The Daily Whine

I recently picked up an interesting-looking book while I was back in Singapore, hoping for a filler for the journey back to work (the waiting at the departure lounge, the flight, and the cab ride all the way back to the office, combine to waste more of my life than Lee Ang ever will). It’s called "Rouge State — A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower". There’s a helicopter on the cover, and a little red blurb that says "New Updated Edition", and on the back cover runs a few quotes and comments from reviewers, including these:

"William Blum (the author), once of the US State Department, gives a chilling reminder that while there may be no justification for 11 September, there may be reasons" — Mavis Cheek, Observer Books Of The Year

"Rouge State is a book of charges to be tied to a paving stone and thrown at the men in Washington" — Independent On Sunday

"Rouge State forcibly reminds us of Vice President Agnew’s immortal line: ‘The United States, for all its faults, is still the greatest nation in the country’" — Gore Vidal

That last one there got my attention. Greatest nation in the country? Intriguing phrase — got me wondering what the heck Vidal meant. So I bought the book.

Oh dear.

Midway through this, I’m beginning to feel a long tuft of wiry black hair growing from my chin, and I’ve developed an inexplicable urge to change my name to Minn Bin Lazing. If Rouge State was written in arabic script, I would have had problems leaving the airport.

Blum is shocking in his forceful accusations of US policy and the heinous ways it has built and maintained what he calls an empire. He lifts excerpts from what he claims to be US Army and CIA Training Manuals outlining SOPs for torture, interrogation and assasination. He lists the names of political allies around the world who have committed terrorist acts on their own civilians. He discusses the various weapons of mass destruction and chemical and bio weapons developed and used by the US and its allies. He recounts the instances in which the US has intervened in global politics since 1945, often covertly. If all his claims are true, this is a very scary piece of anti-US propaganda; a potential recruitment tool for leftists everywhere looking to justify any kind of retailiation against the US.

The problem is, he’s awfully convincing to the layman (that’s me). I cannot help but recoil at his claims and feel an immensely sickening sense of dread at the state of FUBAR we’re living in.

I’ve been impressed by Thomas Barnett’s take on global politics and why US intervention in theaters such as the Middle East is necessary. But Blum’s treatise throws me off quite a bit because so much of what he claims is in fact the exact opposite of what I want to believe in — that progressive thinkers, not cold war dinosaurs, military industrialists and far-right capitalists, are really the ones  shaping US policy.

Big WOW. Highly recommend checking it out if you’ve got a flight into Jakarta.

There was a similar moment of surreal disbelief for me a couple of weeks back, when May and I went to check out this bookstore near Dharmawangsa Square after brunch. One of my colleagues had mentioned to me there was a new Bookstore-cum-Cafe opening up round the corner from the mall, in the same vein as Ak’sara (which I love since it caters to english readers).

We walked in and froze. Everything inside was in arabic script, and the girls manning the store wore traditional white ‘tudungs’ (the cloth that conservative muslim women wear to cover their heads). The store was very clean, very cosy, but it clearly wasn’t for a bunch of expatriates who could barely ask if anyone spoke english. I took walked around the store once and sure enough, not a single english text around — everything had arabic script.

And then they put on some french music.

That totally un-nerved the two of us. We made some excuse and hurried out. I felt like I had stepped into something straight out of The Battle of Algiers. If I looked hard enough, I probably would have found Blum’s book translated into arabic.

Sometimes, sometimes I really don’t mind the sanctuary of McDonalds.