THE WEEKLY SCREED, 29 October 2007

Fighting war — with war!
by David Benjamin

GREAT NECK, N.Y.— The recent veto, by compassionate conservative President George W. Bush, of “S-Chip” health care funding for poor kids seemed to me needlessly cruel — notwithstanding this administration’s fondness for things like torture and concentration camps. Luckily, I gained fresh perspective on Bush’s bold stroke from my inside source in Washington, a rodentoid file-thief known only by the name Kafka.

Standing behind a pillar in a parking ramp, Kafka whispered to me, “It’s not cruelty, man; it’s altruism. The president has a Top Secret plan to bestow free, high-quality health care upon every child on earth. The S-Chip veto was the first salvo in George Bush’s Global War on Children’s Health (GWOCH).”

Bush, explained Kafka, has realized that the only way to truly help sick children is to launch a worldwide campaign to make billions of suckling infants, helpless tots, innocent toddlers and cuddly tykes deathly ill and dangerously contagious. “In the Global War on Children’s Health, we have to treat each sick baby as if it were Osama bin Laden,” said Kafka, expressing the Bush Doctrine. “Hunt ‘em down, round ‘em up, take ‘em out!”

I confessed that I failed to grasp how attacking helpless children could possibly improve their health.

“Don’t be silly,” said Kafka. “This works because it’s a war we can’t help but lose. Look at the record, kid! Every time the White House announces a Global War on Something, it ends up totally ass-kicked. Take the War on Poverty — please! Is poverty gone? Hell no! It’s rampant. It’s so bad that today, if a politician suggests he wants to reduce poverty, what happens? We laugh the poor dumb slob off the podium!”

Kafka kept going. “And the War on Drugs? Drugs won! In fact, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is such a fiasco that it’s contributing to our humiliation in the Global War on Drugs (GWOD). Look at Afghanistan — where we launched the War on Terror. It now exports so much raw opium that worldwide heroin prices have collapsed. School kids who previously had to knock over a 7-11 to buy smack can now afford to score a nickel bag with an actual nickel! Before the War on Drugs, we didn’t have designer steroids, Ecstasy or rohypnol. And speed made the biggest comeback since George Foreman! Drugs never had it so good.”

Kafka traced the concept of abstract war to President Lyndon Johnson, who in 1963 inherited a war, in Vietnam, against an enemy — world communist hegemony — that nobody could really find, in Southeast Asia or anywhere else. Vietnam was the first Global War on Bad Karma. Influenced subconsciously by the futility of Vietnam, LBJ then launched the War on Poverty, which was lost the day it was announced. Poverty, after all, isn’t the sort of enemy that responds to metaphorical combat.

“However,” said Kafka, “LBJ’s absurd declaration of hostilities against an eternal tragedy of the human condition was such a daring gesture that it became a permanent item of White House propaganda. Since LBJ, hardly any president has missed the chance to unsheath his rhetorical Hobbit-sticker and declare war on Mordor.”

Kafka said that Bush has taken LBJ’s sterling example one step beyond.

“In the past, we waged war against bad things over which good intentions and mortal intervention have absolutely no power,” said Kafka. “The Bush Doctrine is the policy equivalent of reverse psychology. Why not — instead — wage global war against the highest hopes and impossible dreams of humanity, thus triggering a worldwide revulsion that just might make those fantasies come true?”

The logic of the GWOCH suddenly came clear. If the U.S. government, led by Bush — the most universally detested president in history — announces its mission to infect little children with malaria and TB, cholera, typhus and AIDS, the world will literally declare war on American policy. Nations will leap to the aid of a vast population of sickly innocents who — until Bush horned in— they had previously left to die hideously next to reeking streams of raw sewage.

“It turns out,” said Kafka, “that the Centers for Disease Control has a secret viral stockpile of smallpox, plague and polio. The Pentagon’s going to spread it all over Africa with crop-dusters, Cruise missiles and, if necessary, suitcase bombs!”

Kafka and I agreed. If the world’s bumbling superpower undertakes to make them sick, the world’s poor kids are likely to get healthier — just as druglords thrived from War on Drugs, just as the poor got poorer in the War on Poverty, and just as terrorists — who now have their own cable channel — have flourished in the War on Terror.

As Bush’s anti-children’s crusade unfolds, guerrilla movements will spring up to inoculate kids, provide pre-natal care to mothers, swaddle every needy family in mosquito nets and build free clinics from East L.A. to East Timor. America’s once-selfish middle-class will rise up against government oppression. They’ll march. They’ll write to Congress. They’ll volunteer as candy-stripers. As the Bush regime escalates the war, by contaminating baby formula and tripling drug prices, the world will counter-attack. Hugo Chavez will divert Venezuela’s oil wealth to buy free drugs from Canada. Cuba will send doctors and nurses to Darfur and Detroit. As George Bush stands firm and resolute, squandering America’s wealth, in a Global War Against Children’s Health, an equally resolute world will finally get around to taking care of its children.

Kafka said, “Bush will pass on his secret Plan for Sickness Unto Death to subsequent presidents, as a blueprint for future abstract wars. Unless something goes terribly right, Americans can look forward to eventually losing the Global War on Public Education, the Global War on Global Cooling and, finally, the defeat to end all defeats— the Global War on Peace.”