Hi. I intended plunging into Alito, but after reading this gem
decided its scene-setting and (expected) brilliance would
ease the pain. So enjoy, learn, and be prepared.
Ed
Published on Saturday, January 28, 2006 by TruthDig
President Jonah
by Gore Vidal
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked
about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of
enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James version of
1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that Jonah, who, like
Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out with the Almighty and thus
became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a cruise liner, thanks to his
presence aboard, was about to sink in a storm at sea. Once the crew had
determined that Jonah, a passenger, was the jinx, they threw him overboard
and-Lo!-the storm abated. The three days and nights he subsequently spent in
the belly of a nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the
digestion-challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of
mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people,
God noted disdainfully, "cannot discern between their right hand and their
left hand," so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy
has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy
becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico
at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by
whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of
prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us
thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a
whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the
people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford,
Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he.
Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation! One can see former
President Jonah in his sumptuous library happily catering to faith-based
fans with animated scriptures rooted in "The Simpsons."
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon's Luciferian fall has
there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative
criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this dark age
where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative road unblocked.
We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and even fewer can define
despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the vast cloud of locusts which
dined on China in that '30s movie "The Good Earth."
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking
for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now and
where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been consumed and only
Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful. Meanwhile, the rest of us can
learn quite a lot from "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire" by
Morris Berman, a professor of sociology at the Catholic University of
America in Washington, D.C.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who refers
to the United States as an empire since I am credited with first putting
forward this heretical view in the early '70s. In fact, so disgusted with me
was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as proof of my madness he wrote:
"He actually refers to the United States as an empire!" It should be noted
that at about the same time Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on
and on about "The American Century." What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history. "We were already in
our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all the insight of an ostrich,
declared it to be 'morning in America'; twenty-odd years later, under the
'boy emperor' George W. Bush (as Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have
entered the Dark Ages in earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can
only accelerate our decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious
characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion
over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration
of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture-a troika that was for
Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; and the
political and economic marginalization of our culture.. The British
historian Charles Freeman published an extended discussion of the transition
that took place during the late Roman empire, the title of which could serve
as a capsule summary of our current president: "The Closing of the Western
Mind." Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the
latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in the
fourth century: namely, 'the gradual subjection of reason to faith and
authority.' This is what we are seeing today, and it is a process that no
society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is a process of which
administration officials, along with much of the American population, are
aggressively proud." In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note
that Bush, like his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God
and that faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House
adviser who disdains what he calls the "reality-based" community, to which
Berman sensibly responds: "If a nation is unable to perceive reality
correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-based delusions,
its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty much foreclosed."
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a cultural
death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still be taught too
many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to their so often
un-evolved students. "Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on
the part of the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get
a clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back. Religion is
used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic conflict between Good and
Evil rather than in terms of political processes.... Manichaeanism rules
across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time magazine
fifty-nine percent of Americans believe that John's apocalyptic prophecies
in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe
that the faithful will be taken up into heaven in the 'Rapture.'
"Finally, we shouldn't be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy
displayed by the Bush administration.. As already noted, fundamentalism and
democracy are completely antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of
course, is tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction
in which the United States is going.. Anthony Lewis who worked as a
columnist for the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what
has happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights
of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy.
Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of
interrogation in isolation-these are now standard American practice, and
most Americans don't care. Nor did they care about the revelation in July
2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the White House and the
Department of Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the
upcoming presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack."
I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that extreme
measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic ballot machines
could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no matter what (read Rep.
Conyers' report (.pdf file) on the rigging of Ohio's vote).
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. "In a
'State of the First Amendment Survey' conducted by the University of
Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment
'goes too far'; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28
percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without
prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war
to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should
have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of 'certain religious
groups' in the name of the war on terror."
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman's to stop abruptly
the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once
the people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them
free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in
the presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious
for the easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck
at least a match can no longer do so because shared information about our
situation is meager to nonexistent. Would better schools help? Of course,
but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the New York Times,
many school districts are now making sobriety tests a regular feature of the
school day: apparently opium derivatives are the opiate of our stoned youth.
Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no idea
who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates don't know the
difference between an argument and an assertion (did their teachers also
fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel agent in Arizona is often
asked whether or not it is cheaper to take the train rather than fly to
Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a passport. At the time of the 2004
presidential election 42% of voters believed that Saddam Hussein was
involved in 9/11. One high school boy, when asked who won the Civil War,
replied wearily, "I don't know and I don't care," echoing a busy neocon who
confessed proudly: "The American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of
the Roses."
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are the
richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why so many
awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an impermeable
bubble without the sort of information that people living in real countries
have access to when it comes to their own reality. But we are not actually
people in the eyes of the national ownership: we are simply unreliable
consumers comprising an overworked, underpaid labor force not in the best of
health: The World Health Organization rates our healthcare system (sic-or
sick?) as 37th-best in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model
for the Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a
First World educational system. Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our
usually information-free media that despite the boost to the profits of such
companies as Halliburton, Bush's wars of aggression against small countries
of no danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade
deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don't produce much
of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how popular our
Entertainment is overseas. Unfortunately the foreign gross of "King Kong,"
the Edsel of that assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that
Bollywood-the Indian film business-may soon surpass us! Berman writes, "We
have lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept
afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do you
think will happen when America's creditors decide to pull the plug, or when
OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of dollars?...An
International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded that the United States
was 'careening toward insolvency.' " Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time
future enemy, is the number one for worldwide foreign investments, with
France, the bete noire of our apish neocons, in second place.
Well, we still have Kraft cheese and, of course, the death penalty.
Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944
institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the maintenance
of a social safety net for society's less fortunate-the so-called welfare or
interventionist state. It did this by establishing fixed but flexible
exchange rates among world currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar
while the dollar, for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods
saved capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in
1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital moving
upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and super-rich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history.
When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press), upon
becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript
fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be
automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous.
"Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?" He returned their
message. They sent it again. His response: "How eager you are to be slaves."
I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of
Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught illegally
wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about his powers as "a
wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is above each and every law
of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has pointed out that he may well be a
lunatic dreaming that he is another Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he
is no wartime president. There is no war with any other nation...yet. There
is no state called terror, an abstract noun like liar. Certainly his illegal
unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like a real war for those on both
sides unlucky enough to be killed or wounded, but that does not make it a
war any more than the appearance of having been elected twice to the
presidency does not mean that in due course the people will demand an
investigation of those two irregular processes. Although he has done a
number of things that under the old republic might have got him impeached,
our current system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it
possible for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and
impeach him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that
befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as
much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great movement to
have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a president wasn't up
to his job and so had lost the people's confidence between elections. But in
time, as Ecclesiastes would say, all things shall come to pass and so, in a
kindly way, a majority of the citizens must persuade him that he will be
happier back in Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops
not killed or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We
may be slaves but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to
Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can't Wait (see
their website, worldcantwait.org). They believe that the agenda for 2006
must not be set by the Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass
political action.
On Jan. 31, the night of Bush's next State of the Union address, they
have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the
country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that "Bush Step Down"
the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just as Bush starts
to speak, people can make a joyful noise and figuratively drown out his
address. Then on the following Saturday, Feb. 4, converge in front of the
White House with the same message: Please step down and take your program
with you.
Copyright © 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C.
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