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Regime
Change Begins at Home … Literally
by
Leilla Matsui
May
5, 2003
For
those of us fed up with military homecoming parades and demolished palace
toilets, (the staples of post-invasion reportage on Iraq), FOX and CNN's
renewed and aggressive coverage of the missing Modesto mother-to-be, Laci
Peterson, comes almost as a welcome relief.
One could argue, however that Iraq's plundered and eviscerated artifacts
and the discovery of the pregnant 27 year old's remains are both revealing
examples of the Bush administration's agenda to corporatize, at any cost, all
aspects of social and economic life at home and abroad.
For
Whitehouse ideologues, the destruction of all evidence of Iraq's history and
civilization conveniently started a new calendar page - the year one for capital's
triumphant monuments over ground zero.
For a Modesto, California fertilizer salesman, an unwanted, pregnant wife
was just more dead wood to be downsized.
In
'Bowling for Columbine', filmmaker Michael Moore cites the bombing of Kosovo as
a starting point for the rampage that led to the student body count of Columbine
High School by two of it's own students - products, he argues, of the
institutionalized violence embraced by the town where the massacre took
place. As home to the Lockheed
Corporation where missiles and other weaponry are manufactured for the Department
of Defense, it's hardly a coincidence that Littleton, Colorado, has been
turning out killers over several generations.
Should it really come as any surprise then, Moore argues, that two of
its own sons could interpret this meaning literally? Could the suspect in
custody in the Laci Peterson case be yet another prodigal son putting a very personal
spin on this particular administration's policies?
Laci
Peterson's murder, unlike the Columbine massacre, did not occur during any
full-blown conflict. On the contrary,
her disappearance on Christmas Eve came at a time when Bush hawks were merely
squawking about regime change in Iraq.
Still, stupid white guys had every reason to feel smugly confident that
their appointed leadership had only their interests in mind. Regime change
could just as easily be interpreted to include one's wife.
Scott
Peterson, the recently arraigned suspect in his wife's murder seems to have
done his own number crunching in the spirit of disgraced Enron execs, doing the
devil's calculus to maximize short-term profit gains. In this case, more hot-buttered booty action from a San
Bernardino masseuse named Amber.
Again,
we can draw gruesome visual parallels between the discovery of Laci Peterson's
dislodged fetus in San Francisco Bay and later, her headless torso, coming in
on the heels of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's verbal victory laps around
the gutted museums and libraries of Baghdad.
This was the sound of freedom, remember? The war-whoop of the newly liberated bachelor yucking it up at
his own stag party.
As
Governor of Texas, GW used the festive occasion of death row inmate, Karla Faye
Tucker's last-ditch appeal on the eve of her execution to try his hand at
stand-up comedy. His on-camera impersonation
of white trash going down the chute could easily have been interpreted as an
official endorsement of domestic violence.
Here was a politician familiar with the patter of angry white guys in
pick-up trucks everywhere. By the same token, the less-than-grieving Scott
Peterson's pre-arrest cameo appearances at the volunteer centre where he was
supposedly assisting in the search for his missing wife gave us the clearest glimpse
yet of a dirt-bag (oops, fertilizer) salesman working the room at a Travelodge
convention centre - the familiarly glib frat-boy very much at home in the
spotlight. A chip off the old
presidential block, mini-me Peterson puts forth a similar aura of simpering,
faux concern that does little to conceal a drainhole where other people might
have a conscience.
Like
his presidential pater, the shoulder slapping, high-fiving Scotty-boy can
summon forth when necessary, divine entities to do his P.R. In Scott's case, it was the 'spirit' of
Laci, who'd dropped by the centre to thank the volunteers for their efforts in
finding her. Surprisingly, few people commented
on the fact that foul-play was still just another scenario the police were
toying with during the investigation.
No one at that point had ruled out the possibility that Ms. Peterson
would return home safe and unharmed.
Scott himself was insisting this was indeed the case, all the while
channeling the spirit of his dead spouse to deal with the press.
George
W. Bush, no stranger himself to syphilitic sugar plums dancing in his head
applied a similar logic to push forth his Apocalyptic vision of a Saddam-less
Iraq, where the maimed and dead danced on the streets and tossed ectoplasmic
rose petals towards oncoming tanks.
Not
surprisingly, both men share a tendency to mangle even the simplest of platitudes
when called upon to look grim - all part and parcel of the sociopath's
inability to deal with emotional issues beyond a few pre-scripted
banalities. Those axioms of evil
spoonfed to then by trusted aides and legal teams become just more pretzels to
choke on. Neither seem capable, for
that matter of sustaining sincerity beyond the time it takes to summon up a
cliche. For them, everything is divine
but certainly nothing is sacred.
Like
Bush, Peterson's motives for his slayings have yet to be fully determined. Why the people of Iraq needed to be
liberated, in most cases, from their own bodies is still a topic of wide
debate. Peterson's decision to
do away with his own wife and unborn son has a similarly
fuzzy logic but one that mirrors in many ways, the regime's fundamental goals
of funneling all tax dollars into military coffers and dispensing with such frills
as education and healthcare.
For
a weekend warrior like Scott, whose hunting and fishing trips were, no doubt,
jeopardized by the immediate and future demands of a wife and fetus, this may
have been the determining factor in his decision to divest himself of them in
order to protect his remaining assets.
Indeed both men share a rugged disrespect for the great outdoors in
their mutual fondness for all-terrain gas guzzlers and even a similarly
predatory view of the scenery. In his own way Scott Peterson, behaved like any
Whitehouse CEO looking at the bottom line through a cocked gun barrel, aiming
to strike poor performers from the company's portfolio.
The
unfortunate Laci Peterson is just another name we can add to the swelling death
toll on Bush's watch; another casualty of the aggressions being waged from the
corporate homefront while more nameless bodies pile up overseas. Scott Peterson, now facing the death penalty
will pay the ultimate price for adhering to the principles of the second Bush's
new world order. While it would be easy
to adopt the popular pundit view of Scott Peterson as a singular aberration,
exempt from any claim to humanity, we would be closer to solving his riddle by
examining his pathology within the context of 'homeland security' and what it
really means on the domestic front.
Leilla Matsui is a freelance
writer living in Tokyo, Japan. She can be reached at: catcat@s3.ocv.ne.jp