Long Pauses

Tag: Bush

  • Can I Go Home Now?

    Watching this video it occurs to me that, instead of the presidency, this guy would have been much happier if he’d inherited a West Texas Chrysler dealership. I have to admit that I more or less supported Bush’s immigration plan. It’s the first time in six-and-a-half years I’ve been able to say that about a White House policy.

  • I Think I’m in Love

    Jim Webb during his first hearing with the Armed Services Committee:

    I also want to say something about my longtime friend, Senator McCain’s comments when he was talking about the consequences of pulling out of Iraq and in your statement, Secretary Gates, you list some of these as an emboldened and strengthened Iran, a base of operations for jihadist networks in the heart of the Middle East, an undermining of the credibility of the United States.

    In many ways, quite frankly, those have been the results of the invasion and occupation. There’s really nothing that’s occurred since the invasion and occupation that was not predictable and in fact, most of it was predicted. It was predicted in many cases by people with long backgrounds in national security…and in many cases there were people who saw their military careers destroyed and who were personally demeaned by people who opposed them on the issues, including members of this administration. And they are people in my judgement, who will be remembered in history as having had a moral conscience.

  • One of Those Political Posts

    A few days ago I watched the episode of The West Wing in which President Bartlet is inaugurated for his second term in office, and it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in years. On January 20, 2001, I was at a hotel in Pigeon Forge, TN, attending a retreat with other men from my church. I remember the date because that morning, during one of the small-group sessions, someone interrupted to turn on a TV. We all watched as Bush took the oath of office. Several men in the room began to pray. Others smiled and offered “Hallelujah”s. I muttered under my breath, “Thank God. Finally an end to eight years of peace and prosperity,” and my friend poked me in the ribs. I was the “liberal” of our group. He’d learned to expect and even appreciate my snark.

    In the years since, I’ve come to feel increasingly alienated from evangelical culture, and politics is an important reason. I used to write about this a lot more on Long Pauses, but I grew tired of my own voice and my own hypocrisies. Too much finger-pointing. Plus, the results of the 2004 election broke my heart. I’ve felt more than a bit defeated and hopelessly cynical ever since. It didn’t help when, a few months ago, I ran into one of those old friends and noticed the “W: Still the President” sticker on the back window of his car. I just don’t get it.

    Bush was elected on the promise of restoring “honor and dignity” to the White House, which, let’s face it, wasn’t an unappealing idea. I was as disgusted as anyone by Clinton’s personal behavior, by the 24-hour media shitstorm, and by the very real political fallout. So I wasn’t all surprised when Bush’s call to do away with the lying and the scandals that had disgraced the last few years of Clinton’s second term struck a chord with most evangelicals I know, particularly because that call was coming from someone who spoke their language, who had a bona-fide Christian testimony, and who promised to protect the “sanctity of human life.” (That Bush had an unimpressive pre-Presidency track record when it came to eliminating scandal was a point I soon gave up arguing with friends who supported him.)

    I’ve always had a begrudging respect for the political skills of the Bush administration. They play the game so well. They say they’re fiscal conservatives, then, with a Republican Congress in their back pocket, they explode the size of the federal government and deficit. “Support me on my big issues,” he seems to have promised House and Senate leaders, “and I won’t even threaten to veto a spending bill.” And he hasn’t. Not surprisingly, the amount of pork has more than tripled under his watch.

    Congress was more than willing to return the favor when Bush asked them for the right to declare war. With one eye on their home states and the upcoming midterm elections, they grabbed his cooked intelligence with both hands, hoisted it up onto the stump, and sounded a few more cheers for fear-mongering. “Mushroom cloud, you say? Mushroom cloud! We must do something! And do it today!” To hell with his campaign promise to never “nation-build.” Bush and his boys wanted this war, wanted to reshape the Middle East, wanted to re-engage America’s permanent war economy, and, boy, if you got in their way — if you questioned their motives or diverted from the War on Terror narrative they were writing — boy, you were fucked.

    Even though today’s announcement had been predicted for most of the week, I was still stunned when the indictments were read. I had to watch for five or ten minutes before I could accept what was happening. I’m not crazy. What a sad and pathetic week in the life of a sad and pathetic presidency.

  • The Moviegoer (1962)

    By Walker Percy

    “What’s the Matter?”
    “Ooooh,” Kate groans, Kate herself now. “I’m so afraid.”
    “I know.”
    “What am I going to do?”
    “You mean right now?”
    “Yes.”
    “We’ll go to my car. Then we’ll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we’ll go home.”
    “Is everything going to be all right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tell me. Say it.”
    “Everything is going to be all right.”

    If you’re reading this in the future — say, you’ve wandered here via some poof of Google magic — you should know that if I were to turn on my television right now (now being the afternoon of September 2, 2005), I’d flip past image after image after image of destruction, violence, and misery. I’m writing five days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, destroying most of Biloxi, Mississippi and tearing up whole sections of states that were still trying to recover from Ivan the year before. I’m writing four days after the levees gave way in New Orleans, filling the city to its rooftops with putrid water and trapping the thousands of people who were still there, whether because they chose to ride out the storm or, as was more often the case, because they couldn’t afford to leave. I’m writing three days after the looting and violence began and two days after the buses arrived to begin shipping “refugees” to Houston.

    I’m also writing four-and-a-half years after President Bush took office and began systematically dismantling FEMA. I’m writing almost exactly four years since September 11th, which we all assumed had motivated federal and state officials to plan seriously for worst-case scenarios on American soil, or at least to have stockpiled rations, water, and the means to distribute them. I’m writing slightly less than three years since FEMA called the New Orleans hurricane scenario “the deadliest of all” (or so reported The Houston Chronicle) and two years after the White House cut funding to an Army Corps of Engineer project intended to strengthen the levees. (Those cuts coincided with President Bush’s decision to deploy the bulk of our national guard in Iraq, we should remember.) I’m writing nine months since small-government conservatives throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama helped re-elect Mr. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, and three days after Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert announced that he saw no reason to rebuild New Orleans.

    I’m writing during the first week in my lifetime when all of America is suddenly being confronted by the poverty and de facto segregation that determines the lives of so many people in the South.

    I’m filled with anxiety and sorrow and anger. (And guilt. I’m anxious? I’m angry? In my air-conditioned home with running water and a stocked ‘fridge?) I’m doing the only things I know to do — keeping in contact with our friends and family in harm’s way, offering them a place to stay if they need it and my prayers, regardless. I’ve made my donation and had my stiff drink, and now I don’t know what to do with myself, so today I sat down and read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. I have a friend in Baton Rouge who knows quite a lot about Percy. When I asked him what I needed to know about The Moviegoer, he wrote back, “I guess one thing to keep in mind is that none of the places where it’s set are there anymore.” So you’ll understand, I hope, if everything I’m about to write is bloated with sentiment.

    Binx Bolling is about to turn thirty. He’s living in a suburb of New Orleans called Gentilly, where the “old-style California bungalows,” the “new-style Daytona cottages,” and the local movie theater offer him some kind of indefinable comfort. The French Quarter, the Garden District, all of the parts of New Orleans that breathe with history and authenticity — they’re all too much for Binx. “Whenever I try to live there,” he tells us, “I find myself first in a rage during which I develop strong opinions on a variety of subjects and write letters to editors, then in a depression during which I lie rigid as a stick for hours staring straight up at the plaster medallion in the ceiling of my room.” He sells bonds or something or other during the day, and seems to have a knack for making money, but most of his energy is directed toward the Lindas and Marcias and Sharons who work for him (then date him, tire of him, and leave).

    Binx is surrounded on all sides by family and by tragedy. His father is dead, as are his brother and one half-brother. Another half-brother, only fourteen years old, is sick, confined to a wheelchair by some unspecified disease. His cousin Kate lost her mother as a child and is still coping with the death of her fiancee in a car accident. Binx himself carries the scars of his service in Korea. Percy reveals this to us slowly, though. A novel that begins with the feel of Catcher in the Rye: Ten Years Later becomes something more as we follow Binx on his “search.” The “search” is also hard to define. For Binx, it’s “what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.” It’s a battle against malaise,”the pain of loss.” It’s a search for permanence and wonder. It’s a retreat from despair. It’s simultaneously agnostic and Holy. It’s creative and endowed with impossible power.

    It’s been a long time since I’ve fallen in love with a book the way I’ve fallen in love with The Moviegoer, and I’d like to think that would have happened even if New Orleans weren’t under water. Percy’s novel, more than any work I’ve read since first beginning these long pauses, answers directly the call of Levertov’s poem, a poem that, after all, is the search. Near the end of The Moviegoer, Binx sits with Kate and watches a black man fumble with something in the passenger seat of his car. It’s a beautiful image. The man has just stepped out of a church on Ash Wednesday; his forehead is “an ambiguous sienna color and pied.” Still watching, Binx wonders:

    It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?

    It is impossible to say.

    Peace.

  • Confidence Man

    A new poll reveals that 70 percent of Americans now believe that any gains we’ve made in Iraq have come at an “unacceptable” cost, and 56 percent now believe the conflict was “not worth fighting.” Poll numbers are poll numbers, of course, but these seem significant if only because they suggest an interesting trend. A real majority now question the validity of the policy that most clearly defines the Bush administration. (And if Bush can call his margin of victory a “mandate,” then I can call 56 percent a “real majority.”)

    Also headlining the front page of The Washington Post website are breaking reports of 22 dead in an attack on a U.S. base, Dana Milbank’s coverage of Bush’s elusive tactics at yesterday’s press conference, and a report of Bush’s confidence in his Iraq policy. What interests me is the juxtaposition of stories — the images of death and destruction jutted up against Bush’s “confidence.” Reminds me of another president.

    Back in January, after reading Jeffrey Alexander’s The Meanings of Social Life, I predicted to a co-worker that the 2004 election would be a repeat of ’72, when Nixon won re-election with 60% of the popular vote despite the Watergate scandal. From my response to Alexander’s book:

    In November 1972, just four months after the Watergate break-in, 84% of voters claimed that the scandal did not influence their decision on election night. Two years later, the event had taken on such symbolic significance that Nixon was forced to resign. “Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkeim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves” (156). In his thoughtful analysis, Alexander explains how Watergate, as a symbol, came to transcend the world of petty politics and to touch upon fundamental moral concerns, thus polluting the executive office with the counterdemocratic code. This process was greatly influenced by the ritualizing experience of the televised hearings and by the release of Nixon’s taped conversations. “By his words and recorded actions,” Alexander writes, “he had polluted the very tenets that the entire Watergate process had revivified: the sacredness of truth and the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (169).

    As an example of how the Watergate context had changed, Alexander reminds us of Nixon’s infamous line, “I am not a crook.” In ’72 those words would have comforted Americans and reinforced their sacred faith in the presidency; by ’74, after the tapes and after the hearings, Nixon’s utterance of the word “crook” only reminded voters of their growing suspicions. Nixon had lost control of his rhetoric.

    I was mostly joking when I mentioned all of this to my co-worker a year ago, but I’m starting to wonder if there might be some truth to it. In the last month, Bush has given America’s highest civilian honor to George Tenet, the man who most on the right scapegoated for his “slam dunk” on Iraq intelligence. He’s nominated a petty criminal for the nation’s top security position. And he’s repeatedly emphasized his support of Donald Rumsfeld. I think we’re reaching a point when Bush’s statement of “confidence” will be read quite differently from how it’s intended.

  • Right Back Atya

    Right Back Atya

    Karen Hughes will, I assume, deny that this is the real President Bush.

  • The Long View

    From Bob Woodward, we’ve learned that President Bush doesn’t give much thought to history — “History? We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” — but for those of us who do, the San Francisco Chronicle has put together a nice collection of statements from prominent military historians, including G. Kurt Piehler, a member of my dissertation committee.

  • Presidential Referendum

    The Choice 2004, Frontline’s documentary overview of the lives of John Kerry and George W. Bush, foregrounded two key moments from the President’s career, moments that are by now familiar to all who have followed his development. The first was his road to Damascus conversion — the moment when he turned his life over to God and gave up drinking. The second was his father’s primary loss to Pat Robertson in 1988 — the moment when George, Jr. recognized the power of the evangelical vote and thought to himself, “I can do this.” He would become an asset for his father in that regard and would later rely on heavy appeals to the Religious Right in his own successful campaigns against Ann Richards and Al Gore.

    Not surprisingly, President Bush was at his best last night when asked about his faith and family. Ignoring for a moment the relevance of such questions in a supposed domestic policy debate that never addressed the environment, the Patriot Act, or stem cell research, those two questions allowed Bush to put aside policy (which is awfully complicated) to talk instead about feelings and relationships. They allowed him to slip into the comfortable rhetoric of evangelicalism. And Bush, to his credit, hit those softballs out of the park. Bush speaks eloquently — yes, I said it — about his faith because it is clearly important to him and because it has a language all its own. But this leads me to wonder: To whom exactly was he speaking?

    The significance of Bush’s insight in 1988 was that by speaking directly to the Religious Right in a language that they understood — by hitting hard on “moral issues” like abortion, marriage, and public displays of faith; by using the coded language of “stewardship,” “devotion,” and “providence” — he could accomplish three main goals:

    1. Transform a single position (on, say, abortion) into a fixed political identification and, in so doing, make of that position an objective barometer of a candidate’s moral fitness to lead (Clinton’s whoreishness played directly into the Right’s hands in that regard). Abortion, the argument goes, is objectively wrong; therefore candidates who support abortion are objectively unworthy of office.
    2. Solidify the Republican base by offering them a moral imperative to get out and vote. The large (and growing) network of evangelical churches in America, then, becomes a grassroots movement of its own, fostered by everyone from James Dobson and Billy Graham to Tim LaHaye and Thomas Kinkade.
    3. Nail shut the coffin on those strains of New Deal Democratic politics in the South that had been dying slowly since before Carter left office, and, in the process, grab control of the House.

    And so I ask again: To whom was Bush speaking last night? Every poll confirms that Bush and Kerry have solidified their bases. There are many, many Americans who will vote to re-elect President Bush solely because of his pro-life stance or because they see in him a reflection of themselves — someone whose life was radically changed by an encounter with God and who exercises daily the rituals of evangelical life: quiet times, prayers of confession, small group Bible studies. (That, after a decade of steady declines, the number of abortions has, in fact, increased under Bush is a subject for another day.) Bush’s genuine confession of faith last night was, I’m sure, one of the few moments of grace and honesty that many voters (most of whom are understandably cynical and apathetic about politics at large) recognized in an otherwise contentious campaign season.

    And so, for the millions of voters who are comforted by the language of evangelicalism, I’m sure that Bush’s performance last night reinforced all of the values that they had already projected onto him. But what about the rest of us? What about Christians (like me) who are deeply troubled by Bush’s conflation of regressive and immoral tax restructurings and arrogant imperialism with Divine Providence? What about Christians (like me) who also believe in liberal democracy and who see a clear separation between the purposes of the State and the Church? To be frank, we see in President Bush a man of faith who is not competent to lead. We see a man who, even after four years in the White House, has great difficulty articulating even the most fundamental of his policy decisions, even when those policies are valid. We see a man who, like the kings of old, is dangerously close to turning religion into a justification for despotism.

    And what about those undecided voters in the middle who don’t understand the coded messages in Bush’s religious rhetoric, who in fact feel excluded by it? I promise that they saw a very different debate last night. They saw a man who, incapable (and even suspect) of reason, turns instead to fancy and dogma for guidance. Which leads me to believe that this election will, in a very real way, be a referendum on Bush’s 1988 insight. Granted, there are millionaires who like his tax cuts and neocons who like his foreign policy and gun owners who will vote for whomever the NRA endorses, but Bush seems to be putting his fate in the hands of his apostles. And it scares the hell out of me to think that it might work.

  • Mr. Bush Comes to Town

    Speaking approximately fifteen miles from my home yesterday, President Bush said:

    Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. . . . We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. . . . I had a choice to make: Either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time.

    Then, repeating (again and again) what has apparently become his campaign mantra, he added, “The American People are safer.”

    It’s interesting to see how Bush’s rhetoric has evolved. While admitting — finally — that WMD have not been found, he continues to litter his speech with allusions to them, though they’ve now morphed into “weapons of mass murder,” and — in a turn of phrase that would have made Monicagate-era Clinton proud — they are now modified with the nebulous term, “capability.” I wish someone would ask him what “capability” means, exactly. It seems a fairly significant question.

    It’s also interesting to see how the year-long build-up to war has been reduced by his speech to a choice between trusting Saddam and declaring war on him. Forgotten are the voices of a majority in the United Nations and the millions of protesters, who resisted this false dichotomy. Forgotten are the alternative methods of defending America founded on multilateral diplomacy and the investment of resources in homeland security and the war on Al Qaeda. It’s all just a little bit maddening.

    I didn’t have the energy to comment on the link that I posted on Thursday, but it does seem to me to be a significant (and largely unreported) story. I’ve been critical of the war since late-2002, when it became obvious that Bush would have his “show of force” regardless of what happened at the UN or in Baghdad, but I’ve tried to avoid the pessimism that marks so much of the anti-war crowd. I want Iraq to be a better, more just nation for our intervention there. The fact that Falluja, a city of 250,000 people, is now a “safe haven” for those building bombs and blowing up our soldiers and Iraqi civilians seems to call into question Bush’s claim that we are safer for his efforts. Is this his proud legacy?

  • Fahrenheit 9/11

    Fahrenheit 9/11

    Like millions of others, I lined up this weekend to see Fahrenheit 9/11. Charles Pierce summarizes my opinion pretty closely:

    Frankly, as a movie qua movie, I thought the thing was kind of a hash. My eyes glazed at the endless Bush-Carlyle-Harken-Saudis-Hallburton segment at the beginning, and I’d heard most of it before. The “Bonanza” thing was really dumb — and I mean FILM-SCHOOL dumb — and it used the wrong theme music, besides. However, he does make up for that with a music cue during C-Plus Augustus’s aircraft-carrier stunt that put me on the floor.

    That having been said, the good stuff is really good. The American soldiers are strikingly eloquent, both here and Over There, and anybody who accuses Moore of undermining Our Troops has to argue that he does so partly by giving the grunts a voice. The Senate sellout of the outraged members of the Congressional Black Caucus in the wake of the 2000 election scam should make Tom Daschle and Al Gore lock themselves in a closet for a month. (Not one Democratic senator would stand with John Lewis?)

    I wish, in fact, that Moore had cut most of the cheap Bush jokes and focused his attention, instead, on only Iraq and the American military. The last hour of Fahrenheit 9/11 is fantastic; I just wish it were cut into a film that wouldn’t alienate so many Bush voters.

  • Pretty close

    What I predicted:

    I think the president’s position on this issue has been made clear time and time again.

    What he actually said:

    In terms of this administration, we laid out the facts very clearly for the American people.

  • Friedman on Fresh Air

    In case you missed it yesterday, Terry Gross’s interview with Thomas Friedman is well worth a listen. The first twenty minutes features a discussion of globalization, in general, and outsourcing to India, specifically. In the second half of the show, he explains his nuanced position on Iraq and defends his recent change of heart regarding Bush/Cheney. (He would justifiably object to that characterization.)

  • Is It Just Me?

    From Bush’s commencement address at yesterday’s Air Force Academy graduation:

    Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States.

    From a conversation that I overheard at lunch last week:

    Yeah, it’s the biggest one in the world . . . I mean . . . in America. Whatever.

    We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American.

    And please, please tell me that at least some of those newly-commissioned Air Force officers know that the Second World War began before Pearl Harbor. I mean, we can’t expect our President to know such things, but surely the military academies require their graduates to take a history course or two.

    ADDENDUM: A co-worker just pointed out that, while Bush was quick yesterday to quote from Eisenhower (thus aligning himself rhetorically with America’s unprecedented ideological consensus of the 1950s), he carefully avoided these bits:

    “Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.” Guildhall Address. London June 12. 1945

    “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.” Canadian Club. Ottawa. Canada January 10. 1946

    “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” First Inaugural Address January 20. 1953

    “There is–in world affairs–a steady course to be followed between an assertion of strength that is truculent and a confession of helplessness that is cowardly.” State of the Union Address Februarv 2. 1953

    “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” “The Chance for Peace” Address April 16. 1953

    “The world moves, and ideas that were good once are not always good.” Press Conference. Washington. D.C. August 31. 1955

    “The only way to win World War III is to prevent it.” Radio and TV Address September 19. 1956

    “The final battle against intolerance is to be fought–not in the chambers of any legislature–but in the hearts of men.” Campaign Speech. Los Angeles. CA October 19. 1956

    “I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.” TV Talk with Prime Minister Macmillan August 31. 1959

    “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Farewell Address. Radio and TV January 17. 1961

  • Looking Back

    Yesterday, while unboxing another box — it’s a maddening, on-going process — I found the “Peace on Earth, No War on Iraq” sign that I carried in a protest during the rush to war, and it occurred to me that I am genuinely proud of that act. Proud like I’m proud of very few things in my life. It’s difficult to explain, but I know that it was absolutely the right thing to do. I guess that’s why I’m taking some comfort from quotes like these, all taken from traditionally conservative commentators:

    From Tucker Carlson:

    “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it,” he said. “It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually.”

    Mr. Carlson—never really a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy—said he had broken off from the hawkish neoconservatives who flogged the war from the get-go. “I’m getting more paleo every day,” he said, referring to the so-called paleoconservatives.

    From Thomas L. Friedman:

    “Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You’re the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics.”

    Yes, that’s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong.

    From George Will:

    Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

  • God Save the Queen

    A friend just sent me this link from the National Catholic Reporter. Joan Chittister, like so many of us, watched Condoleezza Rice’s testimony with great interest, hoping to learn more about our government’s pre-9/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. Instead, she was stunned by “the amount of self-congratulation spent on the fact of the testimony itself.” Chittister has made of the hearings an opportunity to reflect on the value of a monarchy in the 21st century, and I love her for it:

    As Americans, we are inclined to be a bit insular. Probably because we live on one of the largest islands in the world. Bounded on the east and the west by oceans and on the north and south by nations far smaller than we, the geography may have affected the boundaries of our minds, as well. We see ourselves as the center of the globe, the biggest, the best, the latest, the smartest, the most advanced, the most powerful, the most right, the paragon of all paragons in all things.

    We forget that unlike cell phones in Europe, which will work anywhere on the globe, ours don’t work outside the United States. We fail to understand that our videos can’t play too many places but on U.S. soil. We don’t even advert to the situation facing other coalition troops in Iraq. “I’ve been in the United States for six weeks,” one Brit told me, “and I have not heard a word on U.S. TV about the British soldiers in Iraq though our boys are being killed there, too, and news about U.S. engagement plays on European television daily.”

    We are a world unto ourselves. We forget, in other words, that rather than purporting to lead the human race in all things good, it may be time to join it. And government accountability may be as good a place as any to start. Most of all, at least in the Condoleezza Rice event, perhaps we have forgotten our P’s and Q’s. Or rather, their P’s and Q’s. “PQ’s” is British shorthand for “Parliamentary Questions.” In England, the Prime Minister himself goes to the House of Commons every Wednesday at noon to answer questions from members of parliament about any facet of government policy.

    More than that, the Leader of the Opposition can question or rebut the Prime Minister’s answers on the spot. No talk of “separation of powers,” no refuge-taking behind the veil of “presidential privilege.”

    Whenever I watch footage of those Wednesday afternoon shouting matches, I imagine an American president in the prime minister’s shoes. To be precise, I imagine George W. Bush in the prime minister’s shoes, but I’m all for bi-partisan bitch-slapping. The impeachment hearings certainly would have been more interesting (and perhaps seeing educated adults arguing breathlessly about the meaning of “is” would have helped reveal how absurd it all was). I disagree with many of Tony Blair’s policy decisions, but I can’t fault his intelligence or his articulateness. He handles his accusers with great aplomb and with nary a stutter or mispronunciation. And the political discourse at large benefits for it. Dubya has given fewer press conferences than any modern president, and I think we all know why. I wonder if any ideas have “popped” into his head since Tuesday night. (By the way, don’t you love the way he phrased that line, ascribing the action verb to the idea rather than to himself, as if it were his job to merely stand there waiting for inspiration? Apparently thinking is just too much work.)

  • By the Numbers

    Some interesting facts and figures from The Independent [via a Gauche], including:

    $127 billion: Amount of US budget surplus in the year that Bush became President in 2001

    $374 billion: Amount of US budget deficit in the fiscal year for 2003

    $23,920: Amount of each US citizen’s share of the national debt as of 19 January 2004

    $10.9 million: Average wealth of the members of Bush’s original 16-person cabinet

    88%: Percentage of American citizens who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes

    $42,000: Average savings members of Bush’s cabinet are expected to enjoy this year as a result in the cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes

    $42,228: Median household income in the US in 2001

    $116,000: Amount Vice-President Cheney is expected to save each year in taxes

    44%: Percentage of Americans who believe the President’s economic growth plan will mostly benefit the wealthy

    I’ve been daydreaming lately about the upcoming Presidential debates, wondering if the eventual Democratic nominee will find the courage to really take Bush to task. When I daydream, I imagine the Democratic nominee saying something like this:

    Kerry/Edwards/Dean: “Ladies and gentleman, I’m going to be perfectly frank here. Thanks to President Bush’s cut in capital gains and dividends taxes, I saved an additional $42,200 this year. Let me repeat that: While most of you were cashing your $100 refunds, I saved $42,200! I won’t embarrass President Bush or Vice-President Cheney by telling you how much each of them saved (although it’s in the public record).

    “And you know what? I don’t need it. Which is why I donated that $42,200 to my favorite charities.

    “If you believe President Bush when he says that his tax cut doesn’t benefit folks like himself and folks like me, well let me tell you something: you’re wrong. His tax cuts are wrong. And, contrary to what Vice President Cheney may have learned from President Reagan, deficits do matter!”

    I can’t think of a better way to spotlight the real effects of Bush’s tax cuts. Of course, depending on how the pundits respond, this tact might blow up in the nominee’s face. But, man, I would love to see Bush’s reaction.

  • Stuck in the Long, Hard Slog

    How many thousands of hours will future historians devote to parsing through the events of this week? Yesterday, barely 48 hours after the downing of an American helicopter in Fallujah, six — and only six — members of the Senate showed up to approve the White House’s request for $87.5 billion, thus guaranteeing our long-term commitment of lives and resources to the future occupation of Iraq. The other 94 Senators, an homogeneous mix of Republicans and Democrats, skipped the vote so as to avoid putting their names in the official record. It’s an interesting strategy. Now they can’t be accused of abandoning our troops or of pouring billions into a useless cause.

    And you know what? I can’t say that I blame them.

    I’ve made a deliberate choice in recent weeks to keep quiet on these issues, partly because I’m tired, but mostly because I just don’t know where to stand. I protested the war last winter because, like so many by my side, I could see this coming. Hell, even Bush, Sr. saw it coming. From his memoirs:

    Trying to eliminate Saddam… would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible… we would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq… there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles… Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

    But then we started dropping bombs and killing thousands of people and dismantling what remained of Iraq’s infrastructure, and everything changed. Regardless of his political motives, I gained some respect for President Bush in recent weeks when he threatened to veto any changes to the appropriations bill that would turn our $20 billion “gift” into a “loan.” We owe the people of Iraq at least that much. But, of course, then I wonder how much of our gift will actually make it to the people of Iraq, and how much will simply be funneled into the pockets of American contractors (who might or might not have direct, personal connections to the administration). But, then again, even if the money does go to those contractors, who’s to say that they aren’t, in fact, the most qualified people to do the job and that the Iraqi people won’t benefit in the long run?

    And now you see why I’ve been so quiet.

    I wish I could join the knee-jerkers on my end of the spectrum who are turning up the “bring our boys home” rhetoric. Ray McGovern makes the most convincing argument that I’ve read yet. “Whether or not U.S. policymakers can admit at this point that they were ‘terribly wrong,’” he writes, “they need to transfer real authority to the United Nations without delay and support the U.N. in overseeing a rapid return to Iraqi sovereignty.”

    But, many protest, we can’t just withdraw! Sure we can, and better now than ten years from now, as in the case of Vietnam. If it is true that we are not in Iraq to control the oil or to establish military bases with which to dominate that strategic area, we can certainly withdraw. As in Vietnam, the war is unwinnable… hear that? Unwinnable!

    If the U.S. withdraws, would there be civil war in Iraq? One cannot dismiss this possibility lightly given the history of Iraq. But it is at least as likely that a regional-federal model of government that would include substantial autonomy for the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shiites in the south (something foreshadowed by the composition of the existing Council) could begin to function in relatively short order with help from the U.N. While some degree of inter-ethnic violence could be expected, chances are good that this model would still allow a representative national government to function.

    We won’t know if we don’t try. Besides, there is no viable alternative.

    McGovern, the 27-year CIA veteran and advisor to Bush, Sr., certainly understands the issue better than I. (That he directs the Servant Leadership School is another reason that I’m heeding his warning.) And with each day, as the death toll grows (23 already in November), I grow increasingly disheartened. When I heard of the helicopter tragedy on Sunday, my first thoughts were of my own family, who just last week marked the twenty year anniversary of the death of my cousin, who piloted a Black Hawk into (but not out of) Grenada. On November 2, 2023, sixteen other families will mark similar anniversaries and will still be mourning, as ours is.

    But wish as I might, I can’t yet join the knee-jerkers, and I’m not sure why, exactly. Except that I don’t want it all to have been for nothing.

  • Bring ‘Em On

    When Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in that flight suit, I immediately thought, “From now on, just do Bush in the flight suit. Every single time.”
    — Will Ferrell, on life after Saturday Night Live

    Can you just imagine how funny that would be? George W. Bush addressing the United Nations in his flight suit. George W. Bush debating Howard Dean in his flight suit. George W. Bush sitting at his Oval Office desk trying to find Waldo in his flight suit. He really is Too Stupid to be President.

  • Trying to Understand It All

    There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
    — Harry Truman

    I’ve become interested in Iran lately. For personal reasons. I have a new student in my ESL class who arrived recently in America by way of Switzerland and Tehran. He’s a religious and political refugee with nothing but contempt for the Islamic fundamentalists who dominate his country. Each time I’ve chatted with him, he has spoken nostalgically of the days under the Shah. I shake my head knowingly and listen with rapt attention, but my fuzzy understanding of his country’s history is formed mostly by childhood memories of the hostage crisis and by the snippets of wisdom I glean from Kiarostami, Panahi, Makhmalbaf, and those other brilliant Iranian filmmakers.

    It’s a start, though. When he mentioned that his last job there had been building an apartment complex on the outskirts of the city, I said that Kiarostami’s films make those mountains look like the most beautiful place on earth. His eyes lit up, then he told me about the hours and hours he had spent hiking and rock climbing there.

    With my new friend in mind, I read with great interest H.D.S. Greenway’s review of All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. In “The Iran Conspiracy,” Greenway offers a usable introduction to the political and economic rationale for the CIA’s involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government. The parallels with the current situation are impossible to ignore.

    In the current age of American unilateralism and preemptive military interventions, it is hard to remember that just after World War II America still stood for something quite different in the Middle East. Although the US emerged from the war as “the leader of the free world,” the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese still ruled over vast empires. To many colonized people the United States was identified with Wilsonian idealism and anticolonialism. . . .

    In the early 1950s Stephen Penrose, a president of American University of Beirut, wrote: “Until recently American enterprise in the Middle East has been almost entirely non-governmental, an important difference from most other national patterns. Americans have never been seen as colonizers or subjugators and it is hard even now for most Arabs to conceive of them as such.”

    When President Bush first mentioned the “Axis of Evil,” I nearly choked, knowing that, in doing so, he was drawing a line in the sand — a line that would re-establish a Cold War-like polarity and dominate foreign policy and political discourse (and eliminate nuance in the process). I’m only now beginning to understand, however, just how intimately the Cold War and Middle East have been bound.

    The war in Korea changed America’s outlook and policies as surely as did the attack on September 11 in the current administration. The invasion from the north came in June of 1950, and convinced the United States that the Western nightmare of expanding, militant communism was coming true. The Korean War coincided with the growing crisis over Iran’s nationalization of its oil industry, and had the effect of narrowing Washington’s differences with the British at Iran’s expense. Korea played into the American decision to reverse its early opposition to an anti-Mossadegh coup. Coincidentally, the Korean War ended in July 1953, while [Kermit] Roosevelt was plotting his coup. . . .

    In many ways America’s obsession with terrorism since September 11 is an echo of its obsession with communism fifty years ago. Today the United States and Britain claim they must occupy Iraq because of the threat of terrorism. Officially, both say they want to get out as soon as possible; but ideologues in the Pentagon dream of Iraq advancing America’s interests, and Israel’s too, in the Persian Gulf as the Shah once did. Talk of a new American imperialism is becoming fashionable among conservative academics, some of them in power. They forget the lesson of British experience, which is that when a people will no longer accept it, foreign domination is almost impossible to maintain. Kinzer begins his book with an apt quote from President Truman: “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.”

  • I Just Don’t Know

    I’ve been meaning to mention this one for a few days now. Last Friday, Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the Times, “Freedom’s in 2nd Place?” raised some questions that need to be raised right about now, especially given the growing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kristof and his wife, both from immigrant families, recently visited their ancestral homes, the former in Ukraine, the latter in China. For Kristof, the juxtaposition was remarkable.

    Since 1989, when the Soviet Union opened fire on Communism and China opened fire on its citizens, China’s economy has tripled in size — and Ukraine’s has shrunk by half. Even in Russia, according to Izvestia, 40 percent of the people can’t afford toothpaste; in Karapchiv, many can’t afford toilet paper and make do with newspapers (which to me seems sacrilegious). Meanwhile, prospering China has become a global center for cosmetic surgery.

    I was as outraged as anyone that Chinese troops massacred hundreds of protesters to destroy the Tiananmen democracy movement. But China’s long economic boom has cut child mortality rates so much since 1990 that an additional 195,000 children under the age of 5 survive each year. Does this mean that the Chinese are better off for having had their students shot? No, of course not. But it does mean that authoritarian orderliness is sometimes more conducive to economic growth than democratic chaos.

    With another bombing today in Iraq, and with growing numbers of American casualties, those occasional soundbites from Iraqi civilians who claim that life was actually better under Saddam — that they at least had clean water and electricity under his dictatorship — are becoming louder and more difficult to ignore. Can Kristof’s conclusion about “authoritarian orderliness” and “democratic chaos” be applied to Iraq, despite the drastically different social, political, historical, religious, and economic conditions in Ukraine/China and the Middle East? I’m beginning to think, with great regret, that it can.

    None of this should come as a big surprise, of course. Many of us who protested the war did so not because we are anti-American (insert witty Toby Keith quip here), but because we are students of history, because we are willing to learn from the British Empire’s and Soviet Union’s mistakes. The $64,000 question is: Given current conditions, what the hell do we do about it? Some are already arguing that we should admit defeat and cut our losses. I’m not so sure.

    A dear friend of mine is now in parts unknown, doing the type of work that must be done if this war ever really will lead to greater peace and safety in the world. This is the last note I received from him:

    I consider it a privilege to be able to serve the people of Iraq. Please pray that they will find true shalom in the coming months and years.

    Quite an antidote to the cynicism, eh? Here’s what I want to see. I want President Bush to stand before a nationally televised audience, and I want him to commit a trillion (with a T) dollars to Iraq’s economic recovery. Oh yeah, and he should tell those military families who stood united behind him in February and March that their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers will be serving mandatory one-year deployments, because that is what it will take to do the right thing here. Then, I want him to humbly seek the guidance of the United Nations, and I want him to hand over administrative authority to a multilateral coalition. And then I want Bush and Congress to pay for the whole damn thing with a radically progressive tax restructuring. Because, you know what? War is costly, peace will cost a helluva lot more, and America is the only country capable of footing the bill.

    Will it happen? Nope. None of it. But it’s the only thing resembling a solution that I can come up with.

  • Dreaming of a 28 Hour Day

    I hadn’t planned to take a four day break from blogging, but life — as it’s wont to do — keeps getting in the way. And by “life” I mostly mean Sobig viruses, network flubs, and frustrated faculty, all of which have conspired this week to make my day job unusually exhausting. Well, there’s that and the freelance writing projects, reading assignments, and Jack, the four-week old kitten we’re fostering, whose cuteness doesn’t quite make up for his refusal to be weaned or his tendency to pee on walls, clothes, carpets, towels, blankets, couches, and people.

    Universities Left Behind

    The Times published two interesting pieces yesterday. In the first, “Bush ‘Compassion’ Agenda: A Liability in ’04?” Elisabeth Bumiller argues that Bush’s broken promises might just catch up with him. The pattern should be familiar by now: Bush stands before a supportive crowd, drapes himself in the simple symbols of patriotism and Christian charity, then stumps for legislation that, if enacted, would demonstrate his “compassion.” But, of course, he never gets around to the actual politicking necessary to see that legislation through Congress. Instead, we’re left with frustrated people like Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal and a former Bush supporter.

    Mr. Wallis said Mr. Bush had told him as president-elect that “I don’t understand how poor people think,” and appealed to him for help by calling himself “a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to.” Now, Mr. Wallis said, “his policy has not come even close to matching his words.”

    Add to that such highly-touted planks as AIDS funding, faith-based initiatives, child tax credits, and his No Child Left Behind act, and you get a whole mess of sound and fury but nothing much of significance. Well, that’s not entirely true. You also get great sound bites and photo-ops.

    Only tangentially related is “Universities in Decline” from the Times editors. It’s a simple, four-paragraph statement of a disturbing fact: “Public colleges and universities, which grant more than three-quarters of this country’s degrees, have been steadily undermined by state budget cuts and a mood of legislative indifference.” No kidding. Last summer, thousands of my colleagues and I were deemed “non-essential” employees and given a week off when the Tennessee legislature was unable to balance its budget. (Unable, even, after reallocating its tobacco settlement money.) During my five years in Knoxville, three tuition hikes have placed a greater and greater burden on students, who are receiving fewer and fewer services in return. It’s sad.

    And only tangentially related to that is this bit from the latest issue of Harper’s. A co-worker transcribed and forwarded this to me, and I’m now very curious to read the whole piece, “What’s Wrong with Public Education”:

    Public education is not intended to help the individual but to create a populace that is easy to control, says John Taylor Gatto, the author of four books on education and a former New York State and New York City teacher of the year. The real purpose of mandatory public education, he says, is to train young people to be reflexively obedient to authority and to fill social roles that benefit government and commerce. “It is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform,” he writes.

    The problem is not that public education is failing to reach its goals, but that it is succeeding in producing a culture of childishness and consumption, he says. “If we wanted to, we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids ‘take’ an education rather than merely ‘receive’ a schooling,” he writes.

    Perhaps if President Bush had, at some point, learned to “take” his education he would better understand the consequences of his actions (including his frustrating refusals to act).

    And Some Final Thoughts

    From June Chittister’s The Rule of St. Benedict: Insight for the Ages:

    A Zen story tells of two monks walking down a muddy, rain-logged road on the way back to their monastery after a morning of begging who saw a beautiful young girl standing beside a large deep puddle unable to get across without ruining her clothes. The first monk, seeing the situation, offered to carry the girl to the other side, though monks had nothing whatsoever to do with women. The second monk was astonished by the act but said nothing about it for hours. Finally, at the end of the day, he said to his companion, “I want to talk to you about that girl.” And the first monk said, “Dear brother, are you still carrying that girl. I put her down hours ago.”

    The things we ruminate on, the things we insist on carrying in our minds and heart, the things we refuse to put down, the Rule warns us, are really the things that poison us and erode our souls. We dull our senses with television and wonder why we cannot see the beauty that is around us. We hold on to things outside of us instead of concentrating on what is within that keeps us noisy and agitated. We run from experience to experience like children in a candy store and wonder how serenity has eluded us. It is walking through life with a relaxed grasp and a focused eye that gets us to where we’re going. Dwelling on unessentials and, worse, filling the minds of others with them distracts from the great theme of our lives. We must learn to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

  • F— Off, Old Europe

    The arrogance of this bunch is just staggering. Tell me — is there any legitimate justification for our continued snubbing of the U.N.? I mean, other than a general, “nobody’s gonna tell me what to do” stupidity?

    “The administration is not willing to confront going to the Security Council and saying, ‘We really need to make Iraq an international operation,’ ” said an administration official. “You can make a case that it would be better to do that, but right now the situation in Iraq is not that dire.”

    I really wish Bush would just come out and tell the truth: “Of course we knew there weren’t any WMD. Of course we knew that democracy in Iraq was a pipedream. Don’t you get it yet? We want 100,000+ heavily-armed American troops stationed smack dab in the center of the Middle East. And for as long as (is politically) possible. It’s the only way we can show ’em who’s boss.”

    Another Really Short Take. After more than a year of waiting, I was finally able to see Sokurov’s Russian Ark today. What a beautiful, beautiful film. I knew that I would be impressed by the craft of it all, but I hadn’t expected to be greeted by such a compelling narrative. The last twenty minutes are the best cinema I’ve seen all year. So much history and tragedy and nostalgia and sorrow — and all from a ballroom dance sequence, a steadicam shot through a sea of self-conscious extras, and Sergei Dreiden’s remarkable face. I doubt I’ll see a better film in 2003.

  • Theology of Empire

    This weekend I received the latest issue of Sojourners, in which editor-in-chief Jim Wallis discusses the neocon move toward empire and the bad theology that Bush uses to promote it. The article isn’t available online yet — all the more reason to subscribe — so here’s a quick preview:

    The much-touted Religious Right is now a declining political factor in American life. The New York Times’ Bill Keller recently observed, “Bombastic evangelical power brokers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have aged into irrelevance, and now exist mainly as ludicrous foils.” The real theological problem in America today is no longer the Religious Right but the nationalistic religion of the Bush administration — one that confuses the identity of the nation with the church, and God’s purposes with the mission of American empire.

    America’s foreign policy is more than pre-emptive, it is theologically presumptuous: not only unilateral, but dangerously messianic; not just arrogant, but bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous. George Bush’s personal faith has prompted a profound self-confidence in his “mission” to fight the “axis of evil,” his “call” to be commander-in-chief in the war against terrorism, and his definition of America’s “responsibility” to “defend the . . . hopes of all mankind.” This is a dangerous mix of bad foreign policy and bad theology.

    But the answer to bad theology is not secularism; it is, rather, good theology. It is not always wrong to invoke the name of God and the claims of religion in the public life of a nation, as some secularists say. Where would we be without the prophetic moral leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Oscar Romero?

    Wallis’s piece doesn’t offer any particularly revelatory insights into Bush’s agenda, but it’s a great read because it synthesizes so much material and reexamines it through his (Wallis’s) humble perspective. And on a day that I discovered this, it seemed that a little humility was in order.

    A couple of fun factoids from the same issue:

    • CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors increased 79 percent from 2001 to 2002. The average defense industry CEO in 2002 made $11.3 million — 577 times as much as the average U.S. army private on the ground in Iraq.
    • In 1999 the average wait for public housing in Miami was 9 months; in 2002 it is 84 months.

  • Vigorous Democracy

    I don’t know whether suddenly I’m hearing more talk about democracy because I’m listening better, or prompting it. But if the clearest essential for a vigorous democracy is a citizenry that cares, I’d rather think that my conversations are signs of a nation rousing itself in defense of democratic traditions and institutions.
    — Margaret Krome

    I’ve been thinking the same thing lately, though that might be more a reflection of the company I keep than anything like a national trend. During Clinton’s first campaign, I was a typical 20 year old undergrad — a kid who considered himself a “registered apathetic.” (I used those exact words to describe my political leanings then.) Over the next decade I became increasingly aware politically, and increasingly interested. And then came Bush/Gore . . .

    George W. Bush has turned me into a political animal, and I’m not the only one. Everywhere I go now, I find myself stepping into political discussions. Wars, dead soldiers, and budget deficits will do that to a country, I guess. Hopefully, history is a good indicator here. Johnson’s an interesting example. So’s Bush 41. And instead of announcing the golden age of neo-conservative hegemony that many had predicted, Newt’s Contract with America in ’94 helped to set the stage for Clinton’s landslide re-election. I’m beginning to think that Dubya’s club-’em-and-smirk-while-you-do-it agenda might just be inspiring the same kind of counter-movement across the left-of-center. Hell, if he keeps it up, Bush might just lose the center, too. Surely Margaret Krome and I aren’t the only people who are noticing this.

  • The Precision of Words

    Anyone who caught the Blair/Bush press conference a few days ago might sympathize with Philip Roth. Those two leaders, now joined at the hip politically, make for such an interesting juxtaposition — one a well-read academic and well-spoken debater; the other a shoot-from the hip, “just like one of us,” rambling wreck. After watching his companion casually slip the word “compunction” into an off-the-cuff remark, Bush got that wild-eyed look again and began spewing stuff like:

    As I understand, there’s been a lot of speculation over in Great Britain, we got a little bit of it here, about whether or not the — whether or not the actions were based upon valid information.

    We can debate that all day long until the truth shows up. And that’s what’s going to happen. And we based our decisions on good, sound intelligence, and the — our people are going to find out the truth. And the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence; there’s no doubt in my mind.

    I mention Roth because in his recent fiction he seems to have become preoccupied by the degradation, sensationalizing, and politicization of language. In The Human Stain, for instance, (soon to find larger public acclaim, by the way, when the film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins is released in the fall), the main character is undone by a single word, spoken innocently but exploded by an agenda. At one point, he returns to Athena college, the site of his tragedy, and overhears a conversation between two young professors, who are debating the Clinton/Lewinski scandal. Using the young intern as a personification of her generation’s intellectual vacancy, one says to the other:

    Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There’s one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious , must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says “closure” I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure.

    This passage caught my attention this morning as I was typing up notes because of three words: ambiguous, knotty, and mysterious. I worry when politicians denounce ambiguity, when they normalize and conventionalize concepts as mysterious as democracy and history. People die unnecessarily as a result. Families are destroyed and resources are wasted. Someone should flunk ’em.

  • Looking Back

    The latest polls are in, and Mr. Bush can’t be pleased. A quick run-down:

    • Bush’s overall approval rating has dropped to 59%, well below Bush 41’s numbers at this point twelve years ago.
    • 52% of those polled believe there has been an “unacceptable” level of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
    • 57% still consider the war with Iraq to have been worth the sacrifice, down from 70% ten weeks ago.
    • 50% said Bush intentionally exaggerated evidence suggesting Iraq had WMD.
    • 80% fear the United States will become bogged down in a long and costly peacekeeping mission in Iraq, up eight points in less than three weeks.

    The good news, as far as I’m concerned, is that, with the American population growing increasingly concerned over our military occupation, Bush will be less likely to instigate that conflict with Iran or Syria that I have been predicting would come some time in the weeks leading up to primary season. Also, with Dean’s campaign in much better shape than was Clinton’s in ’91, and with Congressional Democrats finally finding some backbone, things are looking better for 2004.

    What I find more interesting, though, are the comments from the “man on the street” that always accompany the findings of polls like this. In the linked article, Betty Stillwell, 71, says, “We were supposed to be in there and out. By now I thought they would have set up a government, and they haven’t done that yet. . . . I think the whole thing was poorly planned, no thought to the aftermath.” Similar sentiments were expressed by interviewees on the Friday edition of ABC Nightly News. One woman, the mother of a 20-year-old serviceman, said that she had stood confidently behind President Bush in February and March (as was her patriotic duty), but that she was surprised and saddened to discover, four months later, that her son was still in the desert, still at risk.

    Huh?

    I totally sympathize with this woman’s frustration (believe me), but to act as though the “untidiness” of post-war Iraq is a big surprise only proves your ignorance. Today I discovered one of the perks of writing a blog. Blogging acts as a record of sorts — a map of texts and happenings through which I can now plot the course of my changing passions and opinions. Or, in other, more self-congratulatory words, it’s like a big We Told You So. (I never said I wouldn’t be petty if it served my needs.) So for those two well-intentioned women (and others like them) who are surprised by how messy things have become, here’s a quick look back through Long Pauses:

    On a Saturday morning in February, millions of people stood up against this war. And just a few days earlier, I warned about what would happen if we made foreign policy decisions based on irrational fear rather than on historical analysis. That post echoes the comments I made on January 30 when, in response to the now much-discussed State of the Union, I wrote: “The histories of nations that have exercised imperial force under the guise of Providence should be telling to all but the most blindly ill-informed and arrogant.”

    On January 2nd there was Robert Scheer in The Nation, writing:

    we are mobilizing our massive forces against a weakened secular dictator 6,000 miles away who doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with a series of devastating terrorist attacks. What is happening here? Certainly not the construction of a coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing the security of the United States or our allies. This is an Administration that in two years has so mucked up our approach to the world that merely applying the demands of logic is made to appear unpatriotic.

    And speaking of those links between Iraq and Al-Quaeda. . . . I was writing about Bush’s rhetorical strategies nine months ago, two weeks into the life of this blog. Responding to his September 12 speech, I wrote:

    After being pressed for several weeks to provide evidence that links Iraq to Al-Quaeda, and after failing repeatedly to do so, the President has instead linked them rhetorically, which, to be honest, is all that he really needs to do in order to sway public opinion back to his favor. Suddenly Hussein has been transformed into a new Osama, a figurehead and weapons broker.

    And it was in the same speech that President Bush first began promising a future in which the people of Iraq would “join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world.” My response:

    Man, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Again, I applaud his spoken motivations, but I just don’t see this administration or the American voters being willing to put forth the long term efforts necessary for such a radical change. Let me be clear here: I have complete faith in the abilities of our armed services, and I have no doubt that we could quickly destabilize Iraq and oust its leadership (though doing so will come at the cost of thousands of lives, some ours, most theirs). But what happens next? That’s the answer that I most wanted to hear yesterday and the one that I knew he would carefully sidestep.

    Downright prescient, eh?

    Now, finally, a majority of Americans are beginning to ask the questions that so many of us wanted answered nearly a year ago. These in my very first blog entry, for instance. Norman Mailer and George Kennan warned us. Reverend Fritz Rich warned us. Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and Republican Representative John Duncan warned us. Countless church leaders warned us. Chris Hedges warned us. And Shane Claiborne certainly warned us.

    In October Pete Stark stood on the floor of the House and asked a question that his less courageous peers only now have the balls to ask:

    What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?

    I wonder how that mother interviewed by ABC last night would respond?

  • It Smells Like . . . Victory

    One of the most iconic and ironic lines in all of American film. Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Kilgore — a name straight out of Dickens — is framed in one of those low-angle, “Hollywood Hero” shots. Mortars explode around him, but he moves confidently, oblivious to or unshaken by (I’m not sure which) the danger and destruction that threatens to end him. Kilgore is an anachronism — an archetypal war hero stripped from a WWII service film and dropped into chaos. His attempts to impose discipline and order on the situation are both absurd and strangely fascinating. Ask anyone what they remember about Apocalypse Now and most will mention Kilgore. Most will even remember his most famous line.

    I was reminded of that scene today when I read The Progressive‘s recent interview with Martin Sheen, in which he discusses the potential of civil disobedience, the pitfalls of being an outspoken liberal, and the wellspring of his resilient faith. I was aware of Sheen’s activism, of course — it’s near impossible not to be when he is so often demonized by the conservative media — but I’d never heard him explain so rationally and passionately his motivations. Who knew that he would come off sounding like a modern Dorothy Day? Sheen’s answer to the final question is damn near inspiring:

    Q: Do you despair, or do you have hope?

    Sheen: No, no, I never despair, because George Bush is not running the universe. He may be running the United States, he may be running the military, he may be running even the world, but he is not running the universe, he is not running the human heart. A higher power is yet to be heard in this regard, and I’m not so sure that we haven’t already heard, we just haven’t been listening. I still believe in the nonviolent Jesus and the basic human goodness present in all of us.

    If all of the issues that I have worked on were depending on some measure of success, it would be a total failure. I don’t anticipate success. We’re not asked to be successful, we are only asked to be faithful. I couldn’t even tell you what success is.

  • Give ‘Em Hell, Bill

    A few days ago I read John Nichols’s report from the Take Back America conference, where Bill Moyers delivered a rousing speech “that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one of the most ‘amazing and spellbinding’ addresses he had ever heard.” Naturally I was anxious to read it for myself, and now a full transcript is finally available online. In just under 6,000 words, Moyers outlines the history of America’s Populist and Progressive movements, unearths the historical precedents for the Grover Norquist / Karl Rove School of Realpolitik, and issues a challenge to left-leaning politicians and voters alike: “This is your story – the progressive story of America,” he concludes. “Pass it on.”

    It really is a fantastic speech — much too long for me to adequately comment on it here. I do want to snip this one paragraph, though, which reminded me of something I had written just a few days ago.

    In “Sin and Society,” written in 1907, [Edward A. Ross] told readers that the sins “blackening the face of our time” were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as such. “The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a ‘rake-off’ instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor.” In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House to write their own regulations.

    And a not-so-random snippet from “The Trouble with ‘Being Left in This Country’: Tony Kushner’s Progressive Theology” (a work in progress, all rights reserved):

    In A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner’s first major play, he dissects one of those “moments,” revisiting the final days of the Weimar Republic, when, with its competing factions divided by petty politics and by interference from the Cominterm in Moscow, the German Left stood idly by as the National Socialist Workers’ Party swept to power. In case the parallels between Weimar Berlin and Reagan-era Washington, D.C. were too obscure for that first audience who saw Bright Room in 1985 — or for any audience since, for that matter — Kushner also places on stage with his German characters a contemporary American Jewish woman. Zillah Katz — “BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies” — is like a living embodiment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. A polemicist and provocateur, she repeatedly interrupts the relatively naturalistic drama in order to comment on the action, and she does so in an explicitly didactic fashion. At her most outrageous, Zillah screams at the audience: “REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DON’T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!” And in an image that could serve as an epigraph for Kushner’s next play, Angels in America, she adds: “Don’t put too much stock in a good night’s sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who’re giving the rest of us bad dreams.”

    “Sleep the sleep of the just” is my favorite line from Moyers’s speech. That strange metaphor — the idea that sleeping soundly somehow demonstrates moral rightness — has shown up in a few odd places lately, most notably in the frequent reports that President Bush is sleeping well despite (or, perhaps, because of) the war. Well thank God for small blessings, eh?

  • Red Five Standing By

    I subscribe to the Pop Culture Association & American Culture Association listserv, which typically fills my in-box only with announcements of calls for papers and research queries. But occasionally someone’s dander will rise and an interesting discussion will follow. This week, several participants have been debating the merits of the various Cultural Studies textbooks, and from that debate has blossomed a chat about the practical impact of myth and heroes on American politics. I was only skimming the messages until I discovered this note, written by John Shelton Lawrence, co-author of The Myth of the American Superhero (2002):

    I would challenge people to think about President Bush’s donning of the flight suit today, engaging in flight, appearing with his flight helmet on deck of the Abraham Lincoln and place it in the context of the film Independence Day. Is the president being scripted to match the plot of a superheroic action president in the film? The question seems worth exploring.

    If you’re at all intrigued by this question, Dr. Lawrence has posted an interesting article on his Web server. “Post 9/11: Who Can Save the Day?” is an anecdotal but historically sensitive discussion of the “relationships between U.S. foreign policy makers and some important popular artifacts.” He takes on, in short order: Teddy Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, FDR and William Randolph Hearst, Clinton’s and Dole’s celebration of Independence Day, and Dubya’s affinity for Rambo. The last section, as you might have guessed, is the most relevant today. After describing the administration’s push for the American Services Members Protection Act, Lawrence concludes with this fun little anecdote (and by “fun” I mean horrifying):

    In February 2002 the president’s pleasure in superheroic fantasy and his eagerness to use it in conveying his own political values was revealed in an incident with Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel. To accompany a “Masters of the Universe” article on the Bush administration’s crusade against evil, Spiegel created a satirical cover depicting each national security player in the role of a zealous destroyer from American popular culture. George W. Bush, surrounded by his advisers, received a muscular Rambo body holding an automatic weapon and ammunition belts.

    Daniel Coats, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, visited Der Spiegel‘s editorial offices — not to protest the caricature or the article’s viewpoint about reckless unilateralism — but to report that “the President was flattered,” whereupon he ordered thirty-three poster-size renditions of the cover for the White House. Each policy maker on the cover reportedly wanted a copy.

    [insert loud guffaw, deep sigh, profane tirade, or sarcastic insult — whichever best suits you.]

  • The Agenda

    At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me begin by saying that, within the strange confines of my personal experience, many of the “Regular Joes” who support President Bush and his agenda seem to do so because he is pro-life and because he evidences publicly the recognizable signs of a “committed walk with God.” Within this community — this large, evangelical sub-culture — voting Republican is a “moral” act, a single gesture by which evangelicals hope to restore America to its Christian foundations (whatever that means — and, of course, it doesn’t mean anything, which is the beauty of empty, historically-blind rhetoric, but that’s another rant entirely).

    So with that out of the way — along with the obligatory acknowledgement that there are, of course, notable exceptions to my rule — I want to dig into William Grieder’s recent piece for The Nation, “Rolling Back the 20th Century,” which does a nice job, I think, of summarizing the Neoconservative agenda. The thesis of his argument, as implied by the title of the article, is that, since Reagan’s election in 1980, the Right has moved slowly but steadily toward a dismantling of New Deal America with the ultimate goal of returning us to the “lost Eden” of the McKinley Era. This is the line that really grabbed by attention:

    Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right’s historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing?

    If you’re a regular reader of Long Pauses, then you know that I’m plagued by the word “praxis” — the symbiotic relationship of theory and action. I was reminded of it again last night as I finished reading Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s 1970 account of a fund-raising party held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein in honor of the Black Panthers. At one point, the trio of Bernstein, Otto Preminger, and Barbara Walters (!) assail Don Cox with pointed questions concerning the risks of violent revolution, and the leather-clad, afro-ed Panther is able only to regurgitate the Maoist jargon of “petty bourgeois oppression” and “individual freedoms.” He isn’t very convincing.

    But the Neocons are. I keep thinking of a line from Angels in America, when Joe, the mostly-closeted Mormon, Republican lawyer, asks Louis, his Jewish, progressive lover: “Do you want to be pure or do you want to be effective?” The Neocons seem to have discovered praxis in spades, though it’s praxis built upon grossly immoral theories of capital. Grieder summarizes the main points of that agenda, each of which is explained in much greater detail in the article:

    • Eliminate federal taxation of private capital, as the essential predicate for dismantling the progressive income tax.
    • Gradually phase out the pension-fund retirement system as we know it, starting with Social Security privatization but moving eventually to breaking up the other large pools of retirement savings, even huge public-employee funds, and converting them into individualized accounts.
    • Withdraw the federal government from a direct role in housing, healthcare, assistance to the poor and many other long-established social priorities, first by dispersing program management to local and state governments or private operators, then by steadily paring down the federal government’s financial commitment.
    • Restore churches, families and private education to a more influential role in the nation’s cultural life by giving them a significant new base of income — public money.
    • Strengthen the hand of business enterprise against burdensome regulatory obligations, especially environmental protection, by introducing voluntary goals and “market-driven” solutions.
    • Smash organized labor.

    Later in the piece, Grieder boils it down even further: “Dismantle the common assets of society, give people back their tax money and let everyone fend for himself.” It’s an oversimplification, obviously, but it’s also a frighteningly accurate summary of Bush’s domestic policy. I guess the question that plagues me is: How did this agenda become the guiding light for America’s evangelicals? How did a Church founded on Christ’s ministry become united behind a political ideology that elevates market forces over justice and mercy? Do we so completely lack imagination and understanding of history that we’ve concluded that this is the best we can do?

    Grieder concludes:

    I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision.

    Perhaps it could be modified slightly and still retain some of its weight:

    I do not believe that most Christians want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of the evangelical church. Constructing an effective response requires a theology that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more graceful, just, and merciful vision.

    Just doing my part for the cause.