Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

by John Scalzi

  Then World War I, and the discovery by nurses that a super-absorbent type of cellulose fiber designed to bandage soldiers also made an excellent menstrual pad (blood is blood). Kimberly-Clark, the makers of the cellulose bandages, decided to market the pads, and thus Kotex was born. And almost died, when it was discovered that women of the time were so mortified at the concept of asking their pharmacists for menstrual pads that they would rather go without. Finally, someone came up with the concept of the “honor box”—A woman could discreetly go to a box, drop in a nickel, take the pad (in an unmarked box) and walk away as if nothing ever happened. Clearly this is a far cry from today, in which women are shown on television celebrating the existence of “wings.”

  Commercial tampons followed the introduction of the pads in the 20s and 30s, though there was some trial and error: Not only did the first tampons not have applicators (that wasn’t standard equipment until 1936), some of them didn’t even have strings. I’m cringing just thinking about it. The manufacturers were apparently also blissfully unaware of the bacterial danger of leaving a tampon in too long; the copy of one early tampon box notes that one wearer left hers in for 48 hours with no ill effects. One wonders if it was the 49th hour that killed her.

  Not all feminine hygiene products were of such utility and usefulness. As with so many other products women use, some feminine hygiene products seem designed specifically to intimate to a woman that walking around in a natural state is tantamount to scaring babies and dogs. Specifically, I’m referring to feminine odor products, in which the menstrual oder is played up to be the closest thing to raw sewage that ever came out of a person’s body, and never mind the actual raw sewage located one orifice south.

  One memorable 1948 ad shows a husband stalking out the door while the wife cowers in a chair, weeping. “Why Does She Spend Her Evenings Alone?” the ad asks. The answer: Because she’s stinky. You know what I’m saying here (although the putative solution—Lysol, of all things—hardly seems much better; if ever there was a place for “minty not medicine-y,” this is it). The irony of this is that in 18th Century France, for one, menstrual odor was thought to be seductive, “impregnated with subtle vapors transmitted by the essence of life,” according to a commentator of the time. This assessment has to be tempered by the fact we’re talking both about the 18th Century (as stench-filled a century as there’s ever been) and France, a place full of underbathed people who regularly eat cheeses that smell like gangrenous feet. Still, the point is yet in evidence: Normal menstrual odor is not nearly the worst thing to come out of one’s body.

  Odor products aside, feminine hygiene products allowed women more control of their bodies, and as an extension, more control of their lives. This is something to which most hygiene products don’t aspire; most hygiene products merely make you cleaner. And while there’s nothing wrong with that (quite the opposite, in fact), in the race for the millennium’s best hygienic products, there’s really no contest. So, three cheers for the tampon and the sanitary pad.

  And now, you’ll excuse me. I need to go and shiver uncontrollably for a couple of hours. I’m just a man, after all.

  TORTURE

  A German reader who was appalled at my suggestion last December that we make Saddam Hussein spend of the rest of his life in a box into which videotaped depositions of the victims of his regime were streamed endlessly (he thought it would be torture, whereas I would be more inclined to call it karmic justice), wanted to know what I thought about the US treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

  Well, in no uncertain terms: It is shameful. But more than that, it very simply marks the moment at which I believe the United States has unequivocally lost the larger war for the future of Iraq and of the Middle East, the war, if you will, of the hearts and minds of the Iraqis and of those of good will in the region. Whether one believes that deposing Saddam was a good thing or not, our armed forces have given the enemies of the United States the evidence they need to posit a moral equivalence between us and him, regardless of whether it is true. We have no one to blame for this but ourselves: If one does not wish to be compared to a brutal dictator who crushed and tortured the Iraqi people, one should not, in fact, crush and torture Iraqis in that brutal dictator’s most infamous prison.

  We tortured Iraqis, and the impassioned appeals that such treatment is not representative of our nation’s ideals is utterly beside the point. Those people writing about how noble it was for us to quickly own up to our failings gloss over the salient fact that we have something we need to own up to. Everyone who wants credit for everything we’ve done right in Iraq fails to appreciate that you can’t get credit for doing a bunch of little things right if the things you get wrong are so goddamned spectacular. It’s nice that people are sending toys and school supplies to Iraq. But plush toys and pencils are no match for pictures of US soldiers setting dogs upon naked, cowering Iraqis. It’s not even close.

  There’s a word for this sort of thing: Incompetence, and that word sticks to just about everything this current administration has done in Iraq from the moment our forces stabbed into Baghdad. The military offensive was bold and brilliantly done; the occupation of the country has been utterly abysmal, and everything about it seems to have been designed to squander what good will we accrued by freeing the country from Saddam’s grip. This could have been a “good war”—not an easy war—had our administration showed some indication that it actually cared what happened to Iraq and the people within it once Saddam was kicked out of power. But it didn’t, and to a large extent still doesn’t—which is not entirely surprising to me since I personally never believed that George Bush had any interest in invading Iraq except to avenge his father. I had hoped that those around him might show some evidence of long-term thinking once Dubya’s limited objective had been accomplished, but I guess I was wrong about that.

  I’m still not sorry we went in and got rid of Saddam—it was an action too long in coming. But everything since then has been nothing short of a disaster; Abu Ghraib is not an exception but the end result of systematic incompetence that plagues the entire enterprise. The abuse and torture the Iraqi prisoners suffered is the fruit of lack of forethought, lack of planning, lack of intent, and lack of care. To put it bluntly, this simply wouldn’t have happened if those at the top of the food chain actually gave a shit about Iraq. But they don’t. Dubya stopped caring the instant they flushed Saddam out of his bug hole; everything since then as been (literally) killing time until we can bug out and claim some sort of moral victory. Well, Abu Ghraib robbed us of that.

  Who is responsible? Well, there certainly seems to be enough blame to go around, doesn’t there. Those at the top didn’t care or didn’t want to know or at the very least seem more annoyed that the truth is out there than they are by the fact of the torture itself. Depending on who you believe, those at the bottom were either untrained to serve as prison guards and left without real supervision or instruction, or they were following orders from above which explicitly condoned torture. One is malignant neglect, the other is simply evil. It all stinks, from head to tail, and it seems unlikely to me that anyone is going to come away clean.

  Personally, what I wish were that it were November so I could cast my vote and register my disgust with this current administration, which in this as in nearly every other thing it has done has shown little but contempt for anyone and anything that is not of its own narrow ilk. Bush and his people are staggeringly bad at their jobs—they are so bad that even their good ideas rot and fester as soon as they are taken out of the bag. This is what you get when the President of the United States is a man who has a level of self-introspection that is best described as canine, and whose cadre of cronies appear outraged at the idea that they can and should be held accountable for their actions (or lack thereof).

  This is the worst president and administration since I’ve been alive—yes, even worse than Nixon, because as paranoid and bad as he was, some of his administrative policies did mo
re good than harm. Nixon was a criminal, but he wasn’t an incompetent. It’s rather terrifying to say that I’d prefer a competent criminal in the Oval Office to the contemptuous incompetent who is in there now. But there it is. As I’ve said before, Bush isn’t the worst president ever—Buchanan, Harding and (probably) Grant are ahead of him in the queue—but if someone else wants to be the worst president of the 21st century, he or she is really going to have to work at it.

  Abu Ghraib is a defining image of the incompetence, contemptuousness and stupidity of this administration; if it eventually helps boot Bush from office, then some good may come from it. I’m sure that the more agitated Bush supporters will try to find a way to make a parallel between Abu Ghraib and the Madrid Bombing; i.e., that it was an example of terrorists gaming the system to get rid of an adversary. But Abu Ghraib is a self-inflicted wound. Al Qaeda didn’t make US servicemen and women torture Iraqis.

  I’m sure my German correspondent would want to know how I can declare what happened at Abu Ghraib shameful and yet be perfectly content to inflict what he feels is torture on Saddam Hussein. The answer is simple: I am not my government or my military. It’s one thing for me to concoct what I feel are karmically appropriate punishments against mass murdering dictators in the privacy of my own mind; it’s another thing for my government and military to condone torture or through incompetence or inaction allow torture to occur. As a private individual I’m allowed my fantasies, but my government and my military exist in the real world. I’m not going to be allowed to mete punishment on Saddam, so I am free to create imaginative sentences. My government and my military are meting out punishment, however, on actual people, none of whom approach the high stinkin’ evil of Saddam. So I would that their creativity be somewhat less terrible than my own.

  THE

  COMING WAR

  Since it looks like we’re heading toward one, here’s my take on war.

  1. It should be done if it’s necessary. For now, I’ll be vague as to what constitutes “necessary” because it’s very much open to interpretation.

  2. If you’re going to do it, then you should make sure your opponent ends up as a grease spot on the wall, and that his country is reformulated so that it never ever bothers you again.

  In the best of all worlds, both of these are fulfilled; you have no choice but to go to war, and you squash your opponent like a plump grape underneath a sledgehammer. But to be entirely honest, if I had to choose between the two of these, I’d pick number 2, if only because if we must participate in an unjust war, ‘tis better it was done quickly. That way the stench of our pointless involvement is over quickly, and we expend as little matériel as possible (not to mention, you know, the deaths of those who fight our wars for us are kept to a minimum). Also, if you have the first, but not the second, what you end up with is a longstanding crapfest that you will ultimately have to revisit, whether you wish to or not.

  Such as it was with the Gulf War. I’m not a terribly big fan of that war, but I’m perfectly happy to cede the point that it was necessary to some great extent. Yes, it was a war about oil. Thing is, while we can argue about the need to reduce our oil consumption (I tend to think the greatest advance in technology in the last couple of decades is the coming age of fuel cell and alternate energy cars), ultimately we still do need oil, and certainly needed it in 1990.

  And of course it’s not like it was just a war about oil on our side of the fence; had Kuwait’s primary export been goat meat, Saddam would have been less likely to get all fired up about reintegrating the lost 19th province of Iraq. The Gulf War also offered the added attraction of the possibility of turning Saddam into a fine particulate mist with the aid of a well-placed smart missile. He’s a morally disagreeable enough person, and his regime largely worthless enough to have made the case for its dismantling persuasive.

  The Gulf War took place while I was in college, and I remember being at candlelight vigils in the quads, not to pray that the US stopped the madness of the attack, but that we kicked the righteous hell out of the Iraqis and that it would all be over quickly. I had a brother in the Army who was over there in the fight. The longer the fighting went on the better the chance something bad would happen to him. Fortunately, it was over quickly, and we learned what happens when a large but poorly-trained, badly-equipped army goes head-to-head with a highly-trained, massively-equipped army: The poorly-trained army loses people by a ratio of more than 100 to 1. We squashed the Iraqi army, all right.

  But we didn’t squash Saddam or his regime, and ultimately, I find this inexplicable. Saddam should have not been allowed to continue to rule. His personal detention (to say the least) and the dismantling of his political machine should have been part of any surrender. War isn’t a football game, after all, where the losing coach gets to try to rebuild for next season. Particularly in Saddam’s case, where he was the aggressor; he started it. The penalty for starting a war (which, to be clear, you then lose, miserably) should be a nice 8x8 cell with no phone privileges until you die.

  Lacking the will to depose Saddam, we (and by we I mean the US and the UN) should have been willing to back up the weapons inspectors with the immediate and massive threat of force. Simply put, any facility that the weapons inspectors were denied entry to should have been bombed into pebble-sized pieces within 15 minutes of the inspectors leaving the area. Aggressive countries that have been defeated in war do not have the luxury of “national dignity” or whatever it is you want to call it. The fact that we just spent more than a decade letting a hostile regime jerk the world around is angrifying (a new word. Use it. Love it).

  Let’s turn our attention to the new war we’ll be having soon. Toward the first point, is this war absolutely necessary? I doubt it. I think it would be much more useful to swarm the country with weapons inspectors and high-altitude bombers that track their every destination. After the first few times Saddam’s precious presidential palaces are turned into powder when the inspectors are turned back, they’ll get the clue. I see nothing wrong with reminding Iraq on the point of a missile of its obligation to let us look anywhere for anything. Clearly they won’t like it, but, you know. So what.

  Many suggest that the purpose of the coming war will to be to assure that Iraq cannot ever threaten any of us, but this achieves the same goal at lesser cost (and without exposing our military to undue chance of death). If indeed containing that threat were the goal of the upcoming war, this works just as well, and will have the additional value of being what was actually the correct response anyway, and only the better part of a decade late.

  However, it’s clear that Dubya wants a war for purposes not related to weapons containment; indeed, his administration is utterly disinterested in that aspect of the Iraq problem, except as a convenient trope to sell the war to inattentive voters. Dubya wants regime change, and I can sympathize. Saddam has been in power a decade longer than he should have been, and I can think of worse uses of the American military than clearing out bad governments around the world. If Dubya said something along the lines of “First we get rid of Saddam, and then we’re going to pay a call to Robert Mugabe,” well, that’s a barricade that I’d be inclined to rush.

  I’m not holding my breath on that pronouncement, however. Ultimately I suspect that Dubya wants Saddam out as part of a father-avengement thing, although what Bush I needs to be avenged for is unclear; Bush I isn’t dead at the hand of Saddam, after all, nor injured, nor in fact seriously put out in any recognizable way. I believe at best Dubya is avenging his father’s taunting at the hands of Saddam. If that’s the case, Dana Carvey had better go to ground as quickly as humanly possible. This is of course a poor reason to send a nation into war, but Dubya does have the advantage of a decade’s worth of stupidity in dealing with Iraq providing him with some actual legitimate reasons to plug Saddam.

  Let’s get down to brass tacks. On balance, the end results of fighting this war will be (cross fingers) the removal of Saddam and the dismantling of his p
olitical state and (incidentally) a clearing out of whatever weapons capability that may exist. For those reasons, I’m not opposed to fighting a war with Iraq now. Be that as it may, even those people who fully support a war against Iraq are rather painfully aware that the stated reasons that the Dubya administration wants to gear up for war are window dressing for a revenge fantasy. It is possible to fight a just war for less than entirely just reasons. We’re about to do it.

  Just, necessary or not, let’s hope that this war is total, complete and ends with Saddam dead or in chains, his system smashed, and Iraq occupied in the same manner as Japan or Germany was at the end of WWII, with an eye toward making the revamped country successful and benign (the scariest things to come out of Japan and Germany in the last 55 years, after all, were Godzilla and the Scorpions, respectively). Anything less will be, in a word, unforgivable. If we mean to wage war, let’s wage war like we mean it.

  THE BEST END

  OF THE WORLD

  Thomas Muentzer’s Armageddon, in 1525. It wasn’t actually the end of the world, but really. When is it ever?

  The history of the human species is the history of a people waiting for the other shoe to drop. The very first human who had the ability to think beyond the next five minutes probably got up one morning, looked around the cave and the savannah outside, smiled briefly and then thought, you know, this just can’t last. Humans are innately eschatological—looking for the signs and portents that signify that the end of the world is nigh. It beats Yahtzee.