Nietzsche referred to the language that most people use in their daily lives as “a mobile army of metaphors . . . a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage, seem to a nation fixed, canonic, and binding.”

He continued, “truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins with their images effaced and now no longer of account as coins, but merely as metal.” According to this revolutionary new way of looking at the words we use to describe the world around us, all too often, rather than disclosing the truth of how things are, conventional language, weighed down by the crust of convention, glosses over and even conceals the living, breathing nuances of an ever-changing experiential cosmos.

It could be argued that nobody has a more sophisticated mobile army of metaphors than the Bush Administration, whose Clear Skies Initiative—much like Harper’s so-called Clean Air Act—is meant to more or less eliminate environmental stewardship, just as one of the Patriot Act’s primary purposes is to quell patriotic dissent, or just as Operation Iraqi Freedom was designed to deprive Iraqis of the opportunity for meaningful self-determination. The list goes on and on.

Perhaps Bush’s most interesting and tragic linguistic distortions of reality occurred in his 2002 Axis of Evil speech, wherein Sunni Iraq, Shia Iran, and communist North Korea were lumped together as unified state sponsors of terror. David Frum, Bush’s speechwriter, picked up the term axis from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had used it after Pearl Harbor to refer to the states opposing the Allies. Since, as far as the Neocons are concerned, 9-11 was the new Pearl Harbor, the insidiously equivocal logic of Bush’s speech was that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea should be blamed for an attack that was committed by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon.

As Bush narrowed his gaze on Iraq, constantly mentioning Saddam Hussein and 9-11 in the same breath, the cloistered American public was lulled into a narcoleptic stupor by the unquestioning sound-byte-centric America media, which was all-too-eager to portray Bush as a noble, straight-talkin’ modern-day FDR. In the end, Bush went into Iraq on a fluffy cloud of bipartisan support.

Of course, no matter how artfully it’s suppressed, the truth has a funny way of resurfacing. And it’s mainly thanks to brave entertainers like John Stewart and Stephen Colbert (both of whom are, ironically, fake news reporters) that the truth of Bush’s mendacity seeped through into mainstream American consciousness.

Interestingly, however, as a result of the Bush Administration’s literal and rhetorical saber-rattling, the axis has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the US has remained hopelessly bogged down in guerilla insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq (which has now become a genuine terror Mecca, or so to speak), Iran and North Korea have been rapidly fortifying themselves against the possibility of imminent American attacks. In fact, Kim Jong Il has even cited Bush’s bellicosity and the Iraq War as a source of motivation for ramping up his country’s nuclearization. And whereas Iraq, like Afghanistan, has gone from rogue state to failed state, it could be argued that Venezuela has swept in to fill the vacuum. If ever there was an honourary member of the axis of evil, it’s Venezuela. Donald Rumsfeld has even gone so far as to liken Hugo Chavez, the nation’s popular populist leader, to Hitler. The truth is that Chavez has elicited the ire of this administration by demanding that a greater share of Venezuela’s oil wealth go to its citizens rather than Big Oil’s and Uncle Sam’s coffers.

The kleptocrats who preceded Chavez had allowed the big oil corporations to reap the spoils of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves; and much of the petrodollars that Venezuela had gotten had been recycled in the form of American Treasury Bills. In effect, America got the oil and the money while Venezuela’s citizens lived in a state of shoddy shantytown squalor. That all changed with Chavez, who survived an America-supported coup attempt in 2002 and proceeded to arm his country to the teeth while spreading his plentiful petrodollars across South America, making particularly good friends of Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Bolivia’s Eva Morales (who has followed Chavez’s example in nationalizing his country’s copious gas reserves). Fortunately for them, Iran, Korea, and Venezuela have all kinds of leverage that Saddam could never have dreamed of. While Saddam was basically a caged-in madman, Kim Jong Il can wreak havoc on Japan and South Korea, thereby eviscerating the world economy in the blink of an eye. Iran, on the other hand, can do a lot more than just turn off its sizeable oil taps; much more importantly, it can shut down the narrow Strait of Hormuz, arguably the world’s most important oil corridor, driving the price of oil through the roof. And with one of the Middle East’s most formidable militaries, Iran’s leaders have publicly goaded America’s overextended armed forces into attacking its nuclear installations. As for Venezuela, Chavez is using his ample petroleum and petrodollar reserves to make dear friends everywhere from Argentina to Harlem; in fact, the country could very well have larger collective oil reserves than even Saudi Arabia and may even one day wrest control of OPEC away from Saudi Arabia or precipitate the organization’s demise.

In any event, the US is well aware that all three countries are tapped into the same military and economic support base: Russia and China, America’s ostensive friends. And, most importantly, both Putin and Hu Jintao know that America is far too militarily, financially, and energetically hamstrung to wage an effective war on either of them, or their close friends and strategic allies.

While Russia is arming the axis as fast as it can, China is not-too-covertly propping up Kim Jong Il (whose nuclearization it probably doesn’t really object to since America is maintaining nuclear-armed forces in both South Korea and Japan) and cementing ties with Venezuela (whose oil, along with Russia’s, its hungry production-based economy badly needs).

Another oft-overlooked dimension of the chess match is the evolution of the petrodollar game. Since the Nixon era, America and Saudi Arabia have ruled OPEC with an iron fist and forced all OPEC countries to sell their oil in American dollars. This has artificially heightened demand for the greenback and made it the world’s de facto fiat currency. Saddam was the first to break OPEC’s commandment, attaching Iraq’s oil to the much stronger Euro. America quickly rectified this anomaly after Saddam went down. Now, however, both Iran and Russia have announced impending commodity exchanges that will sell oil in Euros and Rubles, respectively. Chavez has also suggested that he’ll start selling some of his oil in Euros. The net effect of this sea change could be devastating for the American economy. Demand for the greenback would decline, and, in order to pay off America’s astronomically high debt, the Fed would have to either attract more T-Bill purchases by raising interest rates (which would cause a real estate and stock market bust) or print much more money (resulting in hyperinflation). Neither of these is a viable long-term option.

Unfortunately for the Neocons, the two-dimensional Cold War chessboard has evolved into a fractal playing field. The opposition has become infinitely more complex and unified than it was just a few years back, and Uncle Sam has been reduced to the stature of the little Dutch boy plugging the holes in the dam with all his fingers and toes.

The unavoidable outcome that the Bush Administration is trying so desperately to circumvent is a multi-polar world in which America can no longer bully everyone else into submission. America is in an untenable position: the more aggressively it pursues its imperial ends, the more it strengthens the so-called axis of evil. The best Bush and Cheney can hope for is a stalemate. The axis sure as hell knows it. And it’s only a matter of time before the rest of America finds out about this ignominious predicament.

danadleman@gmail.com

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