2003-04-03
Yay for Baseball and smart people, boo for my bank!
Okay first of all, I am so glad baseball season has started. I love baseball and hot men in tight pants isn't a bad thing either. Since it's the beginning of the season, I can say this might be the year for the Cubs to win it all!
Secondly, my bank account is still all fucked up. So I checked today and my deposit from Tuesday had been credited to my account, but the deposit from yesterday which had previously been credited to my account was nowhere to be found. This is a huge problem because I went ahead and spent part of that money last night and now if that deposit isn't credited, I'm over my account balance. I hate my damn bank!
Finally, I was handed an article by an Anti-War protester on Tuesday and I ususally toss that kind of stuff in the first trash can I see. However, I decided to take a look at it. I discovered that it was actually quite a good article from the April 2003 issue of Harper's Magazine. I'm including it in this journal in case any one wants to read it. If not...don't.
Cause for Dissent: Ten Questions for the Bush Regime by Lewis H. Lapham
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. –Archibald MacLeish
As director of the government’s ministry of propaganda during World War II, Archibald MacLeish knew that dissent seldom walks on stage to the sound of warm and welcoming applause. As a poet and later the librarian of Congress, he also knew that liberty has ambitious enemies, and that the survival of the American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to rely, if only momentarily, on the strength of their own thought. We can’t know what we’re about, or whether we’re telling ourselves too many lies, unless we can see or hear one another think out loud. Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement, but a democracy stands in need of as many questions as its citizens can ask of their own stupidity and fear. Voiced in the first-person singular and synonymous with the courage of a mind that a former editor of this magazine once described as “unorganized, unrecognized, unorthodox and unterrified,” dissent is what rescues the democracy from a slow death behind closed doors.
Unpopular during even the happiest of stock market booms, in time of war dissent attracts the attention of the police. The parade marshals regard any wandering away from the line of march as unpatriotic and disloyal; the unlicensed forms of speech come to be confused with treason and registered as crimes, and in the skyboxes of the news media august personages reaffirm America’s long-standing alliance with God and the Statue of Liberty. Counting through the list of the country’s exemplary virtues—a just cause, an invincible air force, a noble truth—they find no reasons for dissent. On the threshold of a war in Iraq, I can think of ten:
1. Agitprop
I don’t know how else to characterize the Bush Administration’s effort to convince the public of the need for an immediate American assault on the land of Mordor. Whether expressed in the language of religious exorcism by President Bush in his annual message to Congress or chopped into nourishing sound bites by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for fans of CNN’s Larry King Live, the government’s relentless ad campaign rests on the principle announced nearly a year ago by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in Brussels. Asked by a crowd of European journalists for proof of the assertion that weapons of mass destruction confronted the United States with a clear and present danger, Rumsfeld said, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell didn’t come up with a substantially different explanation in early February when he presented the United Nations Security Council with a slide show meant to serve as a trailer for the forthcoming action movie soon to be filmed in the deserts of Mesopotamia. The surveillance photographs of Iraqi trucks demanded the kind of arcane exposition that New York art critics attach to exhibitions of abstract painting. By way of adding drama to the performance, Powell held up a vial of white powder (meant to be seen as anthrax but probably closer in its chemistry to granulated sugar) and rolled tape of two satellite telephone intercepts of Iraqi military officers screaming at one another in Arabic, but he didn’t provide an answer to the question, Why does America attack Iraq when Iraq hasn’t attacked America? In lieu of demonstrable provocations Mr. Powell offered disturbing signs and evil portents, and when the voice of Osama bin Laden turned up a week later on an audio tape broadcast from Qatar, the secretary seized upon the occasion to discover a “partnership” between Al Qaeda and the government of Iraq. No such conclusion could be drawn from even a careless reading of the transcript, but to Mr. Powell the sending of a message (any message) proved that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein somehow had morphed into the same enemy.
The secretary’s power points didn’t add to the sum of a convincing argument, but then neither did the advertising copy for the Spanish-American War or the sales promotions for the war in Vietnam, and if the agitprop failed to persuade the French, Russian, or Chinese representatives to the Security Council, it was more than good enough for the emissaries form the major American news media. Our television networks and large-circulation newspapers trade in the same commodity. They identify themselves as instruments of the American government rather than as witnesses beholden to the American people, and they bring to their work the talents and the haircuts of expensive corporate lobbyists. All but unanimous in their infatuation with President Bush (a Churchillian figure, sometimes Lincolnesque), they’ve been packing their safari hats ever since the navy sent the carriers to the Persian Gulf. In Secretary Powell’s remarks to the U.N. the editors of the Wall Street Journal discovered echoes of Talleyrand and Metternich.
2. The Korean Exception
The Bush Administration makes a boast of its “moral clarity” and principled resolve, also of its willingness to “exercise power without conquest” and “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.” Why then no imbecile invasion of North Korea?
Although cold in winter, the country abounds in unfortunate strangers, and unlike the reports being brought back to New York in February by Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency director general Mohamed ElBaradei the news from Pyongyang that month amounted to something more than a threatening hypothesis. A Communist despotism controlled by a heartless dictator easily the peer of Saddam Hussein had resumed its manufacture of enriched uranium and expelled the U.N. inspectors assigned to monitor its Yongbyon nuclear reactor complex. Three bombs were thought to exist, several others were said to be within a few months of production; the civilian population had been reduced to near starvation, and the army, believed to number a million soldiers, heavily armed and fanatic in its devotion to “the Dear Leader,” was stationed within artillery range of the 30,000 American troops just south of the demilitarized zone. The North Korean threat was both plainly visible and alarmingly present, but it was not one against which the United States cared to launch the wrath of eagles. Confronted with Kim Jong Il’s blunt demand for ransom money (payment acceptable in trade agreements, bank credit, or bags of rice), the Bush Administration referred the unpleasantness to the Untied Nations—the same United Nations that Secretary Rumsfeld had deemed “irresponsible” and on “a path of ridicule” because of its reluctance to endorse an American expedition to Baghdad. The referral dimmed the lamp of moral clarity, and the cautious retreat to the policy of containment that President Bush had declared obsolete clarified the distinction between threats both real and apparent and those cleverly hidden by illusory enemies who also happen to command small armies and govern countries rich with oil.
3. “We refuse to live in fear.”
President Bush presented the statement to an audience in Cincinnati on October 7, and of all lies told by the government’s faith healers and gun salesmen, I know of none as cowardly. Where else does the Bush Administration ask the American people to live except in fear? On what other ground does it justify its deconstruction of the nation’s civil liberties?
Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, no week has passed in which the government has failed to issue warnings of a sequel. Sometimes it’s the director of the FBI, sometimes the attorney general or an unnamed source in the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security, but always it’s the same message: suspect your neighbor and watch the sky; by duct tape, avoid the Washington Monument, hide the children. Let too many citizens begin to ask impertinent questions about the shambles of the federal budget or the disappearance of a forest in Montana and the government sends another law-enforcement officer to a microphone with a story about a missing tube of aluminum or a newly discovered nerve gas.
4. Somnambulism
Washington these days suffers no shortage of visionary geopoliticians touting the wonders of an American empire imposing, by act of conscience and force of arms, peace on earth and good will toward men. The prophets enjoy the patronage of power, some of them White House privy counselors, others advisers to the Pentagon, all of them utopian anarchists. They envision a slum-clearance project for the whole of the Islamic Middle East, Iraq the first in a series of modal democracies soon to be erected in Syria, Iran, Libya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and when reading their articles in the policy journals, I remember a remark I once came across in a novelist’s description of four Marxist assassins seated in a café table in Paris in the 1920’s: “They believe everything they can prove, and they can prove everything they believe.”
The Bush Administration employs a good many ideologues afflicted with a similarly messianic turn of mind and who take for granted the stupefaction of an electorate too lazy to open its mail. Assuming a general state of the government’s press releases count on an audience that thinks of politics as trivial entertainment. The supposition isn’t entirely wrong.
The successful operation of a democracy relies on acts of government by no means easy to perform, and for the last twenty years we have been unwilling to do the work. Choosing to believe that the public good comes to us at the discretion of private wealth, all politicians therefore as interchangeable as hotel bartenders, we don’t bother to vote, don’t read through the list of budget appropriations, content ourselves with the opinions advertised on prime-time television by talk-show guests holding up little vials of important news—sometimes anthrax, usually sugar. Our prosperity finances the habits of indolence. We leave the small print for the lawyers to clean and maybe press, and in place of an energetic politics we get by with nostalgic sentiment and the public-spirited postcards sent by PBS—elections a cascade of balloons, liberty a trust fund, and American the land in which money never dies.
5. The Insolence of Office
In a recent and best-selling book, Bush at War, Bob Woodward presents a portrait of the president so flattering that had it been rendered in oil on canvas, the curator of the White House art collection might wish to hang it in the Blue Room. One of the bons mots that Woodward attributes to his subject could as easily have been attributed to Louis XIV: “That’s the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe some body needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I own anybody an explanation.”
The administration’s senior ministers share the view. Often petulant and openly contemptuous of opinions not their own, they listen to opposing argument with impatience and disdain. At the United Nations last winter, when the French and German statesmen raised pointed questions about both the necessity and the timing of a police raid on Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld received the skepticism as an insult. France and Germany, he said, spoke for an “old Europe” long ago reduced to a harmless tourist attraction, France a country famous for its vanity and pride; Germany stubborn and wrongheaded.
At the higher altitudes of Washington officialdom, the tone of condescension is traditional. Dean Acheson, secretary of state in the Truman Administration, understood as long ago as 1947 that if America wished to do as it pleased in the world, it would be necessary to come up with a slogan that could serve as both a reason and an explanation for high-handed, unilateral decision. Knowing that the American people might balk at the prospect of the cold War if they thought the strategy open to discussion, Acheson explained to his associates in the State Department that the country’s foreign policy must be presented as “nonpartisan,” that any and all political argument “stops at the water’s edge.”
“If we can make them believe that,” Acheson said, “we’re off to the races.”
Over the next two generations the word “nonpartisan” proved invaluable to a succession of presidents bent on waging declared and undeclared wars in Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, Cambodia, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Angola and the Persian Gulf. Replace the once magic word “nonpartisan” with the phrase “never-ending war on terrorism,” and we arrive at the policy of Rumsfeld the Implacable and the wisdom of Cheney the Unseen.
6. Negligence
The destruction of the World Trade Center evoked an immense surge or pro-American feeling everywhere in the world—in Cairo and Amman as well as in London and Paris. Within the brief span of nineteen months our government has managed to squander almost the whole of the asset. Mocked by its failure to find Osama bin Laden, the Bush Administration has bullied our allies, scorned the United Nations, subverted the principle of international law, recruited an angry host of new enemies, and exchanged the hard currency of our inherent idealism for the counterfeit coin of a hair-brained cynicism.
In return for what? A “regime change” in Afghanistan. The horse-drawn and all but helpless Taliban put to rout at a cost of more than $15 billion, Kabul remanded to the custody of a freedom-loving warlord, and tranquility along the border of Pakistan achieved with a $1 billion bribe paid to the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf.
7. Our Staunchest Ally
When I look at the handsomely detailed maps with which the Pentagon marks out the road to glory in Iraq, I’m sure that I miss a good many of the military fine points, but I never doubt that the maps must gladden the heart of Osama bin Laden. Who but Osama stands to pluck so rich a prize from the fires of holy crusade? Fresh recruits for Al Qaeda, the Western democracies at odds with one another (and their intelligence agencies therefore less cooperative), the scourge of civil war conceivable spread across the whole of the Middle East, the Saudi Arabian monarchy maybe overthrown, and Israel possible forced onto the reefs of destruction.
As utopian an anarchist as the Washington apostles of American empire, Osama preaches a parallel vision of a world transformed, justice restored, and the desert cleansed of its impurities. President Bush knows that the work of pious destruction is blessed by the God of Abraham and that liberty is the gift of heaven and not the work of men. Allah the all–merciful sends Osama an American army bring the torches and the mops.
8. Barbed Wire
Unable to erect a secure perimeter around the whole life and landscape of a free society, the government bureaus of public safety solve the technical problems by seeing to it that the society becomes less free. The USA Patriot Act has been reinforced so many times since it was first passed by Congress in October 2001 that by now the country’s law-enforcement agencies have been equipped with as many powers as they choose to exercise—random search, unwarranted seizure, arbitrary arrest.
Every month brings with it some new proof of the frightened and punitive states of mind that inform the imposition of additional rules, more efficient procedures, further restrictions. My notes from the last week in January through the second week in February mention the dropping of a blue curtain over a tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica outside the Security Council chambers (to preserve Secretary Powell from the embarrassment of having to pose for photographs in front of a work of art depicting the horrors of war), Laura Bush canceling a poetry symposium at the White House when told that one or more of the poets might read an anti-war poem, the New York Police Department forbidding an antiwar march in front of the United Nations, a consortium of scientific journals (among them Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine) agreeing to censor any articles that might compromise national security, and then, most unequivocally, in January the Department of Transportation proposing to establish a system of records classifying any and all commercial airline passengers as suspected terrorists and thus subject to background investigations that might otherwise require a court order.
9. Sloth
The question most often asked of the American mission to Iraq can be reduced to two words: “Why now?” I’ve listened to numerous explanations—the weather,
America’s credibility at stake, Saddam about to poison Israel’s reservoirs—but I suspect that the best answer is the simplest. War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it’s easer to send the aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making and American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves.
The Bush Administration owes its existence to our apathy and sloth; if we have allowed the American political argument to degenerate into mindless catchphrase and the fifteen-second sound bite, how can we not expect our government to think in the same language, to depend for its authority on the easy and patriotic lie, and whenever it doesn’t know what else to do, to arrest mysterious strangers and bomb Iraq?
10. Candor
The energy of our democracy springs from the willingness of its citizens to speak and think in their own voices, and among all the American political virtues, candor is probably the one most necessary to the health of our mutual estate. Not meant to be either popular or fun, the dissenting view on first hearing usually strikes the audience as impolite, treasonable, or plain wrong. Prior to the public demonstrations that took place on February 15 in more than 600 cities in all twenty-four of the world’s time zones (at least 200,000 people in New York, 750,000 in London, 1.3 million in Barcelona), the major American new media were busy discounting objections to the invasion of Iraq as words of no worth and little consequence—the work of aging flower children, overly liberal college professors, and B-list celebrities. Three days after the crowds showed up in the streets, President Bush compared the event to the assembling of an ad agency’s hired focus group, the expression of nonserious and uninformed opinion and certainly not one that he would allow to affect his judgment, alter his course of action, or in any way violate the temple of his own enlightenment.
Every society can always count on the parties of reaction crying up the wish to make time stand still, seeking to protect themselves against the storm of the world with impregnable bureaucracies and choruses of adoring praise. Democracy proceeds form a more adventurous premise, its structure akin to a suspension bridge rather than to an Egyptian pyramid, its strength dependent upon the complicity of its citizens in a shared work of the political imagination. The enterprise collapses into either anarchy or tyranny unless the countervailing stresses oppose one another with equal weight, unless enough people possess enough courage to sustain the dialectic between the government and the governed, between city ad town, capital and labor, men and women, matter and mid.
Defined as a ceaseless process of change, democracy assumes the pain of contradiction and new discovery not only as the normal but also as the necessary condition of existence. As has been said, a hard act to perform and one that failed and was abandoned by nearly every country in Europe in the generation between the First and Second Word Wars. In place of truthful and therefore possible unpleasant argument, the Bush Administration offers warm and welcome lies, advising us to lay aside the tool of thought and rest safely on the pillows of glorious and world-encircling empire. We accept the invitation at our peril.
zappagrrl at 1:48 p.m.