Topical notes

Look on the Dim Side
For supporters of John Kerry and that somewhat larger group, opponents of George W. Bush, there is no bright side to the prospect of having Mr. Bush in power for four more years. However, there is a dim side, a less-dark side dotted with lights at the ends of certain tunnels. Since the tunnels and the pitfalls they contain are of Mr. Bush's making, and since the lights emanate from fires into which Mr. Bush has cast all our chestnuts, it's only right that he should plunge down those tunnels first. The events of the next four years should happen on his watch. ... [More]

Body Bluster
Commentators writing about Bob Woodward's latest book on the Bush White House, Plan of Attack, have noted President Bush's fascination with body language. ... There it was again, after he and Vice President Cheney spoke with the 9/11 Commission the other day. There was the stride that's a shade too brisk and bold, like that of a whistler in the dark. And then the trick of starting to talk just a millisecond before the body comes to rest at the microphones, as if to suggest a paratrooper hitting the ground with gun blazing. This is body language that screams "I'm in control" so loudly it makes you feel like listening from across the street. ... [More]

Inside Saddam and Beyond Bush
A Saddam who is thought to have terrible weapons, and missiles with which to deliver them, is a notable actor on the world stage and a very big man to his own people. A Saddam who is known to have scrapped his WMD arsenal under pressure from foreigners is much less big. Like a Mafia boss, a Baath boss can ill afford to show signs of losing his nerve. And so Saddam Hussein seems to have played a game that followed this logic: ... [More]

All Compassion and No Feeling
President George W. Bush likes the sound of the word compassion. But he doesn't feel that it's wrong to exploit the many personal losses of September 11, 2001, for his own political gain. President Bush likes the sound of the words compassionate conservatism. But he doesn't feel that it's wrong to let poor people carry both the burden of fighting and dying in Iraq and the burden of paying for the war while people in his own set enjoy a large tax cut. ... Those who observe him at first hand often come back and report that this is a President who knows where he wants to go, who believes that he's doing God's will, and who is therefore free from mental anguish. What they don't say is that to be free from mental anguish about sending people to kill and die is to be devoid of moral sense. ... [More]

Coming to a Young Woman Near You
Predictably, dropping women into the warrior pool has meant condemning them to face an uncontrolled risk of being raped. Now here's another prediction: Few if any of the commentators who react to this outrage will confront both (1) the risk of rape that women face in the armed forces and (2) the political push to include women in any future military draft. ... In civilian life, women can practice a degree of self-protection by prudently choosing among people, places, and times. In the military, choice is a civilian heresy. The self is a joke. You go where you're sent, and if you think you'll limit yourself to obeying lawful orders, you don't know the remoteness and tardiness of the law. When a sexual threat is clear enough to justify saying No, the scene has already been set for inescapable violence. The law may come along later to tidy up, but that's about it. ... [More]

The Way Outward (1)
Here are some suggestions to progressives and particularly to those active in Democratic Party politics in the United States. On gun control: a breakout position. On the family: a new departure. On homosexuality: a thoughtful attitude. ... Public opinion polls have long shown solid support for stricter gun control (roughly two-thirds of respondents), but people can't be mobilized by arguments about registration or corporate liability alone. Move the issue far out in front of this dust cloud at once. Open a national debate about banning private ownership of handguns, not to mention assault rifles and the like. ... Recognize the family-centered society as the one real alternative to the corporate society. This is not about re-education or mythmaking. It's about cooperation for mutual defense among people who know what's important to them. ... Dispense with liberal creationism about the nature of homosexuality. Avoid the false dichotomy of arguing whether it's a chosen lifestyle or an inborn trait (ask a clinical psychologist, and you may hear that it's neither). Instead, emphasize the value of each human being regardless of sexual orientation. Same-sex marriage? Let the interested parties fight that battle themselves, outside the electoral arena. ... [More]

The Way Outward (2)
On wealth: a return to basics. ... Rich people make profitable use of poor people during their working lives. This is obviously true of corporate entities (which are, in essence, morally insulated extensions of rich people). It's especially true in times like these, when employers squeeze employees for a maximum of work in return for a minimum of pay and benefits. It's also true in the everyday lives of rich people. Every time they use products and services provided by low-wage labor, they save money and gain convenience: they profit. It's not revolutionary to suggest that they should reciprocate by helping finance the health care and old-age support of the people who must live on those low wages. It simply means there's no free lunch for anybody, including the rich. ... [More]

Springtime for Kissinger
Forgettable fact: Henry Kissinger spoke for the sane while the Bush Administration dreamed of conquering Iraq. When he and Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's Secretary of State, appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 26 September, 2002, Senator Russell Feingold asked their advice about managing the aftermath of an invasion, in which American troops might be endangered "for months on end." Dr. Albright attempted a cautiously analytical reply that deteriorated into incoherence and barely left her committed to the opinion that many factors remained unknown. Dr. Kissinger replied, in part, as follows: ... [More]

Can the US Do in Iraq What Israel Can't Do In Israel?
When Saddam Hussein came out of the ground, pundits in Washington and beyond were quick to call it the beginning of the end of terrorist resistance in Iraq, with the rest of the end soon to follow. Of course they were wrong. Of course they'll go on being wrong as long as the US has a presence in Iraq, and then some. After all, the government of Israel has failed for ten years to stop suicide bombings on its home ground, a parcel of land much smaller than Iraq inhabited mainly by people who take the Intifadah personally. ... [More]

Combat Pay for the Action-figure President
In America's recent wars there have been officers, stationed at rear bases or at the Pentagon, who would fly into the war zone just long enough to qualify for combat pay. Then they'd fly back to the security of their usual duties. ... [More]

The Wrong Reason to Leave
For once, let's hope the Bush Administration is able to keep on with its adventure in Iraq a while longer. Not until those halcyon days when Iraq will have become a suburb of America's corporate metropolis, for no such days are coming, but only until the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal has melted back into the greater scandal of the war itself. After doing so much present and future harm, America's neoconservatives must be made the great losers in this war. They must be discredited so thoroughly that they will never rise to lead any generation of Americans again. Abu Ghraib could become their lifeline. ... [More]

Essays

The Den of Forgetfulness
... The problem with Mr. Bush's notorious remark, "Bring 'em on," is not a question of style. To understand what the problem is, it's necessary only to consider that America's Commander-in-Chief is no Agamemnon or Alexander leading armies in battle, but an executive who sends others into battle from the security of a mansion far away. ... He ought to cut short his "working vacation" down on the ranch and spend the summer in Iraq inspiring the troops with his toughness. He wouldn't have to do much, really: just walk the streets of Baghdad crying, "Bring 'em on!"

... The elder George Bush never ate his broccoli, and the son never gave his native language the attention it needed if he meant to lead millions of people and not merely pose as an iconic Regular Guy.

... It's another convention of the den to point out, in Mr. Bush's defense, that intellectuals have not made especially effective Presidents — forgetting, here, that the issue is not the bookish quality of intellectuality, but mental curiosity, discipline, and energy. ... The careless invasion of Iraq, the banished subject of environmental protection, the fiscal drive into darkness: all suggest an indolent non-thinker acting on fixed ideas and faith in pre-ordained success. Even the meaning of "success" may not be clear in Mr. Bush's mind. ... [More]

Hitler Between Them
... It's safe to say that there was only one Adolf Hitler. No combination of character traits, personal experience, and events is ever repeated, and yet one feels that Hitler does exist around us in pieces; even in pieces large enough to worry about. Several of the more obvious pieces seem to have been present in the makeup of Saddam Hussein. ...

That still leaves some important pieces missing. ... If they're nowhere to be found in today's world, all well and good. But what makes them dangerous is their transparency to the moral optics of many normal people: a quality that contributes to that deadening and ultimately damning effect which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.

... Mr. Bush and his associates seem to have grasped a phenomenon at the theoretical level and put it to work in a systematic way, as Hitler did. It goes like this: Most people today reside partially in a media community that exists in parallel with the real community of personal experience. They don't confuse the two, as some media critics have supposed; on the contrary, they let the two remain strangely separate. In reality truth is established by some kind of process, investigative or constructive, that requires factual, logical, or moral integrity. In the mass media it's established by a narrative process, and what is required is emotional or aesthetic integrity. ...

... His propaganda specialists understand that this allows them to overshadow the truth of reality with an illusory media truth. Their kind of fabrication could go by various names, such as the Big Lie in Little Pieces or the Cheesy Screenplay Lie, but to keep this concept from being lost to history (till one of them writes a book) let's give it a more dignified name: the Parallel Lie. ... [More]

Rallying Round the Mechanism
... It may be only natural that wartime tends to become a time of national solidarity. ... Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic policies made him both the most loved and the most hated President of the twentieth century, but war made him one of the world's three big Good Guys along with Churchill and, er, Stalin. In the election of 1944, it made him the horse that one does not change in midstream.

The Vietnam War was more complicated, but it was not the exception that it may seem in distant retrospect. ... It's hard to believe that Kennedy, had he lived, would have seen his Presidency damaged as decisively as Johnson's was by the Vietnam War: a war to which Kennedy had committed the country and for which his brother Robert, as Attorney General, had toured the world drumming up support. He at least would not have had that same brother dogging his footsteps as a charismatic peace candidate, and it's all but impossible to imagine America's college-bred youth chanting, "JFK, JFK, how many kids did you kill today?" in front of the White House. ...

Mr. Bush himself, and not only his staff, began soon after the September 11 attacks to talk as if an open-ended age of war had begun. ... He'd had little to recommend him as a leader except to those who wished to see mediocrity vindicated. Then came the national crisis, and a wave of patriotism lifted his boat high above the rocks of normal consequences for a mediocre President. How could he help but wish to ride the wave as far as possible? It's an understandable impulse, but one that has to be resisted. If the President won't resist the impulse, the American people have to resist the President. George W. Bush has shown no sign of resisting the impulse since his first chance to preside over a nation unified, or psychologically controlled, by patriotism and anxiety. ... [More]

Friends of Anne Frank
... Even schoolchildren in places far removed from the old haunts of the Nazis get a good chance to steer clear of bigotry by learning Anne's story ... If there's one thing we'll never do, it's let them send Anne Frank to Bergen-Belsen.

... Passive bigots, being essentially normal people, don't relish the persecution of the weak and innocent. But if they can be made to see an aggrieved accuser in place of a persecutor, and if the proposed victims are a tribe which they themselves consider altogether too powerful, why, that's another matter.

... And it doesn't follow from the opportunistic behavior of France's President and Foreign Minister that "those French" deserve to become unpersons with an unculture and an uncuisine. What, no foie gras in George W. Bush's America? No Marie Antoinette economic doctrine? When the We-They Mentality gets loose, anyone may suffer.

... It's sad but true that racism, now as ever, is the shame of American society. It's equally true, and sadder, that racism is not the shame of many other societies because not many other societies have developed a capacity for shame about such things. ... [More]

Where Will All the Women Go?
... Those young girls would pose a difficulty for many political liberals today, if they were to rear their pretty heads outside the elegiac world of the song and tell us what it is that makes them important. Ever since the first heyday of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" pacifism has been, for many people in the industrialized countries, a twofold thing: a heartfelt abhorrence of war, yes, but also part of a conventional set of shibboleths by which one is known as an enlightened, progressive sort of person and not just some gun-shy troglodyte. ...

Human beings have always lived in a cycle of war and peace which is, for the survivors, an ebb-and-flow of sanity. Men go to war and derange themselves. They come back knowing they have done so, uneasily accustomed to things morbid and mad, doubting their own humanity. Women, meanwhile, have kept the sane part of the world intact. They've preserved it for everybody by keeping to it themselves. Man returns, and woman teaches him to be human again. This is not simply a matter of resuming the old routines of peace. Woman is able to give man heart for another try at sanity only because she is reliably sane herself. There must be a principle in the world that is the very antithesis of war, if the human race is to improve. In most societies until now, woman has been that principle. ... [More]

The Mohammedan Candidate
... There are three modes of applying the thesis of The Manchurian Candidate to George W. Bush. The most pleasurable mode is to imagine him as the witting agent of political Islam, a convert under deep cover who has, with great subtlety, cultivated the persona of a vacuously dogged superpatriot. ... However, the most accurate mode is probably the third: recognizing George W. Bush not as the witting agent of political Islam, nor as its unwitting tool, but as the half-witting agent of something akin to it. ...

Mr. Bush and his associates seem in a hurry to prove the wisdom of Lord Acton's words, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." No proof is needed. Absolute power corrupted the Caliphs. It corrupts the rulers of theocracies in the world today. The very thought of it corrupts anybody who imagines himself to be the hand of God, and when his own hands hold the levers of enormous power over human affairs, one may say that the outlook is grim. ... [More]