The Age of Incompetence: Part XIV

"They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks, except about the anus: which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend them as they sat on the ground...Upon the whole I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal."
Jonathan Swift, - Gulliver's Travels (describing Yahoos)

PLZEN Returning to America after a two year absence had a peculiar effect on the senses. I wondered if Swift's Gulliver had much the same sensation during his travels. You might recall Gulliver landed on several islands and on each found beings of various sizes and shapes from the small Lilliputans to the giants of Brobdingnag to the loathsome Yahoos

The community where I come from in America is physically and economically unlike almost any other in the United States. Physically it is set apart from the great urbanized areas of Seattle-Tacoma and is a long drive up the Columbia River away from cosmopolitan Portland. A long chain of mountains runs from British Columbia, all the way into California where they become the Sierra Nevada, divides the state into a wet and dry side sheltering my side from the Pacific rains and the land is parched and sun drenched. With dams built on the Columbia it became a kind of oasis where fruit orchards flourished and later wine vineyards became second only to California in production.

But the reason for the modern day existence of this community in the desert is the decision by the U.S. Government in 1943 to locate part of the secret Manhattan Project to what was then a wasteland. There were virtually no people to re-locate, only two sleepy towns along the banks of the Columbia River, Pasco, a railroad hub, and Kennewick, a farm town which appeared to be transported from some prairie in Kansas or Nebraska with its only prominent building a grain elevator.

Overnight a new town was created called Richland to house the 50,000 or so workers on the secret plants who were bussed, trained, and driven from all corners of America to live in the Quonset huts out on the sun baked, wind swept desert. On August 6, 1945 with the dropping of Little Boy, the first atomic bomb, over Hiroshima the secret was out.

Groves Little Boy

General Groves Little Boy

General Leslie Groves of the Army commanded the whole project. Groves was a big, bluff, rotund man who was said to like ice cream so much he kept some in a refrigerator in his office, and brooked no counter opinions about his management. After the war Richland and Hanford flourished because of the Cold War and the Russian threat. By the time I was a teenager on the other side of the river in Pasco I wondered what kind of people lived in houses that looked all the same in a town built and owned by the U.S. Government. I learned they were middle class, secure, and prosperous. Even the janitors who worked out in the secret plants made more money than our teachers or even our town mayor.

All three towns merged years ago into one, but have kept their original names. As a teenager there was a single high school in each town, today there are eight high schools. The economic recession which has crippled much of the rest of America and left millions without jobs, homes, or hope has barely touched this community in a remote corner of America. Here one can see people driving Hummers and solitary women parking gigantic vehicles to grocery shop, as if the gasoline spike that stunned much of America only months before never happened.

This community of nearly 200,000 is prosperous today because of the cleanup by the U.S. Government of the radioactive waste from World War II and the Cold War era. The government spends hundreds of millions of dollars here each year in this cleanup. It buffers the area from feeling the pain of the recession that other Americans feel. The cleanup will go on for years.

The local newspaper, The Tri-City Herald, reflects a thinking that differs from the rest of Washington State. Washington State is dominated by a Democratic Governor, two Democratic U.S. Senators and most of its representatives in Congress are Democrats. But not here. Here I counted on one hand the times the local newspaper printed an editorial by a moderate or liberal writer; all were staunch Republicans and conservative. Its single representative in Congress is a Republican.

Still, I was not prepared one morning early in July to pick up the local paper and find an editorial written by John Yoo. Yoo gained fame and notoriety by being the author of the infamous Bush Administration torture document which explained that it "can't be considered torture unless the prisoner loses a body organ or dies." I am quite sure Josef Goebbles and Heinrich Himmler and countless Soviet apparatchiks would nod their heads in agreement with Yoo. But one would not expect to see them writing editorials lecturing about the fine points of law in an American newspaper. At the end of his epistle Yoo was identified only as, "A columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a former Bush administration Justice Department official." Yes, and Herr Goebbles was just a hard working clerk in the Ministry of Information.

All this without winking. But it is illustrative of America as a whole in the ninth year of the 21st century because this is not the only region of America where there is a slice of the population that seems to have been lifted from the pages of Gulliver's Travels. That is,
Yahoos are not merely fictional creatures from Jonathan Swift's pen. During the summer American television featured Yahoos attending town hall meetings which were supposed to be about health care reform. But Yahoos showed up at these meetings with guns strapped to their hips as if they were in the wild west of 1860. They carried signs of Pres. Obama with Hitler's mustache, some carried signs accusing him of being a communist. They shouted down anyone who voiced a differing opinion. One of the Yahoos actually shouted at Pres. Obama during a speech in Congress that he was a liar loud enough to be heard throughout the hall. All that for wanting to help all Americans enjoy basic health care, which all the rest of the industrialized world already enjoys. Such a revolutionary idea!

These same Yahoos were oddly silent when George Bush blew his inherited budget surplus for tax cuts, the same Clinton-Gore plan that would have put the U.S. out of debt in the year 2009! They were silent when Bush sent American soldiers into Iraq on a giant lie about weapons of mass destruction and put the cost of it on the credit card of our children. They were silent about revelations of torture and kidnapping. They were silent about the rape of the Constitution of illegal wiretapping of U.S. Citizens. But health care for the poor and impoverished among us? That's unthinkable to the Yahoos.

Swift is needed to write another Modest Proposal to describe these American Yahoos. They are not merely British Tories of the stripe that raped Ireland for hundreds of years, they are willing to rape their own countrymen. When Heinrich Heine said, "Those who begin by burning books end by burning people," he could well have written, "Those who do not object to torturing those considered aliens, will end up approving of torturing their countrymen as well."

The proof of that is at hand in America and the re-appearance of the Yahoos, the direct descendents of the Brown Shirts.