I am so checking out Rogue State from my local library! It’s a book-long bullet point list of the major evils the US government has visited directly on the rest of the world for the past few decades, all for empire: election fraud, sponsoring terrorists, trafficking in drugs—an enormous list of shame, even limiting it to purely political actions, and excluding “business-friendly†acts like conquering Hawaii for Dole or Iraq for Exxon.
I don’t doubt Blum’s central message. I’m entirely prepared to believe my country has done some bad, bad things under cover of “national security†and similar euphemisms; it’s been doing bad, bad things since its founding. Next to a century of slavery and genocide, a little state-sponsored assassination is small potatoes. We’ve got admissions of horrors like MK-Ultra on record, and Afghanistan is still daily news, even if we’ve stopped talking about Iraq. Still, the book is borderline garbage. It’s thick with inflammatory adjectives and thin on documentation. The incidents reported typically come with a single footnote indicating its singular source, which Blum simply takes at face value. (Granted, the NYTimes, Washington Post, and State Department papers are excellent sources, but hardly infallible.) The source’s story is then cast in the most damning light, and not in the same tone or context of the original source.
So why the sudden enthusiasm for muckraking? I’ve prepared a character with a shady past for our next RPG campaign, a badass geezer who couldn’t quite cut it in the CIA but found himself a profitable niche as a go-between for American officials and foreign personae non grata, the sweet spot between reliability and deniability. (Fans of the 100 Bullets comic books will recognize much of Agent Graves in Deacon. Also The Losers.) And for a purely fictional exercise, like an RPG, Rogue State is a goldmine of back story elements.
Post a Comment