July 16, 2003 by lonbud

Remember the Bastille

As we enter the dog days of Summer, who is not nearly glazed-over by the who-shot-John of all the discredited, manipulated, politicized, fabricated, misinterpreted, misattributed, so-called intelligence upon which the Bush Administration relied to entice Congress, the media, and the public to accept the fiction that it was absolutely, frighteningly imperative we commit hundreds of thousands of American armed services personnel to “indefinite” duty in the Persian Gulf?

That, and spend untold hundreds of millions of dollars dethroning a punchless, disheveled, defenseless tyrant, who’d been propped up by decades of domestic terror and U.S. foreign aid, laying waste in the bargain to the lives of uncounted Iraqis, and to what amounts (so far) to an average of nearly one American life a day.

I believe it is time to stop pointing fingers and start looking in the mirror.

Up to now I’ve been willing to blame the President himself. He’s a perfect target: anointed as a figurehead by a wealthy, powerful cabal of former government spooks and machers-turned-titans of private industry, with a yen to scratch the itch only satisfied by pure power –the power that corrupts; placed in office through a transparent election fraud orchestrated and applied by a state government headed by his brother; “certified” for the record by a bare Supreme Court majority, whose authors flouted years of Court precedent and public policy in the doing.

And, too, there’s his forced caricature of folksy, down-home Texas “roots” and his disarming unfamiliarity with the English language.

His administration is filled with perfect villains, as well.

There’s Dick Cheney, setting national energy policy with the GOBs he befriended during his days at Halliburton, and Cheney making sure the folks at CIA knew who was wearing the pants when it came time to justify the invasion of Iraq.

There’s Paul Wolfowitz and Karl Rove, playing out their little Napoleon (or is it Hitler?) complexes to glowing coverage in Time, Vanity Fair, and Esquire.

There’s Donald Rumsfeld, living his Goebbels part down to the unfettered smarm and the hulking raincoat.

And there’s John Ashcroft, lurking in the secret dungeons with his cat-o-nine-tails and his crucifix.

No, there’s no dearth of feet at which to lay the blame for all that has gone wrong with the American experiment in the last two and a half years. Assuming, that is, we can agree budget deficits which are continually revised upward, economic growth rates which are continually revised downward, unemployment at twenty-year highs, a loss of over three and a half million jobs, declining fiscal solvency of the states, personal and corporate bankruptcies at all-time highs, inflation in energy prices and other core needs like food and housing coupled with deflation in wages and export prices; assuming, that is, we can agree such a picture might indicate trouble onboard the ship of state.

In fact, to this observer, the uncanny thing about it is how naked the corruption has become and how inured to travesty the public is proving to be.

Jonathan Schell, in the July 14th edition of The Nation, calls it “cognitive torture” and writes,

“…attention must shift from the deceiver to the deceived…corruption threatens to spread from the teller to the hearer, from the Administration … to us. Today lies, exaggerations, contradictions and broken promises litter the mental landscape, like uncollected garbage, polluting and poisoning the intellectual and moral air… What was said ten minutes ago is forgotten. What was promised yesterday never appears and no one cares. What is needed now is not so much more investigation as an awakening of will. The question is no longer what the government is doing but whether the public will hold it to account.”

It’s hard to imagine the form such a holding to account might take. Barely a whisper of protest was heard when the President was gerrymandered into office nearly three years ago. Skeptics and doubters who questioned the rush to war in Afghanistan after 9/11 were shouted down and branded traitors. Hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets of Washington, New York, San Francisco and elsewhere around the country and the world were roundly ignored in their calls for an alternative to war in Iraq. Responsible members of Congress – elected representatives of We the People – are lampooned for their efforts to use the mechanisms of constitutional government to understand what really happened on 9/11, to understand how the President came to use lies in a State of the Union address to scare the country into supporting an unjust, unnecessary, irresponsible waste of our resources in the desert sands of Iraq.

One might do well to remember the Bastille, or learn about it for the first time, as the case may be. For unless a reasoned, willful, orderly holding to account is soon devised, we may slip so far down the path of abdication that only an orgiastic bloodletting of Eighteenth century proportions will save us from ourselves.