In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
A Dream, a Rant, Letter to a Friend, E-mail, Letter, and Paul Krugman
I had a long exhausting dream last night about swinging from cables hundreds of feet high in the towers of some unspecified bridge in New York. I didn't fall or get hurt, but I kept grabbing hold of them like a trapeze artist and swinging across from beam to beam and back again, and every single time was terrifying, but I got used to it all the same. I kept looking down. Maybe this dream is just encapsulating constant fear and learning to live with it in a particularly dramatic image, but I woke up with the disturbing feeling that the bridge wasn't just some random symbol, chosen for its height and the fact that one must travel across it, back and forth, because you don't have a choice; rather, it seemed unpleasantly particular. Usually when I dream about the city, it's always a New York that's utterly different, one I've never seen or been to before. The New York City dream is a fabulous place, usually industrial, where I'm forced by obstacles toward its outer edges -- in other words, I can never travel anywhere in a straight line, I'm always forced off to the side until I hit the river and muddy byways and troughs, typically involving iron doors and unscaleable stone walls. Usually I'm being pursued.
But this dream wasn't like that at all. I was up there in the highest part of the towers, swinging from the cables, that was the whole dream. At one point I shimmied down to the bridge level, but then I was back on top somehow, all over again.
Strange residual worry. This fucking convention.
***
You know the three things I resent the most? 1: That we're all supposed to be permanently scared, but that New York is always on Orange Alert, and that we better be more scared than some, and to prove the point, the U.S. Army is patrolling the streets so that NYC is a permanent occupied territory -- in other words, Republicans have turned my city into their Theater of War, because everyone who votes for them hates New York and considers it Evil, and for that reason it deserves to be destroyed, because this is where the terrorists are; 2: That Americans don't understand the difference between the army and law enforcement (NOTE TO PATRIOTS: soldiers are trained in delivering death and destruction, not police work) and that most citizens are entirely unaware that the Department of Homeland Security intends to institionalize the U.S. military in domestic law enforcement (read: shoving a nightstick up your Granny's ass while helping themselves to the liquor and jewelry, just because they can); and 3: That the rest of the country -- with notable exceptions -- think that this is basically swell, because values are important.
Yes they are. So what do you value? The patriotic duty to shove my face in your shit?
***
Dear L.,
Welcome back to what used to be my country. Since you were gone a lot of
freedoms have come to pass. You know what they're working on now? Granting
the CIA the power to arrest U.S. citizens on the say so of the president.
Well, that's one way of getting rid of anyone who opposes you. The FBI is
now interrogating political protesters and issuing subpeonas. Whoever
dreamed this up must be a great reader of history: this is excellent
Stalinism, with an extra touch of Mao. Well, you missed fascism in Portugal
by only a few years; you can make up for it by living in America.
What is happening right now with the Republicans' lock on power is scary and
crazy -- and getting worse. Tell P. that he's lucky he's not American --
knowing him, he'd be locked up in a military jail by now on some island
without access to lawyers or a trial. Dissent in this country is now
illegal, and they're punishing people for what they MIGHT do. That pretty
much includes everyone, doesn't it?
***
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2004
I read in the paper that the whole goddam army is in the city now, the navy, the armada, the air force, the biggest fucking collection of military anywhere in the
history of America. What a stupid shithead idea to have their convention
here. What the Christ are they thinking? I wonder what the body count will
be when it's over? We'll never know of course. It crossed my mind that the
army patrols may never leave once they set foot in NY, like the shores of
Tripoli. It sort of feels like D-Day, a fucking invasion.
***
When we were at peace (remember that? I don't), all I could do was read
books about Vietnam, anything I could get my hands on; now that America is
at permanent war, going on for infinity -- and that's a promise -- I don't even
want to think about it. We've all got amnesia. This country is full of fucking
lunatics, and most of them are in charge.
I expect any day the men in dark suits'll come kick my door in, going "Down!
Down!"
At least that's what my friend the Vietnam vet told me last week.
***
But Paul Krugman should lighten the mood:
War, Mr. Hedges says, plays to some fundamental urges. "Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours," he says, "is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver." When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a "mythic reality" in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn't our ally is our enemy.
This state of mind works greatly to the benefit of those in power.
George W. Bush isn't General Galtieri: America really was attacked on 9/11, and any president would have followed up with a counterstrike against the Taliban. Yet the Bush administration, like the Argentine junta, derived enormous political benefit from the impulse of a nation at war to rally around its leader.
Another president might have refrained from exploiting that surge of support for partisan gain; Mr. Bush didn't.
And his administration has sought to perpetuate the war psychology that makes such exploitation possible.
Step by step, the fight against Al Qaeda became a universal "war on terror," then a confrontation with the "axis of evil," then a war against all evil everywhere. Nobody knows where it all ends.
What is clear is that whenever political debate turns to Mr. Bush's actual record in office, his popularity sinks. Only by doing whatever it takes to change the subject to the war on terror - not to what he's actually doing about terrorist threats, but to his "leadership," whatever that means - can he get a bump in the polls.
To win, the Kerry campaign has to convince a significant number of voters that the self-proclaimed "war president" isn't an effective war leader - he only plays one on TV.
This charge has the virtue of being true. It's hard to find a nonpartisan national security analyst with a good word for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Iraq, in particular, is a slow-motion disaster brought on by wishful thinking, cronyism and epic incompetence.
And I'd point out that while Mr. Bush spared no effort preparing for his carrier landing - he even received underwater survival training in the White House pool - he didn't prepare for things that actually mattered, like securing and rebuilding Iraq after Baghdad fell.
There you go.
- Michael 10:26 PM - [PermaLink] -
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