snowjob had the photo displayed as, say, the rigor mortis stiffened bodies of criminals killed back in the American Old West by some posse or other were displayed, stood up as ghoulish trophies against the siding of the Palace Saloon. The press corps and TV audience, to be sure, need to verify that Zarqawi is dead.

Whether we should take the third Bush White House spokesman’s word on Zarqawi’s death—even with photographic evidence—is an issue to be held in serious doubt. After all, the Bush bunch provided plenty of photographic evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as a justification for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Remember the portable bio-labs? Need I list once again all the lies, the secrecy, the subterfuge, the surreptitious sneaky slimy bottom-feeding slurring, slandering strategy and tactics of the bunch of glorified gang bangers who have twice hi-jacked the White House? The list is dreadfully long.

(And what was it again Clinton was impeached for?)

So why should this photographic evidence be given any more weight than the absolute vacuum of credibility this administration has painstakingly earned?

This photo could be dummied up. The technology to do so has long existed. All one needs is a decent graphic artist and appropriate software.

Not that I don’t want Zarqawi dead.

All things considered, Zarqawi’s death is probably necessary (and one must consider who made it necessary). On the other hand, I don’t want him dead so much that I would finally pop the cork on the bottle of fine champagne I am saving for just the right moment. I’m not ecstatic about Zarqawi’s death as are some of the conservative pundits. Like Nick Berg’s father, Michael Berg, I take no pleasure in this death. Death is all sad. Even this one. The stories telling how death comes are all tragic. And the hundreds of years long saga of exploitation and corporate greed and frustration and resentment and anger and death and destruction and maiming and bleeding that brought us to Zarqawi’s death, one death among millions of similar deaths not as symbolically significant as his, is one of the saddest of all death songs.

And Zarqawi’s death will not bring the saga even one day closer to its end and may indeed lengthen the war as the administration argues, “We have turned a corner. We have passed a milestone. We are making progress.” So, we will stay a little longer. And after the next corner, beyond the next hideous corpse bloated with media mythology, we will remain a little longer. Gore Vidal puts it well: we are “[meandering] toward Armageddon” [1].

Following Zarqawi’s “extermination,” came on the Right a feeding frenzy of gleeful corpse stomping and gore wallowing. The covers of the New York Post and the Daily News pretty much summed it up. The Post ran a full cover of the same ghastly photo Snowjob used, with “GOTCHA!” at the top in three-inch block letters and a little cartoon speech balloon coming from Zarqawi’s pale lips, reading, “Warm up the virgins.” The Daily News carried a different and bloodier photo, topped with “SMOKED!” One must, I suppose, consider the source—and the audience. You see—unlike the Post’s audience, which is very much like the Fox News audience, like the audience of Ollie North (Ollie, where’s Stanley?), the audience of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Coulter, Malkin, and Liddy—I do not observe a war as though I were rooting at a football game or like a drunken hooligan at a soccer match.

So pardon me if I leave my pompons in the closet till next Super Bowl—if I impatiently leave my champagne (from France—with the “a” pronounced like “a” in “father”; y’all remember les français now, don’t ya?—them “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” that trapped Lord Cornwallis for our Founders at Yorktown) in the fridge till Chief Justice John Roberts must ironically gavel George W. Bush—the gangster who got him his job sitting up there on that austere dais almost as if he were looking down on us from a neocon Olympus—out of office as the very worst president of all time at his Senate impeachment conviction—“a consummation devoutly to be wished!” For there can no longer be any doubt: there is a great deal rotten in our state, and the king is indeed a "mildewed ear."

One wonders who in the White House was responsible for displaying in a “tasteful” gold frame the large photo of Zarqawi’s ghastly dead face for Snowjob’s press conference. Is it possible the genius considered that framing this morbid photo so “tastefully” lends it an air of permanence and elevates it to the level of art? According to CNN’s Carole Costello [June 8], the “ornate” frame might be used for a painting of flowers in a vase. (I love you for taking this risk, Carole!) Bush was said by the press to be solemn and subdued in his Rose Garden comments on the Zarqawi hit. But is there not just a little more than a teeny-weeny bit of gloating in that incongruous golden frame?

When Stephen Hadley told Bush about the slaying, Bush said (according to Snowjob), in his best Martha Stewart imitation, "That would be a good thing." Is it possible Bush has been boning up on Martha Stewart’s design ideas and has had Zarqawi’s photo so framed that he might hang it on the wall of the Oval Office next to Saddam’s pistol? Saddam’s pistol indeed! Would that the handgun were—one can readily imagine George Bush imagining, that is, if he had the capacity for imagining, in the finest ancient Mesopotamian Old Testament tradition—Saddam’s foreskin. In terms of Freudian psychosexual symbolism, especially since this story has so much to do with macho masculinity and the land of the Bible, reading the phallic handgun as the rival’s foreskin is not too far a stretch, is it?

Can’t you just see in your mind’s eye our cowboy, Commander in Thief cum Old Testament patriarchal potentate, taking the infamous Colt 1911 semi autoloader down now and again and looking over the sights at that implacable dead face, exclaiming explosively, “Bang! Bang! Bang! . . . Gotcha!”—and then blowing imaginary smoke off the barrel. All this occurring roughly where Monica got her dress stained. One can imagine this president deriving countless hours of entertainment from just such a pastime, can’t one? Especially after the infamous “codpiece” episode with el presidente, hombre machismo, traipsing in his specially tailored flight suit on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln with his, ahem, “package” so prominently displayed—subliminal priapic satisfaction for those of the religious right. “Mission Accomplished.” Cigarette, anyone?

While it is perhaps good that Abu Moussab al-Zarqawi’s fateful story may be finally over and he will no longer kill or order killings—that is, if he ever did order them and if he were not after all mostly a media creation—the truth is that this entire despicable episode concerns a big terrorist’s killing a little one—a big myth’s eating a little myth, in a media PR war of words and images in which realities like death are somehow secondary. We little everyday folks, after all, according to Paul Wolfowitz’s mentor Leo Strauss [scroll down to “Noble lies and deadly truths”], need our myths to keep us all happy and comfy and purchasing whatever our little hearts desire at Wal-Mart, while the Big Adult People do what they must to keep the military-industrial-governmental complex humming along. “It’s hard work!” And big terrorists like Bush and his corporatist regime need little terrorists like Zarqawi and Bin Laden to use as straw men to render their own despicable behavior heroic.

Notes:

1. Gore Vidal, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, p. 57.

Email Charles M. Ashley at scriblerus@psnw.com.

Copyright © 1998-2006 Online Journal