“Don’t it s’prise you de way dem kings carries on, Huck?”

“No,” I says, “it don’t.”

“Why don’t it, Huck?”

“Well, it don’t, because it’s in the breed. I reckon they’re all alike.”

What do the U.S., Palestine, Israel, and Iraq have in common? The answer depends somewhat on who you ask, and when and where, but if you happen to ask an average citizen of average intelligence from any of these seemingly disparate places, at a time when no one happens to be looking over his or her shoulder, the answer is likely to be: ‘rotten leadership’. Go ahead and add your personal candidates to the axis of corruption. But please don’t leave The World’s Greatest Democracy Ever [trademark] out.

Frankly, I’m not feeling very charitable this morning. I’ve been reading the papers and this is what I’m being told: “It’s not if, it’s when,” says Dick Cheney, my vice president, in reference to another terrorist attack on the United States. Now wait a minute. I distinctly remember a certain someone promising the average American citizen of average intelligence Osama bin Laden’s carcass, dead or alive, and a happy ever after post-carcass future. I remember a certain someone whipping us into a war to crush terrorism forever and ever, and I remember hearing on at least three separate occasions that Al Qaeda has been categorically smashed. Meanwhile, we’ve been hearing what most of us suspected all along – that our not necessarily elected administration saw 11 September coming and simply missed it. And now they tell us they’re determined to miss it again? Not if but when?

I once lived in a mixed neighborhood in Morocco, where a third of the population was dirt poor, a half had enough to get by, and the rest had way more than enough. It was a fair model of the planet we live on. A friend from the privileged slice of that neighborhood owned a pumpkin-yellow MG, and insisted on parking it in a conspicuous place out on the street. One night somebody cut a hole in the soft roof and took a dump on the back seat. The owner was angry and upset, and so was I, but along with everybody else in the neighborhood, I thought, “I’m not surprised. Why did he have to park it there?” The U.S. government has been flaunting its vintage MG for years. Yet, the only entity that seems completely caught off guard by the fact that someone wanted to take a dump in the back seat is… the U.S. government. Many Americans were not all that surprised by September 11, at least not in private, and wish their government had had more sense.

Again, I’m not feeling very charitable this morning. The FBI is reportedly reluctant to find who sent the anthrax, as it appears almost certain to have been someone connected to our own government’s biological weapons program. I’m having a little problem at this point telling whose side this administration is on. Now that it’s here, the fact that it wasn’t actually elected doesn’t even bother me much. But its preoccupation with Iraq makes me wonder. In 1992, Bush the Elder led what at the time seemed to me an arrogant, ignorant police action against a reasonably reptilian dictator unreasonably billed as the “Hitler” of the Middle East. Several months earlier he had merely been a reptilian ally. And now, ten years later, Bush the Younger wants a sequel. But in the uncharitable mood I am in, there are several questions more pressing to me than whether or not Saddam Hussein is Hitler. I’d like to know why the Enron Scandal fizzles away like a dud firecracker in the Republican night. I’d like to know why September 11 happened. Why were we a target, and how much did our own government have to do with making us one? I’d like to know why the World’s Greatest Democracy Ever has wasted 40 years bullying Cuba. I’d like to know why we get so defensive when people in other places profess an interest in liberty and justice for all. I would like to know why Dick Cheney can tell us nothing more uplifting at this point than, “It’s a matter of when, not if.”

For the moment, the best answers are probably back on that fictional raft floating down the Mississippi River:

“All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised.”

“But dis one do smell so like de nation, Huck.”

“Well, they all do, Jim. We can’t help the way a king smells; history don’t tell no way.”

A smelly and ornery lot indeed. But one wonders how many allowances we can still afford to make.

John Liechty teaches in Muscat, Oman. E-mail: liechty98@hotmail.com

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