When I was in first grade, or maybe it was second, our classroom teacher was an Iranian-born woman who had moved to the United States fairly recently. I remember her as of entirely average stature, dark-haired, and with no detectable accent (at that age, we children were not exactly experts in the field of accents, each one of us having our own childhood lisps and squeaks marring our own speech.) She always dressed in long-sleeved black sweaters and black pants. A few times a week she would teach us a little Farsi, and she had a shoebox full of small toys and trinkets that she would allow you to pick from as reward for a particularly good grade (the actual process was wonderfully consumerist: you would earn "dollars" for high test scores, and each item had a price, also in fake dollars, and the class would have a once-a-month-or-so opportunity to cash in their winnings.) I took home well over my fair share of those prizes, but the only one I still remember distinctly was a slender gold watch. The mechanism was broken but it was still, after all, shiny and gold, and we had all stared at it like crows looking to build a nest. I won it, and for a while treated it as if it were as rare and precious as a doubloon from a pirate treasure. I do not think I still have it anymore, though. I don't know where or how I would have lost it. In any event, that year passed uneventfully enough, and the next year I was in a different classroom in the same school, taught by a teacher who made so little of an impression on me that I cannot remember if they were even male or female.

This was in the suburbs of San Diego, immediately before and during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, during the Carter years. From the moment it started she was distrusted by many of the parents, and it got worse the longer the situation dragged on. The irony was that she was one of the good Iranians, a supporter of our wonderfully corrupt Shah; that distinction was, however, lost on many of the parents. They did not want an Iranian-born immigrant teaching their children, and there was pressure to fire her outright. If there was a more substantive reason than racial bigotry and misplaced jingoistic patriotism, it was never made clear. She was from Iran; we currently hated Iran; her own flight from Iran and her own unabashed pro-American stance mattered not a damn bit.

That small introduction to bigotry made a large impression. For starters, it helped teach me even as elementary student that there were an enormous number of stupid adults in the world, and that by and large the world and the fate of even individual people, whether they be nice or not nice at all, were in their hands. My impression of adults and their intellects never got better, and was wrecked forever once I became an adult myself and could verify, in person, just how gigantically stupid many adults were when compared to any average elementary school child.

But every time some blowhard pundit lusts for war in the Middle East, I still think of that teacher. As it turns out, this means I think of that teacher often, because the last decade has seen the national supply of blowhard pundits constantly advocating war in the Middle East, to the extent that it hardly seems to matter anymore which precise country ought to be the target. There just needs to be one nation that we hate passionately during any given period of time. It needs to be one we are utterly confident we could actually win a war against, and one whose own ability to retaliate in kind is nonexistent. We decided Iraq was a good target, and that we would be doing them a grand favor to bomb the holy hell out of them because, after all, their government consisted of a small set of notorious bastards who the whole world would be glad to be rid of. The blood never quite even had a chance to dry before the same blubberheads decided we ought to bomb the holy hell out of Iran—also because it would be doing them a grand favor, and because their government consists of a small set of notorious bastards who the whole world would be glad to be rid of.

At least, that is what the charitable ones think. The uncharitable ones, the truly stupid ones, the ones for whom even raw jingoism is an intellectual bridge too far, do not even bother to make the argument that we would be doing them a grand favor. No, we just want them dead.

Fox News commentator and The Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson openly called for war against Iran and argued for the full-scale annihilation of the Islamic Republic during an appearance on Fox News’s late-night show Red Eye. Carlson responded to a question about U.S. military action:

CARLSON: I think we are the only country with the moral authority [...] sufficient to do that. [The U.S. is] the only country that doesn’t seek hegemony in the world. I do think, I’m sure I’m the lone voice in saying this, that Iran deserves to be annihilated. I think they’re lunatics. I think they’re evil.

Carlson, having called for the annihilation of Iran — a country with a population of over 74 million people — went on to acknowledge that “we should assess what will happen to the price of energy were we to do that.”

Where to start? The premise that the United States is the only nation with the "moral authority" sufficient to determine which other nations deserve to be "annihilated?" The notion that the United States does not seek hegemony in the world, even while our vaunted, televised walking clusterfucks of humanity assert that enemies of America are, presumably by definition, "evil"? The deep pundit wisdom of pausing slightly to recognize that, to fucking fuck with the entire population of the country in question, the real dilemma is whether or not butchering them wholesale would be too damaging to the price of gasoline?

I remember when we went to war with Iraq that one of the premises was that at least we would be liberating them. The ones not directly bombed would thank us for getting rid of their bastard leader, and not particularly care what government we replaced it with. The ones not forced from their homes, and the ones who could still find food in a war-ravaged country, and the ones who had no loved ones die or who had to flee the secondary waves of horrific violence unleashed—they would be grateful. That was the reason given for turning from al Qaeda to unrelated targets. It was an act of kindness, on our part. In return, they would love us, and embrace American business libertarianism, and give us their oil.

It can be difficult to pinpoint when exactly the bastards of other countries become our bastards, and when they stop again. I never understood why we had previously all-but-embraced the murderous thug Hussein, or why we in the last decade sought rapprochement with the equally murderous thug Kaddafi, although in the latter case it seemed transparently to have something to do with business development concerns. The religious dictatorship of Saudi Arabia is coddled unrelentingly, while the one in Iran is recognized as quite obviously evil. Do we support the government of Egypt, or do we not? What about the new one? I hear there are Muslims there—it quickly becomes too complicated for the buffoons of television to make sense of. Forget Pakistan—the contradictions are scarcely even mentioned, anymore. No, Iran is the simple case, because everybody knows the whole damned country, and not just their oppressive, theocratic-but-not-Christian government, are evil, and deserve even worse than what was dished out to Iraq. No, as the only nation with the moral authority to decide such things, we are the only nation with the right to decide that the whole sodding nation just ought to be annihilated. That is what good patriotism, and good Christianity, demands.

For any nation in the crosshairs of American decisions over good and evil, the lessons of the Bush Doctrine and of the Axis of Evil would seem to be plain enough. Be as murderous as you want, if you have the backing of a major power or if you have nuclear weaponry already (North Korea), and the United States will not lift a finger against you. Lack that power, however, and all bets are off. When faced with that bare truth, I wonder how a decision to pursue nuclear weapons could really be branded as a "lunatic" choice. Unwise, perhaps—but I dare say every pundit currently waving the flag of war here would be equally rabid in their outright demands to pursue nuclear weaponry if it was an Iranian flag pinned to their lapels. They would also call it a God-given right. They would assert the evilness of the vile and heathen Christian powers with every bit as much froth as they denounce the theocrat heathen Muslims, now. They root for America as if it were a sports team; I am confident they would root for any other team with equal bluster, and equal vacuousness, if the circumstances of their birth were altered by a single half-spin of the globe.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like, if I could introduce that Iranian teacher to this or that gasbag pundit, just so they could have a face to face discussion on whether or not everyone in her home country should be annihilated as this decade's enemy of choice. I would not wish it on her, though. There is no substantive difference between the Tucker Carlsons of the world and the flag-waving little rodents that hated her back then merely for her having the audacity of existing. Some of them just get to be on TV.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010:

Steve King To Conservatives: 'Implode' IRS Offices
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd at CPAC on Saturday that he could "empathize" with the suicide bomber who last week attacked an IRS office in Austin, and encouraged his listeners to "implode" other IRS offices, according to a witness.

We already know King is nuts, but the question I have is why does the Republican Party tolerate these kinds of fringe extremists? And no, the Democratic Party does not have anyone similar to King; Dennis Kucinich might be for single payer health care, but he's not for bombing health insurance companies.

I guess when Republicans talk about having a big tent, they are only talking about a tent that goes as far to the right as the political horizon extends. Vote for health care? We're gonna' primary you. Vote for the stimulus? We're gonna' primary you. Say you "empathize" with suicide attacks against the U.S. government? No problem, join the party.

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