Opinion

The Ripper is no Gipper

By Randall Carter Gray
Online Journal Contributing Writer

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October 26, 2005—With All Saints Day approaching (and the night before it that I've come to loathe, i.e., All Hallows Eve or Halloween), I'm inclined once again to reflect on how stupid evil must be to believe it can dress itself up as good and somehow get by without anyone noticing it.

What it is that has triggered this latest reflection on the mind of evil and the evil mind is a president who, despite the misery he has caused with his imperialistic adventure in Babylon's backyard, persists in likening the empire-building war in Iraq to the "winning" of the Cold War.

Evil is too stupid to know that it has no good reason to be proud of itself. In fact, evil is positively eaten up with pride, so much so that it in turn deflects guilt, when guilt is evermore warranted. I believe clinicians call that anti-social behavior or sociopathy. The psychological malady that O.J. Simpson suffers from. It's the evil that fuels the criminal mind, the flawed rationalistic thinking that allows the serial killer to delude himself that killing prostitutes or other throwaway surplus lives is doing society a favor.

You know, Jack the Ripper kind of stuff.

Wasn't the Ripper supposed to have been a member of Parliament or some kind of duke or something; someone possessing some elevated status that afforded him the cloak of propriety that he needed to continue his dastardly fiendish acts without getting nabbed?

I lived and worked for a year in the Near East, mostly in Egypt and Ethiopia, where wars—civil, cold and not so cold—were under way in the early '70s. My experience overseas of living and working among American servicemen—most of whom served in base-support capacities and not in intelligence field work as I did—and interacting daily with the nationals, the local people who were my hosts, gave me an education that I would not trade for a million bucks. Seriously. It is this education that enables me now to know an Ugly American when I see one, and, which makes the 100,000-plus and counting civilian deaths in Iraq so repugnant. Not to mention the thousands of allied casualties.

Although many of the military personnel I served with were often no more than hoods and hicks seeking to escape jail time (although some had been drafted, like me), once all of us got overseas on the home turf of the frail, often-impoverished Africans, who cooked our food, transported us, did our laundry, got us drunk and laid, these commoners from America suddenly became kings . . . and tyrannical ones. It was nothing for many American servicemen in Africa to kick or slap or otherwise verbally abuse an African of any age or gender. And if you want to talk atrocities, which some vets swear never happened overseas during this era, I worked with a chap for whom a night of fun was getting drunk, driving his jeep down the back streets, which were no more than dirt roads, and terrorizing the locals.

His fun finally came to an end (or a peak) when he lopped the head off of a young Ethiopian girl with a wooden boat paddle, as he sped by in his jeep.

You know, Jack the Ripper kind of stuff.

It was funny for this guy, who was a hell of a Morse code operator, until the Ethiopian people in that village rose up, identified this little monster and demanded justice. Needless to say, shenanigans like this by the Ugly few (or perhaps they were in the majority) complicated things for the other hundred or so military personnel attached to this remote U.S. installation in East Africa. When the Americans packed up and left in 1974, after the Soviet Union had replaced the United States as Ethiopia's superpower sugar-daddy, the nationals were angry, and there was some violence and gunfire, because we were taking our money with us, which meant the end of their economy, more or less, but our hosts were still glad as hell to see us go.

Ugly Americans, I've come to realize, are too proud and stupid to know that there is a world out there beyond the borders and shores of the United States. Consequently, they're anti-social, arrogant sociopaths (or budding ones), the devil's most willing ambassadors. (Or do-gooder, condescending missionaries.) What's an African girl's death, or an Iraqi girl's death, or thousands of them, if the cause is just and our side just needs to let off a little steam . . . in the cause of democracy and freedom?

For all the religious posturing this president and his supporters do, the poor nationals, I could tell, had truly been walking with God since they were children. Hunger does that. That's why missionary work that is all talk and little monetary support (except for the missionary who needs a job) is a load of crap.

Somehow, some Americans believe that since they have a Wal-Mart superstore or two in their community and jobs and money to shop with, that this distinction makes them superior and better than people who eat spicy beans and goat and sponge bread three times a day. America doesn't make Americans superior . . . it makes them superficial. Give me humble, common people who eat goat and drink dirty water to be my friends, because I found these people to be the most charming, gentle, kind and genuinely delightful and happy people I've ever known.

And they bleed and hurt, make love, give birth and die just like every other child of God on earth.

The late Ronald Reagan was a flag-waver, with a tendency to be superficial and childlike, although he was a masterful orator. He, like most or all American neocons or old-school-cons (or just plain cons), believed the homeless people who slept on sewer grates to catch the warm steam in the winter months actually preferred living this way. Many of the homeless, by the way, are veterans who have nearly drunk themselves to death, in their loneliness and despair, never quite ever fitting in when they came back from overseas. I know that feeling. Fortunately for me, I had a little more to come back to.

But as clueless at times and as tough talking as Reagan could be, he was a gentle man, with firm convictions, and I believe he was honest . . . as politicians and actors go.

The current president, whose grand imperial scheme should be no secret now to anyone who is paying attention, recently spoke at the Reagan library in California—in which he compared himself and his "war on terr'r" to the fall of communism (which, by the way, is making a comeback). But of course "terr'r" is a relative term. Had the president spent his years serving in the military during the Vietnam War era overseas in third-world countries, as I and many others did, he would perhaps know that poor "fer'ners"—innocent men, women and children—experience "terr'r" just as anyone else with a heart and a brain does. And with this broader world view, the president would know that no loss of overseas civilian life—or military life, for that matter—would be worth "stabilizing" the Middle East and eventually opening new markets for American contractors and globalists (i.e., New World Order cons).

Reagan told his Soviet counterpart to "tear down" the Berlin Wall. And it happened, because that president at least had a moral platform from which to speak. Not one U.S. tank did or could have done what a moral American president can do with words. Statesmanship, integrity, gravitas . . . not bullets and bravado . . . is what we need in a president.

The Ripper in the White House is no Ronald Reagan. And neither was his father, as it turns out, New World Order con that he also is.

It's spooky as hell—and apocalyptic, in my view—that the Ripper thinks he can dress up as the Gipper for Halloween . . . and no one will notice. It's spooky as hell—and also apocalyptic—that so many Americans won't notice a thing.