A Conspiracy of Whores

 

John Grant, opednews.com, April 20, 2012

Whore: (verb) To debase oneself by doing something for unworthy motives, typically to make money. -The New Oxford American Dictionary

It’s a challenge to make adult sense of the absurdities coming out of Colombia right now.

I had first planned to write about the Drug War aspect of President  Obama’s summit meeting in Cartagena, since it’s quite amazing when the  right-wing president of Colombia publicly lobbies the US president to shift the Drug War from military operations against supply in Latin  America to a more social approach against demand in the US. After all,  Colombia is the highly militarized US showcase nation in the 40-year  Drug War.

“Despite all of the efforts, the immense efforts, the huge costs, we  have to recognize that the illicit drug business is prospering,”  Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos told the attending leaders. He  even advocated a process of decriminalization, though he recognized this was only a “starting point to begin a discussion that we have been  postponing for far too long.”

This is real news.

Our Drug War is a military/police enterprise focused on attacking the supply of drugs coming from Latin America. Santos seems to concede it’s a dismal failure. He also knows the accumulated conditions of that  failure are so entrenched in the hemisphere that it’s hard to even begin to discuss a way out.

 

Presidents Santos and Obama and Hillary Clinton at the Havana Club in Cartagena by unknown

Barack Obama’s administration is so cowed by entrenched, die-hard drug warriors that it’s doubling down on marijuana busts as local governments across the nation go the other way and ease  enforcement of marijuana laws. The Feds are like fundamentalist puritans who see the decriminalization of marijuana as the social equivalent of a “gateway drug” leading to crack-addict Hell. There’s a desperate need  for a much more pragmatic approach.

Besides the call from our Latin American neighbors for a more sane,  demand-oriented approach to international drug problems, there was an  equally consensus-driven call for the US to drop its aggressive and  counter-productive 50-year embargo of Cuba.

Here’s the right-wing Santos again on lifting the embargo on Cuba:  “There is no justification for that path that has anchored us in a Cold  War. … It is the hour to overcome the paralysis produced by  ideological stubbornness.” As expected, President Obama remained mired  in the “ideological stubbornness” of the Florida Cuban vote.

When it came to approving a labor agreement with Colombia, Obama was  in total agreement with the rightist Santos. It did not matter that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka had lobbied hard against the agreement, citing killings of trade  unionists and other human rights abuses. Trumka responded by saying, “We regret that the administration has placed commercial interests above  the interests of workers and trade unions.”

Back in 1984, I was deported from Honduras for sitting down with  union leaders who shared with me and friends a litany of murders and  rights abuses against trade unionists. That was during the Contra War.  It seems little has changed in 28 years. Capital and profits always  trump unions and the human rights of workers.

The “escort” who set off the scandal and US Secret Service agents by unknown

It’s quite revealing that while profound historical discussions  during the summit focused on reforming the Drug War, lifting the  outmoded Cold War embargo of Cuba and violent abuses of trade unionists, that the really big story to come out of Cartagena is that US Secret Service agents and military security officers purchased sex.

And who is thumping the scandal? None other than Rep. Peter King,  chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and the greatest  War On Terror whore in America.

The heavy breathing soon began. Could any of the ladies contracted  from the Pley Club brothel have been al Qaeda agents? How was the  President’s safety affected? How much of a black mark was it on the  honor of the United States? Whose heads would have to roll?

Reality Versus Distraction

Meanwhile, back in Realityland, Latin America was in the midst of a  major, future-oriented economic correction with the dynamic Brazil on  the leading edge. The requests for the US to reform its Drug War and to  lift the embargo on Cuba were in fact part of that greater dialogue, a  dialogue that includes questions about energizing the middle and lower  classes into a consumer engine that can lift all economic boats across  the continent.

This is a deadly theme in 2012 in America. So it’s not surprising to  see a ridiculous scandal pop up to distract Americans from the real  issues. As was accomplished following World War Two, the US economy  needs to rebuild its working and middle classes, and the only way to do  that is to break the cycle of entrenched, right-leaning wealth. It’s a  major epochal struggle in Latin America, as it should be in the United  States. It was one of the big stories that should have come out of the  summit, and instead we get distractions about agents and whores.

It’s a story about high-powered, red-blooded American men in an  exotic location erotically fueled by the myth of American  Exceptionalism; actually it’s one of the oldest stories in the annals of colonialism and imperialism. And it naturally involves the oldest  profession, in this case, savvy Colombian entrepreneurs after top-dollar profits.

The weak link in all this apparently was an inebriated Secret Service agent who didn’t speak enough Spanish to understand the perfectly legal business contract he was engaging in. The 24-year-old woman offering  her services to this gentleman is very beautiful, and she emphasized to The New York Times that she was not a prostitute or a whore; she was an “escort.” The  marketing line for such expensive escorts is that a client is paying for class and, most important, discretion.

There would have been no scandal if the man had paid his bill.  Failure to fulfill a legal contract amounts to theft of services. Thus  the wronged woman went to the police, and the police, in turn, did their duty and took up the woman’s case against the US agent. Sex had nothing to do with the scandal; it was a contractual arrangement gone awry. The man might as well have been refusing to pay for a haircut.

One of the themes being voiced in this scandal is that a matter of  national and military honor is at stake, that it’s a violation of our  “core values.” It’s the same distracting  note of concern we hear from  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta when soldiers in Afghanistan photograph  themselves grinning like geeks holding up the blown apart legs of a  suicide bomber. Panetta said what these men did was “not worthy of our  core values.”

So exactly what are our “core values” in this scandal? First, it has  to be recognized that these so-called core values are generally  expressed in the realm of public relations to respond to some  embarrassment. It’s a sad fact of our times that our real values are  those expressed in the realm of secrecy where most of US foreign and  military policy unfolds. Real values are how we really operate — not  how we envision ourselves.

Whoring in Vietnam

Back in 1966, I was a red-blooded 19-year-old kid in Vietnam serving  my country as a radio direction finder. My job was to locate the enemy,  which generally consisted of Vietnamese kids fighting to force me and  500,000 other Americans from their land. I located these young soldiers  so Air Force F4 Phantoms could incinerate them into charred corpses.

When I wasn’t hunting Vietnamese radio operators, I spent a lot of  time in Pleiku at the many brothel-bars that catered to kids like me  engorged with the myth of American Exceptionalism. For me, Vietnamese  girls were the most beautiful creatures on Earth. As an American  soldier, I was drawing a salary, plus $65-a-month combat pay for being  in Vietnam. There were many thousands more just like me.

Money burned a hole in our pockets, and prostitution was everywhere,  in bars and in every little laundry beside the road. It was the juicy  entrepreneurial receptacle for the arrogant, imperial engine that drove  the war itself. Eventually, to control VD, the Fourth Division actually  oversaw its own brothel-bars just outside the base camp in Pleiku.

At these bars, one was presented with an assortment of energetic and  lovely child-women willing and eager to share their most intimate  physical pleasures for five dollars. I was an armed young male  propagandized with a sense of superiority suddenly presented with pliant young girls who wanted my money, of which I had more than I knew what  to do with.

I’m now, of course, thoroughly ashamed of myself and mention the  experience here only to shed a little light on the notion of Americans  buying sex in foreign lands. My shame is intricately tied to  the war and the fact I was paying a pittance for these girls’ services;  they were there only because they were poor and because we were wrecking their country. It wasn’t the prostitution that was shameful or  dishonorable; it was the wrecking, the exploitation and the larger,  collective shame for the war itself and the massive amounts of killing  and destruction it entailed against the Vietnamese people.

This kind of misplaced dishonor is part of the “core values” cited in the Secret Service scandal. Something is wrong when individual sexual  peccadilloes become a more serious matter for public shame than  collective actions like a disastrous and violent 40-year Drug War and a  misguided 50-year embargo of a tiny island nation. Add in wars in Iraq  and Afghanistan and the new doctrine of special operations assassination teams and lethal drones and the “scandal” of a few agents paying for  consensual sex becomes laughable. Our wars are the real scandal.

Colombia and other Latin American nations have decriminalized  prostitution and they now seem inclined to do the same for drugs. This  has been the reality in places like Amsterdam for some time. Reasonable  people have to wonder when the professed “core values” of American  Puritanism will allow the same kinds of reform and evolution to occur in the United States. So far, the forces of obstruction and distraction  have the upper hand.

This sort of reform is never easy, and it’s never perfect. But we  know criminalization and militarization doesn’t work and that they are  extremely costly approaches. In a way, we have become socially addicted  to these approaches. Maybe it’s time for the nation to go into rehab and assume a little of the spirit of E. F. Schumacher’s famous book Small Is Beautiful.

• To borrow the subtitle of the book, we’d be a whole lot better off if our leaders stopped being such corporate, imperial whores and began to  govern “as if people mattered.”

 

John Grant

I am a 62-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a 19-year-old kid who has been studying US counter-insurgency war ever since. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I am a photographer and a writer — sometimes a video filmmaker. I have been a member of Veterans For Peace for 24 years. I think the economic reckoning we are living through, that has only just begun, makes it clear we need to re-evaluate who we are as a nation and ratchet down the imperial world policeman role and look after our own deteriorating nation’s problems. I like good writing, good film, good music and good times. I drink alcohol and smoke dope responsibly. I confess this because I think the Drug War is an abysmal failure. I’m a committed pragmatist who believes in the old line: My Country Right Or Wrong. The fact is, it’s wrong a lot of the time. And I’m sticking around.