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Life Arts    H4'ed 10/24/21

Book Review: The American Way: Stories of Invasion

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book cover: The American Way (Comma Press, 2021)
book cover: The American Way (Comma Press, 2021)
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Invasions of Empire and the Masquerade Ball of Language

by John Kendall Hawkins

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

- George Orwell, 1984

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, but in these relativistic days of post-Truth reality (whatever that means), many of us have taken to writing in its shadow, or in the vacated location of its last known appearance. Creative Non-fiction is big now. It's very big with the MSM, especially with its Tales of Yankee Power (as the Bard of Duluth would put it) coming from anonymous sources in unnamed highly placed positions, usually the Intelligence Community (IC). It's John le Carre' all the time now. Fiction and truth just aren't that far apart any more in events that matter -- if they ever were. That's what postmodernism was all about after all: It all depends on who controls the narrative.

The reader will probably remember Abbottabad 2011, the bin Laden raid, the showdown. Obama's Counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, telling the pressthat Navy SEALs had been in a firefight with UBL, and that "while bin Laden had vowed to go down fighting, in his last moments alive the master terrorist hid behind a woman." As if anticipating criticism for killing the one guy who might have known about future 9/11s, Brennan added that UBL would have been taken had they been able to. He soon walked these details back. A video feed of the raid was said to have gone awry, leaving the narrative to hearsay accounts, and soon several different versions of what happened at the 'showdown' were reported. SEALs reached out to the public, 60 Minutes interviewed raiders, the "journalistic" Zero Dark Thirty was made, with the "cooperation" of the White House. There was even the local Pakistani media coverage that told a different tale. But it's still uncertain what actually took place that early morning in Abbottabad.

But there's another version of those events, KBL--Kill Bin Laden: A Novel Based on True Events by novelist John Weisman, which maintains close access to SEAL team members and Weisman, a writer praised by Seymour Hersh, has written about them before. Some facts can only be related as fiction rather than fact, and are truer as a result. In KBL, Weisman gives an account of 'what actually happened' at Abbottabad that is disturbing and riveting. SEALs coming up the staircase, facing UBL's slightly ajar door, we get:

One round had hit just above the left eye. His head must have been turned toward the shooter because it exited out behind the right ear, taking a fair amount of skull and brain matter with it. Between the green light and the Ranger's night-vision equipment, the blood and brain goo registered black. But that wasn't all. The shock and kinetic energy had ballooned the head itself so it looked almost hydrocephalic...

Of course, the MSM is not likely, in their anal-licktickle kowtowance, to report such glee. For all the horror of Wikileaks's depiction of a war crime in "Collateral Murder," little commentary has addressed the laughter of gunners on board the shooting choppers.

Weisman is even self-conscious, seemingly taking the mickey out of the Press for what it leaves out. Here, Weisman continues with the 'showdown' and comments, journalistically, on its eventual perception:

Whoa, Crankshaft'd [bin Laden had] taken a wholesome burst dead-center mass. Four, maybe five, maybe more rounds. Turned most of his chest cavity into squishy, bloody colored jelly. Faint fecal scent told the Ranger maybe they'd even nicked the colon. No way Washington was going to admit to any of that. The Ranger made himself a bet that the official report would read something to the effect of one round to the chest and one round to the head.

This is exactly how it was reported, early on, in the MSM. The same ABC report citing Brennan above added: "Bin Laden was shot twice, once in the head and once in the chest, a senior administration official told ABC News." Oy.

In The American Way: Stories of Invasion (Comma Press, 2021) edited by Ra Page and Orsola Casagrande, the narrative of 'what really happened' is explored by presenting 20 known US military incursions into the sovereignty of other nations -- first, in the form of fictional stories, followed by an Afterword for each story that is more traditionally journalistic and politically analytical. The stories are conveniently presented in chronological order: Iran, 1953; Congo, 1961; Cuba, 1961; South Africa, 1962; Canada, 1963; Vietnam, 1967; Italy, 1969; Turkey, 1971; Chile, 1973; El Salvador, 1981; Guatemala, 1982; Grenada, 1983; Nicaragua, 1986; Kurdistan, 1999; Afghanistan, 2001-2021; Colombia, 2002; Iraq, 2004; Gaza, 2007; Libya, 2011; and, Pakistan, 2008-16. We're reminded that this list is the tip of the iceberg, but, even so, demonstrates a level of bellicosity toward the world, a posture of conditioned and doctrinaire-y privilege, that has taken up some 75 years of post-WW2 threat. What do "we" have to show for it?

In the introduction to The American Way, the editors seek to have the reader consider the tales to follow in the light of the shiftiness of language. This is a phenomenon that is both the proverbial curse and the blessing of meaning. I recall T.S. Eliot complaining (as if, right?) about its imprecision:

Words strain,

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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