Co-dependent Nation

November 28, 2006 by lynnell

by Lynnell Mickelsen

Is it just me or is anyone else in this country getting that co-dependent "don't call Iraq a civil war because Dad will get mad" vibe?

Atrios, Josh Marshall, McJoan at Kos and others are tracking the few media types brave enough/sane enough to call the obvious civil war in Iraq a civil war. So far there's only a few, namely Solomon Moore at the LA Times, Michael Ware on CNN and NBC News. Everyone else seems to be waiting to see what Dad will think.

I didn't grow up in an alcoholic family. But I've observed alcoholic families and worked for a few alcoholic bosses. So I've experienced first-hand how seemingly competent adults can quickly morph into a careful, cringing, walk-on-eggshells, don't talk, don't feel, don't think, deny-the-obvious alcoholic family members. One of the weirder aspects of alcoholism is how it affects the non-drunks who live with it ---making them almost as crazy and delusional as the drunks themselves.

I knew an alcoholic parent could do this to a family. But I never thought an alcoholic (active or dry drunk) president could make an entire nation go co-dependent in only six short years. But then I look at our dry drunk Commander-in-Chief and our current state of denial/delusion about Iraq and it sure looks crazy-drunk to me, what with the media tip-toeing around, using their careful euphemisms and breathlessly awaiting the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group that will supposedly guide our way out of this mess.

Of course, waiting for the Iraq Study Group is as lost and crazy as Waiting for Godot. The group is basically a bunch of old hacks and Bush family retainers, none of whom have any particular wisdom or experience with Iraq and whose chief aim appears to be to try to find a way of finessing W.'s latest disaster. Which will be no easy trick since W. and his wing-nut, neo-con pals have committed the Mother of All Disasters, probably the biggest foreign fuck-up in our nation's history. And there is no good way to fix it or put a noble face on it.

We invaded and destroyed Iraq because''' uh, because, uh'. actually this is one of the weirdest alcoholic things about our country right now. We're more than three years into the Iraq war---and we still have no real idea why we're there.

We've long known that the whole WMD'"looming mushroom cloud shtick was a big lie to scare the public into supporting the war.

We also know W. didn't invade Iraq to spread democracy'"he and his cronies apparently planned to install convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi as the new Iraqi strongman. Bush, Cheney and Rummy just shrugged while Iraq was being looted---probably because Halliburton was busily looting our own treasury. And W. wasted no time re-instituting torture as standard operating procedure,

We also knew Saddam was not sheltering Osama bin Laden.

So why did we invade? For the oil? For Junior's need to prove his manhood, strut his stuff, play dress-up pilot on the aircraft carrier and one-up his Dad?

I mean, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, there are thousands upon thousands of dead people and we still don't have the faintest idea of why we really started the whole bloody mess. But then again, alcoholic families are famous for their endless secrets, hidden pasts, unfathomable decisions and ability to ignore the obvious, even as all hell breaks loose.

I remember once spending a long weekend with a distant relative, a brilliant woman who lived with her American diplomat husband, in a huge apartment on the East Bank in Paris. I was a college student traveling through Europe on a shoe-string. I didn't come from a wealthy background. So I was surprised and delighted to discover distant relations with palatial Parisian digs who were willing to put me up for a few days.

On my first night, Erica and her husband took me out to dinner at a fine restaurant. Erica had been lovely and seemingly normal during the day. But she must have started secretly drinking earlier in the evening because by 8 p.m. when we were in the restaurant, she was out of control, yelling at the waiter, turning over dishes, falling out of her chair. Her husband ignored her, calmly asking me pleasant questions about my travels which I found difficult to answer with all hell breaking loose across the small table.

Then the husband suddenly announced he had unfinished business at the office and vanished, Which meant it was my job---at the tender age of 22'"to figure out how extract a wildly-drunk, screaming woman from a fancy restaurant, pack her in a cab and get her home in a foreign city where I didn't have my bearings or spoke much French. Dragging her back into the apartment was no mean feat because she fought me tooth and nail. Once we were inside the apartment, it got worse. I finally barricaded myself in the guestroom and listened as she wandered around in a rage, breaking things and periodically pounded on my door, demanding that I come out and fight some more.

Yet the next morning, Erica and her husband both pleasantly greeted me as if nothing had happened. It was just nuts. So I thanked them profusely ''.and cut and ran. Checked into a hostel where the old cheap bunk never looked so good.

Fast-forward 25 or so years and I feel like I'm watching something similarly bizarre only this time on a far larger and more deadly scale. Our president has abandoned tens of thousands of young soldiers to a no-win dangerous situation and then checked out. Doesn't have a clue and doesn't want to really deal with it. Ditto for the media and much of the citzenry.

"With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences, " Bob Herbert writes in his latest New York Times column. He quotes Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, saying that most of his classmates "don't even think about the war. They're more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday's test''.His thoughts were echoed by other students, including John Cafarelli, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of New Hampshire, who was asked if he had any friends who would be willing to join the Army. "No, definitely not," he said. "None of my friends even really care about what's going on in Iraq."

"This indifference is widespread. It enables most Americans to go about their daily lives completely unconcerned about the atrocities resulting from a war being waged in their name. While shoppers here are scrambling to put the perfect touch to their holidays with the purchase of a giant flat-screen TV or a PlayStation 3, the news out of Baghdad is of a society in the midst of a meltdown."

Don't talk., Don't think. Don't feel. And don't call it a civil war because that makes Dad mad.

So how do we get better? Is there a version of the Adult Children of Alcoholics program that we could sign up for as a nation? Or at least sign up the Washington press corp? I'll try to tackle that in a different post.

Posted in

Lynnell's Blog

Yowza! What an interesting and totally spot-on commentary! We are a co-dependent nation, aren't we? Funny I didn't tumble to that. We co-dependents tend to live in denial sometimes. Both of my parents were alcoholics. I have lived the life Lynnell describes above, including a long stint in Adult Children of Alcoholics. I'll write more about this later today. It's a fascinating theory, the co-dependent nation thing.

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