I keep forgetting to mention this. A few weeks ago, at the mall I frequent for end-lot clothing and remaindered books (it’s not officially a discount mall, but the only stores worth a damn there are clearance houses), I was approached by a marketing research clip-board teen.
I’m not averse to these people. Unlike telephone solicitors, marketing research people will often pay for your opinion. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve been paid as much as $125 for two hours of focus group time on the subject of office stationary (this was in 1997 and at a time when the money was badly needed, and I’m still ‘for rent’ to pretty much anyone willing to pay $62.50 an hour plus refreshments for me to gas on about what I do and don’t like).
I got (if memory serves) $20 for an hour of my opinion on convenience store fountain drinks.
Regrettably, this clip-board brandishing teen didn’t turn out to be offering money. Random positive reinforcement is a vital part of Pavlovian templates, so I’m bound to get suckered out of a few minutes of my life for free in exchange for the times when I get overcompensated for mouthing off.
What this kid did was take me back to a booth where, after filling out my demographic vitals, he showed me the trailers for a movie called ‘Jarhead.’ According to a newspaper ad I saw this weekend, it wasn’t a bad joke, the movie is actually playing.
I get as pissed off as right wing radio talk show hosts at disingenuous conspiracy theorists like Michael Moore, but I don’t think its any improvement when Hollywood recruits Jamie Foxx and other vaguely familiar looking actors for what amounts to a two-hour Marine Corps propaganda flick. As far as I could tell from the trailer, it’s a Desert Storm glory movie, apparently in an effort to cast the occupation of Iraq in the limelight of glamour by representing it in the context of a separate war.
Okay, some would say it’s the same war continued. But I have serious questions about whether the rulers of Kuwait are much of an improvement over the average in the region. The general rule in that area of the world is totalitarian regimes with any valuable resources (petroleum, jewels, Palestinians) nationalized by the ruling party and exploited for whatever profit they will yield in a manipulated market.
OPEC is the kind of anti-competitive organization (similar to the Medellin Cartel and Big Tobacco) that deserves to be disrupted. That said, it’s something the state is uniquely unqualified to disrupt effectively, as the state is also an anti-competitive organization.
But disrupted how? And at what cost? King Bush I was mainly afraid (as were many other political entities) that too much oil would be under one thumb. Even if Iraq could claim a rightful stake in Kuwaiti oil, and even if Saddam had been Daddy Warbucks instead of Daddy War-Lord, it’s scary enough to the CEOs of the Fortune 500 that Saudi Arabia’s abortion of a government controls such a huge amount of petrol. The thought of the pool of potential members of OPEC coming down by one was too much to bear. The U.S. could (if countries existed in vacuums) sustain its own energy needs for some time. Might have to piss off the hippies and tap ANWAR, or Mississippi (hippies prefer protecting Alaska, even if Mississippi is a bigger problem in ‘real’ terms). But we’d be okay. Really, it’s Europe and Japan that needs Middle-East oil, but as Europe and Japan are de-facto American colonies, we treat them as the 51st state and declare their interest our ‘national interest’ (read: the interests of global corporations based in the NYSE).
We buried John Wayne a long time ago; buried Ron Reagan long after he could do better than deliver cribbed notes about the doctor’s who patched him up after Hinkley’s Hijinks. But we still make war movies to glorify the most armored, lowest paying form of gangsterism. For that matter, with a gang membership, you at least put your life on the line for the elusive (and dubious) reward of wealth, instead of the ridiculous reward of a coffin draped with a silly flag.
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