When You Wish Upon A Star...

Apologies for being out of touch for a while. First, there was a conference. Then, there was a series of deadlines for my job with Reader J (da Boss). Finally, there was the soul-sucking ennui of my purposeless existence, and the fuck-it-all attitude that periodically prevents me from doing my duty.

Fortunately, the rest of the world rolled merrily along, and from my lonely peak I observed the to-and-fro below, and drew my inferences. I have thoughts. I have opinions. I will now roll them out in a series of posts ushering in a new era of Bacondom.

Apparently, it's not nice to say that one wishes Dick Cheney had died in the attack on Bagram in Afghanistan. It's so not nice, in fact, that Arianna Huffington pulled down comments on the Huff Po expressing...well, strong disappointment. Strong and somewhat expletive-spiked disappointment. It was generally felt that it was bad behavior for liberals to speak desirously of the death of anyone, even the Dark Lord, and that it gave the Party a bad name. All the major bloggers weighed in, and even when they thought it was all a tempest in a teakettle, or, more acutely, rather hypocritical coming from the "kill the fags and torture the terrorists" wing of politics -- still, there was always a sentence beginning something like, "While I don't condone the comments...."

Well, all I can say is that if I'm going to hold the line on this, then Cheney is going to have to stop teasing me with these near death experiences. Today he has evidently developed a blood clot in his leg. A potentially dangerous blood clot. A potentially fatally dangerous blood clot of doom. What's a responsible liberal supposed to think? Bagram, or blood clot, or neither? Is it ever ok to root for the Veep to die?

Any student of the second world war has pondered the pivotal moment in July of 1944 when the Stauffenberg group very nearly assassinated Adolph Hitler. We even celebrate the people who nearly pulled this off -- this being the assassination of a sovereign ruler of a sovereign government. How many lives might have been saved had those bombs met their target! Regret, to the extent that it can be attached to such distant events, circles entirely around the failure of the attack rather than its essential immorality. There are times, we all know, when a death is a blessing. We don't like to say it; but it's true. So why can't we say it now?

The outcome of the Libby trial, however you want to parse it, boils down to the open acknowledgment that the VP's office went after Joe Wilson, and his wife, because of the VP's personal knowledge that the nuclear evidence on Iraq was thin to fraying point. It's not about outing a CIA agent -- treasonous though that is -- it's about the lies that got us into a war. A war in which over 3,000 Americans have died, and over 20,000 have been wounded, some so severely that they may as well have died. Shall we count Iraqi lives? Those numbers -- over 60,000 by a conservative estimate -- can be folded into the mix, if you're so inclined. But these things are done, and nothing that happens now is going to undo them; though they are certainly the source of the rage of the Huff Po commenters, they are not a sufficient justification for wishing the man dead now. After all, as all death penalty opponents know, vengeance is by definition not justice.

So here. I wish that Cheney had had a blood clot in his leg in the spring of 2002. I wish that, back then, that blood clot had broken loose and gone straight to his dark heart and killed him. Or -- why be fussy? -- at any time before the spring of '02. After that it's too late, the damage is done and that's that. That's the thing -- the Stauffenberg moment, the plot you want to succeed, is by definition always in the past. It's a form of nostalgia. To wish for such things in the current moment is to think that someone deserves to die for what they've already done, since what they will do is unknowable.

I think we can all be happy Cheney didn't die in Afghanistan, not because I like the man, but because I can't even bear to imagine the nationalist rhetoric we'd face in this country if a sitting vice president, however vampiric, were murdered by terrorists. If you think we're violating the Geneva conventions now, you would really not like the future. But as to my audacity to hope for the blood clot's potential success...well, that all depends on whether Cheney is going to convince Bush to bomb Iran, doesn't it?