consumptive fantasies

Once again, my naivité has allowed me to become engaged in conversations that most people would ignore...

I was in Toronto today to see the Massive Change exhibition at the AGO - a separate post will give some of my opinions on that. I exited and composed my thoughts, as any good bullshit artist should do, while I walked to Yonge St. My particular reveries of a solitary walker led me down University ave, and past the American consulate, where an anti-US protest was underway. The issue was of course American involvement in Iraq, with a particular regard for the atrocities currently being committed against Muslims in the area.

So I’m paying attention to the guy with the megaphone, who proved himself a less than capable motivational speaker, when I catch up to a woman in her mid-thirties responding to her young son’s questions about the protest. Since I’m a nosey bastard, I couldn’t help but overhear.

“...why we had to go there. People in Iraq were being murdered, and now they can begin to experience freedom and start building their lives again.” Before I could respond she rattled off “I support the president. I voted for the president,” to which I had to ask which one she was referring, as there were several thousand presidents in the world, and that the one which leads her country should not be referred to as “the president”. That semantic game went nowhere fast.

Again, I’m a nosey bastard, so I asked her what freedoms she felt came from a military occupation. “Well, we ended all of the rapes that were happening.” was one of her many answers, along with the threat of WMD and the rest of the line items we all heard from the American government in 2003.

Interestingly enough, none of the people of Iraqi descent who I have met ever complained about the widespread rape problem.

She told both me and her kid that “Some wars are good.” The kid replied “So guns can do good things?” to which she said “Sometimes you have to kill bad guys to get things right.”

I asked her if she thought all 100,000 civilians that the Lancet estimates have been killed by the US invasion to have been bad people; Iraq might ultimately see the good to come of such barbarity, under the terms of her own logic.

“Fewer people have died from this war than did in Vietnam. We’re doing a better job.” Using one barbaric imperialist war to justify the ontology of another is indeed the way to go on this one...

Anyhoo, I told her kid to look it up for himself on the internet, as while his mother might love him very much, she might not have all the facts about American foreign actions. That pissed her off, and she quickly disappeared into a random office supply store which I’m sure had exactly that which she needed.

Still, I wasn’t really satisfied.

Going back to the American consulate, I began to talk to the few dozen Americans sitting out front watching the protest across the street. Here’s the stats:

12/15 people I talked to thought that Iraq possessed nuclear arms technology, which has been proven false by every reputable source, including the CIA.

7/15 thought that Canada had sent troops to Iraq to fight alongside America, which it did not.

3/15 thought that widespread raping and murdering occurred while Saddam Hussein was in power, which contradicts what most international observers and Iraqis themselves have ever reported; you can see some results for yourself here.



13/15 thought that America was right to invade a country and impose “freedom”. [As of this writing, with Operation Lightning we are about to witness the largest deployment of security forces in Bagdad since the war began. The city is being cordoned off from the exterior, and is being cut into several security sections along the lines of the ghetto projects of the second world war. Let’s hope this is a better event than it looks to be.]

7/15 thought that Muslim extremism was caused by the tenets of the religion, and could not be overcome. Interestingly enough, 6/7 of those people, when asked about the dangers of Christian extremism, did not believe such a thing to be possible.

9/15 thought that violence can solve more problems than it creates, when used “effectively”. I almost got punched by 4/15 people when I asked if the individuals who caused the 9/11 tragedy had a justification to their actions, from their point of view.

And here I was thinking that the Americans who were visiting Canada were the enlightened ones who wanted to get away from their despotic leader. Looks like the election of 2004 really did provide a legitimate mandate to the intentions of the White House.