There is a lot of chatter about impeachment these days in the ether. High crimes and misdemeanors and all that. I'm not really sure if the standard is met or not, but I thought it worth while to restate that particular part of the quaintness that is the U.S. Constitution. Article 2, Section IV:
"The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, or for relentlessly brandishing illogic, or an absence of logic, or circular logic, before the exasperated body politic."
Wow... relentlessly brandishing illogic, or the absense of logic, or circular logic. Couldn't really be any clearer than that... it's like they knew these guys would show up eventually.
Saw a great piee from Adam Cohen in the NY Times this weekend about that same wacky group of guys that tried so hard to put something that would last in writing.
July 23, 2007
Editorial Observer
Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War
By ADAM COHEN
The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” he said at a recent press conference. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.” He added magnanimously: “I’m certainly interested in their opinion.”
The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.
Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”
The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”
Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”
When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.
The Constitution does make the president “commander in chief,” a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The framers took it from the British military, which used it to denote the highest-ranking official in a theater of battle. Alexander Hamilton emphasized in Federalist No. 69 that the president would be “nothing more” than “first general and admiral,” responsible for “command and direction” of military forces.
The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly. Madison described Congress’s control over spending as “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
The framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters. The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting “in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.”
As opinion turns more decisively against the war, the administration is becoming ever more dismissive of Congress’s role. Last week, Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman brusquely turned away Senator Hillary Clinton’s questions about how the Pentagon intended to plan for withdrawal from Iraq. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq,” he wrote. Mr. Edelman’s response showed contempt not merely for Congress, but for the system of government the founders carefully created.
The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an “invitation to struggle” among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. It is no surprise that the current debate over a deeply unpopular war is arising in the context of a Congressional spending bill. That is precisely what the founders intended.
Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
Every now and again... JFK and Bush at Yale Commencement(s)
I've been writing here off and on for nearly two years now. I'm still not sure why I do it, but I have hopes that someday I can look back on these, or my children can, and learn something about me (even though most of the material is reposted from other sources, it does, I hope, show what I care about at any particular point).
Anyway, I recognize a need within myself to provide more personal explorations here, as I think the value to my failing memory will be indispensible if I do. That said, I ain't here for that today :)
Here's an interesting article from Slate on the pretender's recent commencement at Yale compared with that of JFK 45 years ago - GOOD STUFF:
Better to be Hamlet than President George
Doubt is a virtue, JFK told students 45 years ago. Without it we have the tragic bluster and empty optimism of political culture today.
By Peter Birkenhead
Jun. 11, 2007 | "There's no doubt in my mind that each person who has been executed in our state was guilty of the crime committed." -- George W. Bush, June 2, 2000
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world." -- GWB, Jan. 28, 2004
"There is no doubt in my mind that this country cannot [sic] achieve any objective we put our mind to." -- GWB, April 20, 2004
"There's no doubt in my mind we made the right decision in Iraq." -- GWB, Sept. 2, 2004
"There's no doubt in my mind that Afghanistan will remain a democracy and serve as an incredible example." -- GWB, Jan. 5, 2006
"There's no doubt in my mind [warrantless surveillance] is legal." -- GWB, Jan. 26, 2006
Remember good old doubt? When a capacity for self-doubt was a prerequisite for self-knowledge and a hallmark of maturity? To put it another way, can you imagine John F. Kennedy walking with the swagger of George W. Bush? Kennedy walked like what he was -- a man in pain from injuries he suffered in an actual war, and he allowed himself to be photographed hunched over with worry during the Cuban missile crisis. That picture, now an iconic image of heroic doubt, is sadly anachronistic.
Forty-five years ago today, JFK, speaking to the graduating class at Yale, said, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic ... Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." He urged the students to "move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality." Kennedy was urging the students not to let the establishment, which he represented, get away with anything. Submit its rhetoric to the fiercest scrutiny. Think for yourself. It was an invitation that reflected his own education, two years earlier, in the wisdom of doubt.
By June 11, 1962, the president had learned the lessons of the Bay of Pigs disaster well. His Yale speech seemed infused with regret at not having treated the CIA's intelligence with more skepticism before the invasion. (The agency had promised that the exiles could "melt into the mountains" if the plan failed -- mountains that it failed to notice were 80 miles away.) The speech also foreshadowed his own fierce scrutiny of the rhetoric of Gen. Curtis LeMay and other administration hawks, who urged an attack during the missile crisis.
Six years after the speech, George W. Bush graduated from Yale and went on to confront reality with a vengeance, or, more accurately, ignore it all together, as Ron Suskind noted in "The One Percent Solution," when he famously quoted a White House aide dismissing journalists and historians as "the reality-based community." But it would be lazy and wrong to think of George Bush as the source from which the modern disdain for doubt flows. The truth is, we, as a culture, don't value self-doubt the way we did in the time of Kennedy or of other famous doubters, like Lincoln or Jefferson. We have created the political culture of mythology JFK warned us about. We have the president and, as the recent presidential debates have shown, the potential presidents we deserve.
Let's face it, George Bush doesn't have to doubt himself, any more than Donald Trump or Tom Cruise or Mitt Romney do. We live in a culture where they will never be forced to examine their prejudices or flaws. Of course, they have been denied the true confidence of people who are brave enough to face their doubts and who know there are worse things than feeling insecure. Like, say, feeling too secure. Pumped up by steroidic pseudo-confidence and anesthetized by doubt-free sentimentality, they are incapable of feeling anything authentic and experiencing the world. But that hasn't stopped them, and won't stop others, from succeeding in a society that is more enamored of a non-reality-based conception of leadership than previous generations were.
JFK's generation had been warned by FDR about the corrosive peril of fear, and they took the admonishment to heart. But imagine if they had approached their moment in history with the grandiose self-image with which we've approached ours. Without the wisdom of doubt, without the grace of humility and the simple ability to learn from mistakes, would anyone have called them the Greatest Generation? (And by the way, don't we do them a disservice with that moniker -- didn't they fight against all things "greatest" and on the side of splendid imperfection?) Imagine what the world would look like if they'd had the disdain for humility we do, if they'd relied on a conception of themselves as innately good, if they'd allowed themselves to think they knew everything and therefore learned nothing.
But our generation has erected a culture that confuses happiness with a lack of discomfort, and leadership with an almost psychotic form of false optimism. We have ingeniously insulated ourselves from self-scrutiny and fear. We tuck ourselves away in gated communities, hibernate in food courts, or sleep in front of televisions, swathed in layer upon layer of soft and soporific comfort to protect ourselves from the bracing draft of doubt. We can barely feel our own culture anymore.
Our pretend fearlessness has made us timid. Some of our filmmakers, the Michael Bays and Brett Ratners, make movies as if they're embarrassed by stories, and some of our singers, especially those of the emo variety, sing as if they're embarrassed by melody. Most of us are getting our information from only a few sources, and it's infused with narcotic banality: pillow-embroidery sentiment and locker room aphorisms that induce the waking sleep of consumerism. We've been convinced that good things go to people who "want it more than the other guy," that wealth is a reward, and poverty a penalty. That the highest compliment we can pay each other is, we know what we want and how to get it, which makes us sound brave. But by banishing doubt we have cultivated fear. We've stopped looking under the bed for monsters. The good books and songs and movies, like last year's harrowing "Little Children," have to fight through layer upon layer of swaddling to get to us.
We've forgotten how valuable, even vital, it is to be bravely unsure of ourselves. We've forgotten that doubt is the hill that hope climbs, that without it our spirits atrophy.
You'd think that after the past six years we'd want some of JFK's brand of genuine bravery and capacity for doubt in our leaders, but most of the current candidates for president, with a few exceptions, like Barack Obama, John McCain and John Edwards, again sound like scared little children playing soldier. They puff up their chests and bray in the absolutist style of the guy who got us into the biggest mess of our lifetime. They clumsily and desperately make up facts, conflate enemies, and endorse the worst kinds of behavior, all to seem more certain than the next guy that evil is all around us. They present themselves as even less troubled by reality than our freedom-frying, deaf, dumb and blind dauphin. And at the same time they seem excruciatingly un-free, as if they're straining against the straitjackets of political convention.
Our current presidential candidates could do us all a favor and read the words of a president who had to wear a confining back brace every day and who would often wince in pain, slump with doubt, and exhibit all sorts of human flaws -- but also gave the impression that he could swim three miles in the South Pacific if he had to, even in his suit and tie. Someone who stood up to the fear-mongers of his day with courageous doubt, who knew firsthand that the closest thing there is to absolute evil is absolutism itself.
-- By Peter Birkenhead
Anyway, I recognize a need within myself to provide more personal explorations here, as I think the value to my failing memory will be indispensible if I do. That said, I ain't here for that today :)
Here's an interesting article from Slate on the pretender's recent commencement at Yale compared with that of JFK 45 years ago - GOOD STUFF:
Better to be Hamlet than President George
Doubt is a virtue, JFK told students 45 years ago. Without it we have the tragic bluster and empty optimism of political culture today.
By Peter Birkenhead
Jun. 11, 2007 | "There's no doubt in my mind that each person who has been executed in our state was guilty of the crime committed." -- George W. Bush, June 2, 2000
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world." -- GWB, Jan. 28, 2004
"There is no doubt in my mind that this country cannot [sic] achieve any objective we put our mind to." -- GWB, April 20, 2004
"There's no doubt in my mind we made the right decision in Iraq." -- GWB, Sept. 2, 2004
"There's no doubt in my mind that Afghanistan will remain a democracy and serve as an incredible example." -- GWB, Jan. 5, 2006
"There's no doubt in my mind [warrantless surveillance] is legal." -- GWB, Jan. 26, 2006
Remember good old doubt? When a capacity for self-doubt was a prerequisite for self-knowledge and a hallmark of maturity? To put it another way, can you imagine John F. Kennedy walking with the swagger of George W. Bush? Kennedy walked like what he was -- a man in pain from injuries he suffered in an actual war, and he allowed himself to be photographed hunched over with worry during the Cuban missile crisis. That picture, now an iconic image of heroic doubt, is sadly anachronistic.
Forty-five years ago today, JFK, speaking to the graduating class at Yale, said, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic ... Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." He urged the students to "move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality." Kennedy was urging the students not to let the establishment, which he represented, get away with anything. Submit its rhetoric to the fiercest scrutiny. Think for yourself. It was an invitation that reflected his own education, two years earlier, in the wisdom of doubt.
By June 11, 1962, the president had learned the lessons of the Bay of Pigs disaster well. His Yale speech seemed infused with regret at not having treated the CIA's intelligence with more skepticism before the invasion. (The agency had promised that the exiles could "melt into the mountains" if the plan failed -- mountains that it failed to notice were 80 miles away.) The speech also foreshadowed his own fierce scrutiny of the rhetoric of Gen. Curtis LeMay and other administration hawks, who urged an attack during the missile crisis.
Six years after the speech, George W. Bush graduated from Yale and went on to confront reality with a vengeance, or, more accurately, ignore it all together, as Ron Suskind noted in "The One Percent Solution," when he famously quoted a White House aide dismissing journalists and historians as "the reality-based community." But it would be lazy and wrong to think of George Bush as the source from which the modern disdain for doubt flows. The truth is, we, as a culture, don't value self-doubt the way we did in the time of Kennedy or of other famous doubters, like Lincoln or Jefferson. We have created the political culture of mythology JFK warned us about. We have the president and, as the recent presidential debates have shown, the potential presidents we deserve.
Let's face it, George Bush doesn't have to doubt himself, any more than Donald Trump or Tom Cruise or Mitt Romney do. We live in a culture where they will never be forced to examine their prejudices or flaws. Of course, they have been denied the true confidence of people who are brave enough to face their doubts and who know there are worse things than feeling insecure. Like, say, feeling too secure. Pumped up by steroidic pseudo-confidence and anesthetized by doubt-free sentimentality, they are incapable of feeling anything authentic and experiencing the world. But that hasn't stopped them, and won't stop others, from succeeding in a society that is more enamored of a non-reality-based conception of leadership than previous generations were.
JFK's generation had been warned by FDR about the corrosive peril of fear, and they took the admonishment to heart. But imagine if they had approached their moment in history with the grandiose self-image with which we've approached ours. Without the wisdom of doubt, without the grace of humility and the simple ability to learn from mistakes, would anyone have called them the Greatest Generation? (And by the way, don't we do them a disservice with that moniker -- didn't they fight against all things "greatest" and on the side of splendid imperfection?) Imagine what the world would look like if they'd had the disdain for humility we do, if they'd relied on a conception of themselves as innately good, if they'd allowed themselves to think they knew everything and therefore learned nothing.
But our generation has erected a culture that confuses happiness with a lack of discomfort, and leadership with an almost psychotic form of false optimism. We have ingeniously insulated ourselves from self-scrutiny and fear. We tuck ourselves away in gated communities, hibernate in food courts, or sleep in front of televisions, swathed in layer upon layer of soft and soporific comfort to protect ourselves from the bracing draft of doubt. We can barely feel our own culture anymore.
Our pretend fearlessness has made us timid. Some of our filmmakers, the Michael Bays and Brett Ratners, make movies as if they're embarrassed by stories, and some of our singers, especially those of the emo variety, sing as if they're embarrassed by melody. Most of us are getting our information from only a few sources, and it's infused with narcotic banality: pillow-embroidery sentiment and locker room aphorisms that induce the waking sleep of consumerism. We've been convinced that good things go to people who "want it more than the other guy," that wealth is a reward, and poverty a penalty. That the highest compliment we can pay each other is, we know what we want and how to get it, which makes us sound brave. But by banishing doubt we have cultivated fear. We've stopped looking under the bed for monsters. The good books and songs and movies, like last year's harrowing "Little Children," have to fight through layer upon layer of swaddling to get to us.
We've forgotten how valuable, even vital, it is to be bravely unsure of ourselves. We've forgotten that doubt is the hill that hope climbs, that without it our spirits atrophy.
You'd think that after the past six years we'd want some of JFK's brand of genuine bravery and capacity for doubt in our leaders, but most of the current candidates for president, with a few exceptions, like Barack Obama, John McCain and John Edwards, again sound like scared little children playing soldier. They puff up their chests and bray in the absolutist style of the guy who got us into the biggest mess of our lifetime. They clumsily and desperately make up facts, conflate enemies, and endorse the worst kinds of behavior, all to seem more certain than the next guy that evil is all around us. They present themselves as even less troubled by reality than our freedom-frying, deaf, dumb and blind dauphin. And at the same time they seem excruciatingly un-free, as if they're straining against the straitjackets of political convention.
Our current presidential candidates could do us all a favor and read the words of a president who had to wear a confining back brace every day and who would often wince in pain, slump with doubt, and exhibit all sorts of human flaws -- but also gave the impression that he could swim three miles in the South Pacific if he had to, even in his suit and tie. Someone who stood up to the fear-mongers of his day with courageous doubt, who knew firsthand that the closest thing there is to absolute evil is absolutism itself.
-- By Peter Birkenhead
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
And Frazier goes down...
Sorry, meant the capricious FCC administration's contempt for the first amendment. This time in court, where the networks pointed out that if it was okay for Bush and Cheney to say them, it must be okay for Bono and Nicole Richey to as well...
Monday, June 04, 2007
Short Salon interview with Berkeley Breathed
A nice interview with my favorite political satarist before Jon Stewart...
Berkeley Breathed, Salon's new Sunday cartoonist, tells us why he'd kiss Cheney if he could, why satirists can't touch Bush, and why his new children's book was flayed by the p.c. police.
By Douglas Wolk
Jun. 03, 2007 | It's been almost 18 years since "Bloom County" ended, but Berkeley Breathed is still cartooning full speed ahead. He made his name with that Pulitzer Prize-winning 1980-89 daily comic strip; since then, he's left and returned to the comics page twice (first with "Outland," more recently with "Opus"), sticking to full-color Sunday strips that give his artwork more room to stretch. Breathed has also branched out into other media -- especially children's books, beginning with "A Wish for Wings That Work" in 1991. His latest book for kids, "Mars Needs Moms!" unveils his new all-digital art style. It's the story of young Milo, who shares his name not only with a "Bloom County" character but with Breathed's own son. Milo doesn't see what's so special about his tyrannical, vegetable-obsessed mother until she's kidnapped by Martians; he follows them to Mars, where he discovers not only how useful a mother can be, but that his own mom is willing to sacrifice more for him than he'd ever realized.
In an e-mail conversation, Breathed discussed the hot buttons that "Mars Needs Moms!" has pushed with audiences and reviewers, as well as the state of some of his other projects and the frustrations of dealing with George W. Bush in satire.
The last time Salon interviewed you, in 2003, you said that your goal with "Opus" was "simply to have some fun." How's that been going for you? What are the fun parts of doing the strip?
Drawing Dick Cheney with a marsupial on his head, denying that it's there and blaming it on the left-wing media. What could be more fun than that?
You've recently floated the possibility of ending "Opus" and killing off the character. I realize this isn't the most appropriate figure of speech, but is the penguin an albatross for you? Does the persistence of the characters you've been following for decades make it easier or harder for you to do an ongoing comic strip?
I wouldn't be in the comic pages if not for Opus. The spiritual and comedic heart of a comic strip doesn't always appear, and you can't will one into being. A good comic strip character is born midwifed by serendipity, not design.
I was kidding about killing Opus, by the way. I'd like to walk the streets free from fears of spontaneous garroting.
What's going on with the "Opus" movie?
Good segue! He's dead. A stake through his promising cinematic heart, after five years of active development at Miramax. Animation isn't a game for the timid. There'll only be a movie if I'm writing it, which will probably keep him off the big expensive screen ... probably just as well.
You've mentioned that you've got a novel in progress. What kind of novel is it?
Everybody has a novel in progress. I hate to be left out of these trends. I have an idea that could not -- despite herculean efforts -- be squeezed into the 40 pages of a picture book. And once I train myself to write a page of text without immediately running off to paint the action, like a monkey reflexively jumping to an organ grinder, I shall begin.
Years ago, you declared that George W. Bush had "cut off our satirist balls" by being unwilling to take himself seriously, but "Opus" features some of the most vehement political satire you've ever written. What do you think is the job of a satirist at a political moment like this one?
Cartoonists -- any satirists -- are mere blowhards at the fringes of the mob, screaming at the crowd to throw the gasoline bombs at the storm troopers. Nobody pays attention to us, really, but we look amusing with our veins popping out. I think it builds confidence for the stragglers in the back.
Bush has given us a gift: far from not taking himself seriously, he's become the only human being on the planet that thinks he's not just uniquely competent ... but brilliant in his strategic, heavenly inspired prescience as to how the world works. This hilarious -- also arguably homicidal -- self-deception is what makes him a comical figure. Literally, it's as if -- I mean this with the utmost respect for both the office and the man -- my 5-year-old boy Milo was running the free world. Milo believes himself equally as shrewd in spotting who the bad guys are in any movie and declaring the complex strategy to deal with them: "Blast 'em all!"
But there's bad news for satirists. Bush has come full circle: His ridiculousness is approaching the sort of existential absurdity that is untouchable. Watch him try to string a sensible sentence together now. Anywhere. He's become one of those guys with the Marx Brothers in "A Night at the Opera" who tumble through the door in the stateroom scene. I can't make him funnier than when he's trying to explain himself in a town hall meeting. Any day now he will go with "I'm the decisioner" and we satirists will know that our balls have been cut off entirely by a very shrewd adversary. Reagan did this too by becoming senile.
Dick Cheney is a different matter. I'd kiss him if I could.
"Mars Needs Moms!" features your first fully digital "painted" artwork, and the color images have what looks like a lot of 3-D digital modeling in them -- they have a very specific "2007" look about them, in a way that the black-and-white line drawings on other pages don't. (And some of the characters and sets seem to have a hint of old Chuck Jones cartoons in their design.) How did you decide on your visual technique and style for this book?
This story popped forth in my mental scrapbook looking like a film ... which admittedly is my first love. I painted it as stills from a movie, which it's actually becoming. Watercolor and color pencils usually rule the realm of children's illustrations. The book I'm working on now will be drawn more conventionally. You still can't beat the weird verisimilitude of an elegantly drawn rough pencil line, though.
What were the picture books you liked best when you were a kid? Are your favorites different now that you've had two children of your own to read to?
To be honest, beyond the charms of Seuss' cartoons, children's books in the '60s weren't a depository of inspirational artwork. They had their charms ... but they rarely offered rich, graphic worlds that transported imaginations. Painters such as N.C. Wyeth would never have considered illustrating anything but adult novels. I wish he had. It took stumbling on a Chris Van Allsburg book when I was doing "Bloom County" in 1985 for the possibilities to occur to me. And indeed, this was when publishers discovered that the real way to sell lots of picture books ... was to make them just as captivating to look at for adults as children. This is revolutionary. It's the world that I could fit into.
What has having children taught you about creating a book that can worm its way into a 4-year-old's mind and heart?
A recent, instructive exchange with my son while reading the beta version of "Mars Needs Moms!" some months ago:
Me: "Then Milo pulled on his slippers and ran after the departing spaceship that held his captive mother..."
My son: Dad, where's the slippers? Look. He's got bare feet.
Me: He's got them shoved down his jammies. He'll put them on soon. Listen, the Martians have his mother. That's the important thing, right?
My son: Yep.
Me: So ... "Milo grabbed the spaceship's ladder and hung on as --"
My son: Are the slippers in his butt crack?
Lesson learned: If you write it, draw it. They should give me the Caldecott Medal just for embracing at least this bit of kid-lit orthodoxy.
"Mars Needs Moms!" is about the idea that parents love their children so much they'd die for them -- and that children don't often realize that. Do you think young kids might pick up that message from the book, or is it more meant to strike an emotional chord with the parents who read it to them?
Both. And it does, from the comments I get. Read the readers' reviews for the book at Amazon. The idea was to illustrate for a child that their perspective on their parents might have more than one dimension. Some kids get this intuitively. Others could use some illumination. But interestingly, adults are reviewing their own mothers -- or parents -- through the prism of the story ... and this is when they get emotional. For me, it didn't occur to me that my mother showed much love through sacrifice until I took a closer look at her life. Her style wasn't that of day-to-day hands-on affection. But she delayed ending a deeply unhappy marriage for at least 1- years until my sister and I were nearly adults. Ten years of frustration and depression was the foul Martian air she had to breathe after giving us the last space helmet. Oh, heck, that's probably what was in my mind when I wrote the story. I didn't marry a psychologist for nothing.
You've mentioned that "Mars Needs Moms!" has run into trouble with "the daunting p.c. police of children's literature." What's the issue with it?
It's 1) the domestic depiction of moms and the domestic fantasy that the Martians are obsessed with: getting driven to soccer. Making their lunches. Being entertained. I got dinged by the kid-lit p.c. police for failing to mention a professional job for mom. Big no-no. This is very funny. As if working at Kmart -- or as the CFO for Intel -- means a damned thing to a 5-year-old. Bandaging her boo-boo does.
And 2) depicting moms as (domestic) self-sacrifice machines. This, in the kid-lit orthodoxy, provides reasons for women to feel guilty about the career choices they might make (and the sacrifice/guilt issues regarding children). Both of these nailed me in Publishers Weekly's eyes. It was a deliciously scathing review, the most important in publishing ... I can say "delicious" with a buoyant, flippant air because the book is a bestseller. I'm quite positive, by the way, that my Publishers Weekly reviewer was a woman whose own mother made her sit and eat broccoli until she wet her pants.
How has the world of children's books changed in the 16 years since "A Wish for Wings That Work"?
The fucking -- excuse me -- celebrities have invaded our turf and don't plan to leave. Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- who has a household name is lined up and booked on the "Today" show to promote their children's book. I happen to know that Saddam Hussein had been approached before the noose tightened. Too bad they couldn't have hung Madonna before she had a chance to dump her 10 million books all over the shelves. For crying out loud, Barney, the presidential dog, did a children's book. It was a bestseller, goddammit. I'm going to show up at the White House and suggest that it's my professional right to take a poop in Barney's doghouse. See how he likes that. I'm not bitter.
One theme of your work seems to be longing for respect -- a lot of Opus' story is about his uphill battle for dignity, and in "Mars Needs Moms!" Milo starts out frustrated at his "thundering, humorless tyrant" of a mother's lack of respect for him, and ends up respecting her more. Do you feel like you've gotten the respect that's due to you?
Now that you've brought it up, no. My mother still calls me "Berke" and not "Berkeley," even after I explained to her that a "berk" is common, working-class English slang for -- I'll put this gently -- a vagina. I'd like her to stop this. Mom, I hope you subscribe to Salon.
-- By Douglas Wolk
Berkeley Breathed, Salon's new Sunday cartoonist, tells us why he'd kiss Cheney if he could, why satirists can't touch Bush, and why his new children's book was flayed by the p.c. police.
By Douglas Wolk
Jun. 03, 2007 | It's been almost 18 years since "Bloom County" ended, but Berkeley Breathed is still cartooning full speed ahead. He made his name with that Pulitzer Prize-winning 1980-89 daily comic strip; since then, he's left and returned to the comics page twice (first with "Outland," more recently with "Opus"), sticking to full-color Sunday strips that give his artwork more room to stretch. Breathed has also branched out into other media -- especially children's books, beginning with "A Wish for Wings That Work" in 1991. His latest book for kids, "Mars Needs Moms!" unveils his new all-digital art style. It's the story of young Milo, who shares his name not only with a "Bloom County" character but with Breathed's own son. Milo doesn't see what's so special about his tyrannical, vegetable-obsessed mother until she's kidnapped by Martians; he follows them to Mars, where he discovers not only how useful a mother can be, but that his own mom is willing to sacrifice more for him than he'd ever realized.
In an e-mail conversation, Breathed discussed the hot buttons that "Mars Needs Moms!" has pushed with audiences and reviewers, as well as the state of some of his other projects and the frustrations of dealing with George W. Bush in satire.
The last time Salon interviewed you, in 2003, you said that your goal with "Opus" was "simply to have some fun." How's that been going for you? What are the fun parts of doing the strip?
Drawing Dick Cheney with a marsupial on his head, denying that it's there and blaming it on the left-wing media. What could be more fun than that?
You've recently floated the possibility of ending "Opus" and killing off the character. I realize this isn't the most appropriate figure of speech, but is the penguin an albatross for you? Does the persistence of the characters you've been following for decades make it easier or harder for you to do an ongoing comic strip?
I wouldn't be in the comic pages if not for Opus. The spiritual and comedic heart of a comic strip doesn't always appear, and you can't will one into being. A good comic strip character is born midwifed by serendipity, not design.
I was kidding about killing Opus, by the way. I'd like to walk the streets free from fears of spontaneous garroting.
What's going on with the "Opus" movie?
Good segue! He's dead. A stake through his promising cinematic heart, after five years of active development at Miramax. Animation isn't a game for the timid. There'll only be a movie if I'm writing it, which will probably keep him off the big expensive screen ... probably just as well.
You've mentioned that you've got a novel in progress. What kind of novel is it?
Everybody has a novel in progress. I hate to be left out of these trends. I have an idea that could not -- despite herculean efforts -- be squeezed into the 40 pages of a picture book. And once I train myself to write a page of text without immediately running off to paint the action, like a monkey reflexively jumping to an organ grinder, I shall begin.
Years ago, you declared that George W. Bush had "cut off our satirist balls" by being unwilling to take himself seriously, but "Opus" features some of the most vehement political satire you've ever written. What do you think is the job of a satirist at a political moment like this one?
Cartoonists -- any satirists -- are mere blowhards at the fringes of the mob, screaming at the crowd to throw the gasoline bombs at the storm troopers. Nobody pays attention to us, really, but we look amusing with our veins popping out. I think it builds confidence for the stragglers in the back.
Bush has given us a gift: far from not taking himself seriously, he's become the only human being on the planet that thinks he's not just uniquely competent ... but brilliant in his strategic, heavenly inspired prescience as to how the world works. This hilarious -- also arguably homicidal -- self-deception is what makes him a comical figure. Literally, it's as if -- I mean this with the utmost respect for both the office and the man -- my 5-year-old boy Milo was running the free world. Milo believes himself equally as shrewd in spotting who the bad guys are in any movie and declaring the complex strategy to deal with them: "Blast 'em all!"
But there's bad news for satirists. Bush has come full circle: His ridiculousness is approaching the sort of existential absurdity that is untouchable. Watch him try to string a sensible sentence together now. Anywhere. He's become one of those guys with the Marx Brothers in "A Night at the Opera" who tumble through the door in the stateroom scene. I can't make him funnier than when he's trying to explain himself in a town hall meeting. Any day now he will go with "I'm the decisioner" and we satirists will know that our balls have been cut off entirely by a very shrewd adversary. Reagan did this too by becoming senile.
Dick Cheney is a different matter. I'd kiss him if I could.
"Mars Needs Moms!" features your first fully digital "painted" artwork, and the color images have what looks like a lot of 3-D digital modeling in them -- they have a very specific "2007" look about them, in a way that the black-and-white line drawings on other pages don't. (And some of the characters and sets seem to have a hint of old Chuck Jones cartoons in their design.) How did you decide on your visual technique and style for this book?
This story popped forth in my mental scrapbook looking like a film ... which admittedly is my first love. I painted it as stills from a movie, which it's actually becoming. Watercolor and color pencils usually rule the realm of children's illustrations. The book I'm working on now will be drawn more conventionally. You still can't beat the weird verisimilitude of an elegantly drawn rough pencil line, though.
What were the picture books you liked best when you were a kid? Are your favorites different now that you've had two children of your own to read to?
To be honest, beyond the charms of Seuss' cartoons, children's books in the '60s weren't a depository of inspirational artwork. They had their charms ... but they rarely offered rich, graphic worlds that transported imaginations. Painters such as N.C. Wyeth would never have considered illustrating anything but adult novels. I wish he had. It took stumbling on a Chris Van Allsburg book when I was doing "Bloom County" in 1985 for the possibilities to occur to me. And indeed, this was when publishers discovered that the real way to sell lots of picture books ... was to make them just as captivating to look at for adults as children. This is revolutionary. It's the world that I could fit into.
What has having children taught you about creating a book that can worm its way into a 4-year-old's mind and heart?
A recent, instructive exchange with my son while reading the beta version of "Mars Needs Moms!" some months ago:
Me: "Then Milo pulled on his slippers and ran after the departing spaceship that held his captive mother..."
My son: Dad, where's the slippers? Look. He's got bare feet.
Me: He's got them shoved down his jammies. He'll put them on soon. Listen, the Martians have his mother. That's the important thing, right?
My son: Yep.
Me: So ... "Milo grabbed the spaceship's ladder and hung on as --"
My son: Are the slippers in his butt crack?
Lesson learned: If you write it, draw it. They should give me the Caldecott Medal just for embracing at least this bit of kid-lit orthodoxy.
"Mars Needs Moms!" is about the idea that parents love their children so much they'd die for them -- and that children don't often realize that. Do you think young kids might pick up that message from the book, or is it more meant to strike an emotional chord with the parents who read it to them?
Both. And it does, from the comments I get. Read the readers' reviews for the book at Amazon. The idea was to illustrate for a child that their perspective on their parents might have more than one dimension. Some kids get this intuitively. Others could use some illumination. But interestingly, adults are reviewing their own mothers -- or parents -- through the prism of the story ... and this is when they get emotional. For me, it didn't occur to me that my mother showed much love through sacrifice until I took a closer look at her life. Her style wasn't that of day-to-day hands-on affection. But she delayed ending a deeply unhappy marriage for at least 1- years until my sister and I were nearly adults. Ten years of frustration and depression was the foul Martian air she had to breathe after giving us the last space helmet. Oh, heck, that's probably what was in my mind when I wrote the story. I didn't marry a psychologist for nothing.
You've mentioned that "Mars Needs Moms!" has run into trouble with "the daunting p.c. police of children's literature." What's the issue with it?
It's 1) the domestic depiction of moms and the domestic fantasy that the Martians are obsessed with: getting driven to soccer. Making their lunches. Being entertained. I got dinged by the kid-lit p.c. police for failing to mention a professional job for mom. Big no-no. This is very funny. As if working at Kmart -- or as the CFO for Intel -- means a damned thing to a 5-year-old. Bandaging her boo-boo does.
And 2) depicting moms as (domestic) self-sacrifice machines. This, in the kid-lit orthodoxy, provides reasons for women to feel guilty about the career choices they might make (and the sacrifice/guilt issues regarding children). Both of these nailed me in Publishers Weekly's eyes. It was a deliciously scathing review, the most important in publishing ... I can say "delicious" with a buoyant, flippant air because the book is a bestseller. I'm quite positive, by the way, that my Publishers Weekly reviewer was a woman whose own mother made her sit and eat broccoli until she wet her pants.
How has the world of children's books changed in the 16 years since "A Wish for Wings That Work"?
The fucking -- excuse me -- celebrities have invaded our turf and don't plan to leave. Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- who has a household name is lined up and booked on the "Today" show to promote their children's book. I happen to know that Saddam Hussein had been approached before the noose tightened. Too bad they couldn't have hung Madonna before she had a chance to dump her 10 million books all over the shelves. For crying out loud, Barney, the presidential dog, did a children's book. It was a bestseller, goddammit. I'm going to show up at the White House and suggest that it's my professional right to take a poop in Barney's doghouse. See how he likes that. I'm not bitter.
One theme of your work seems to be longing for respect -- a lot of Opus' story is about his uphill battle for dignity, and in "Mars Needs Moms!" Milo starts out frustrated at his "thundering, humorless tyrant" of a mother's lack of respect for him, and ends up respecting her more. Do you feel like you've gotten the respect that's due to you?
Now that you've brought it up, no. My mother still calls me "Berke" and not "Berkeley," even after I explained to her that a "berk" is common, working-class English slang for -- I'll put this gently -- a vagina. I'd like her to stop this. Mom, I hope you subscribe to Salon.
-- By Douglas Wolk
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Where is our outrage?
I've mentioned, previously, that I believe that my generation - the adults that permitted George W. Bush, to be installed as president by the Supreme Court in 2000, will be judged poorly by future generations. The disaster that the reign of King George would be bad enough if he had been duly elected. But the fact that we let what went down in Florida in 2000 go down without a better fight reflects as poorly on us as it does on the usurper. And if somehow our collective shame serves to rally others to determine to "never let it happen again", then I believe that we will have served our democracy in some small, if not cowardly, way.
That said, it is my hope that as the lens of history draws itself upon the acts of this administration, it has the cool demeanor and sensibilities of Mark Danner. Mr. Danner recently delivered this commencement to Berkeley's graduating Department of Rhetoric class.
A Study in the Rhetoric of George W. Bush
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070601_a_study_in_bushs_rhetoric/
Posted on Jun 1, 2007
Mark Danner
Words in a Time of War
Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President
By Mark Danner
[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]
Originally posted at TomDispatch.com (http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=200332)
When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I’m afraid, that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety—the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.
The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in particular you, the parents.
Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world—and I use “get on in the world” in the very broadest sense—well then, oh esteemed parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of Rhetoric.
Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic, something indeed ... intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years during time of war—and what a very strange wartime it has been.
When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq war had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the president, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a banner famously marked “Mission Accomplished,” had declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today—“Words in a Time of War”—surely those words of George W. Bush must stand as among the era’s most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the president uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The president has lost control of those words, as of so much else.
At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003, fits handily into the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast aircraft carrier—a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off, would not be glimpsed by the television audience—the event and its staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1 extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to bind the country together in a second precise image of victory—the first being the pulling down of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, also staged—an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004 election. The president was the star, the sailors and airmen and their enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.
However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl’s famous film spectacular of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something different here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If ever there was a need for a “disciplined grasp” of the “symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse”—as your Rhetoric Department’s website puts it—surely it is now. For we have today an administration that not only is radical—unprecedentedly so—in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.
I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial “unnamed Administration official” and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind’s recounting, is what that “unnamed Administration official” told him:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”
I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante’s welcome above the gates of Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from “Bush’s Brain”—for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname—these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the “reality-based community”—those such as we—are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.
Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be “truth”—in quotation marks—for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?
Of course I should not say “those such as we” here, for you, dear graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else altogether. This is, after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades—though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we in the “reality-based community” may just now be discovering it, you have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first Rhetoric-Major President.
The Dirtied Face of Power
I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of—I hope—permitted rhetorical pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the history of the present age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major President came to power after a savage and unprecedented electoral battle that was decided not by the ballots of American voters—for of these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival—but by the votes of Supreme Court justices, where Republicans prevailed 5 to 4, making George W. Bush the first president in more than a century to come to the White House with fewer votes than those of his opponent.
In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the president shortly achieved this first success in “creating his own reality.” To act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had overwhelming political power.
This, however, was only the overture of the vast symphonic work to come, a work heralded by the huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of 9/11. We are so embedded in its age that it is easy to forget the stark, overwhelming shock of it: 19 young men with box-cutters seized enormous transcontinental airliners and brought those towers down. In an age in which we have become accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide attacks in a single day—often these multiple attacks from Baghdad don’t even make the front pages of our papers—it is easy to forget the blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image of the second airliner disappearing into the great office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it, and emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red blossom of flame, on the other side; and then, half an hour later, the astonishing flowering collapse of the hundred-story structure, transforming itself, in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to great plume of heaven-reaching white smoke.
The image remains, will always remain, with us; for truly the weapon that day was not box-cutters in the hands of 19 young men, nor airliners at their command. The weapon that day was the television set. It was the television set that made the image possible, and inextinguishable. If terror is first of all a way of talking—the propaganda of the deed, indeed—then that day the television was the indispensable conveyor of the conversation: the recruitment poster for fundamentalism, the only symbolic arena in which America’s weakness and vulnerability could be dramatized on an adequate scale. Terror—as Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister and the successful terrorist who drove the British from Mandate Palestine, remarked in his memoirs—terror is about destroying the prestige of the imperial regime; terror is about “dirtying the face of power.”
President Bush and his lieutenants surely realized this and it is in that knowledge, I believe, that we can find the beginning of the answer to one of the more intriguing puzzles of these last few years: What exactly lay at the root of the almost fanatical determination of administration officials to attack and occupy Iraq? It was, obviously, the classic “over-determined” decision, a tangle of fear, in the form of those infamous weapons of mass destruction; of imperial ambition, in the form of the neoconservative project to “remake the Middle East”; and of realpolitik, in the form of the “vital interest” of securing the industrial world’s oil supplies.
In the beginning, though, was the felt need on the part of our nation’s leaders, men and women so worshipful of the idea of power and its ability to remake reality itself, to restore the nation’s prestige, to wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the president, when asked by Bush’s speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq war, responded: “Because Afghanistan was not enough.” The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” In other words, the presiding image of The War on Terror—the burning towers collapsing on the television screen—had to be supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a vanquished Arab capital. It is no accident that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the first “war cabinet” meeting at Camp David the Saturday after the 9/11 attacks, fretted over the “lack of targets” in Afghanistan and wondered whether we “shouldn’t do Iraq first.” He wanted to see those advancing tanks marching across our television screens, and soon.
In the end, of course, the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks, though they were perfectly happy to have us do so, the better to destroy these multi-million-dollar anachronisms with so-called IEDs—improvised explosive devices—worth a few hundred bucks apiece. This is called asymmetrical warfare, and one should note here with some astonishment how successful it has been these last half-dozen years. In the post-Cold War world, after all, as one neoconservative theorist explained shortly after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare “unipolar moment.” It deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy and Air Force, than the rest of the world combined.
It was the assumption of this so-called preponderance that lay behind the philosophy of power enunciated by Bush’s Brain and that led to an attitude toward international law and alliances that is, in my view, quite unprecedented in American history. That radical attitude is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: “Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.” Let me repeat that little troika of “weapons of the weak”: international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and ... terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything. In such a world, courts—indeed, law itself—can only limit the power of the most powerful state. Wielding preponderant power, what need has it for law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon of the weak. The most powerful state, after all, makes reality.
Asymmetric Warfare and Dumb Luck
Now, here’s an astonishing fact: Fewer than half a dozen years into this “unipolar moment,” the greatest military power in the history of the world stands on the brink of defeat in Iraq. Its vastly expensive and all-powerful military has been humbled by a congeries of secret organizations fighting mainly by means of suicide vests, car bombs and improvised explosive devices—all of them cheap, simple and effective, indeed so effective that these techniques now comprise a kind of ready-made insurgency kit freely available on the Internet and spreading in popularity around the world, most obviously to Afghanistan, that land of few targets.
As I stand here, one of our two major political parties advocates the withdrawal—gradual, or otherwise—of American combat forces from Iraq and many in the other party are feeling the increasing urge to go along. As for the Bush administration’s broader War on Terror, as the State Department detailed recently in its annual report on the subject, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has never been higher, nor more effective. True, al-Qaida has not attacked again within the United States. They do not need to. They are alive and flourishing. Indeed, it might even be said that they are winning. For their goal, despite the rhetoric of the Bush administration, was not simply to kill Americans but, by challenging the United States in this spectacular fashion, to recruit great numbers to their cause and to move their insurgency into the heart of the Middle East. And all these things they have done.
How could such a thing have happened? In their choice of enemy, one might say that the terrorists of al-Qaida had a great deal of dumb luck, for they attacked a country run by an administration that had a radical conception of the potency of power. At the heart of the principle of asymmetric warfare—al-Qaida’s kind of warfare—is the notion of using your opponents’ power against him. How does a small group of insurgents without an army, or even heavy weapons, defeat the greatest conventional military force the world has ever known? How do you defeat such an army if you don’t have an army? Well, you borrow your enemy’s. And this is precisely what al-Qaida did. Using the classic strategy of provocation, the group tried to tempt the superpower into its adopted homeland. The original strategy behind the 9/11 attacks—apart from humbling the superpower and creating the greatest recruiting poster the world had ever seen—was to lure the United States into a ground war in Afghanistan, where the one remaining superpower (like the Soviet Union before it) was to be trapped, stranded and destroyed. It was to prepare for this war that Osama bin Laden arranged for the assassination, two days before 9/11—via bombs secreted in the video cameras of two terrorists posing as reporters—of the Afghan Northern Alliance leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, who would have been the United States’ most powerful ally.
Well aware of the Soviets’ Afghanistan debacle—after all, the U.S. had supplied most of the weapons that defeated the Soviets there—the Bush administration tried to avoid a quagmire by sending plenty of air support, lots of cash and, most important, very few troops, relying instead on its Afghan allies. But if bin Laden was disappointed in this, he would soon have a far more valuable gift: the invasion of Iraq, a country that, unlike Afghanistan, was at the heart of the Middle East and central to Arab concerns, and, what’s more, a nation that sat squarely on the critical Sunni-Shia divide, a potential ignition switch for al-Qaida’s great dream of a regional civil war. It is on that precipice that we find ourselves teetering today.
Critical to this strange and unlikely history were the administration’s peculiar ideas about power and its relation to reality—and beneath that a familiar imperial attitude, if put forward in a strikingly crude and harsh form: “We’re an empire now and when we act we create our own reality.” Power, untrammeled by law or custom; power, unlimited by the so-called weapons of the weak, be they international institutions, courts or terrorism—power can remake reality. It is no accident that one of Karl Rove’s heroes is President William McKinley, who stood at the apex of America’s first imperial moment, and led the country into a glorious colonial adventure in the Philippines that was also meant to be the military equivalent of a stroll in the park and that, in any event, led to several years of bloody insurgency—an insurgency, it bears noticing, that was only finally put down with the help of the extensive use of torture, most notably water-boarding, which has made its reappearance in the imperial battles of our own times.
If we are an empire now, as Mr. Rove says, perhaps we should add, as he might not, that we are also a democracy, and therein, rhetoric graduates of 2007, lies the rub. A democratic empire, as even the Athenians discovered, is an odd beast, like one of those mythological creatures born equally of lion and bird, or man and horse. If one longs to invade Iraq to restore the empire’s prestige, one must convince the democracy’s people of the necessity of such a step. Herein lies the pathos of the famous weapons-of-mass-destruction issue, which has become a kind of synecdoche for the entire lying mess of the past few years. The center stage of our public life is now dominated by a simple melodrama: Bush wanted to invade Iraq; Bush told Americans that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Iraq did not have such weapons. Therefore Bush lied, and the war was born of lies and deception.
I hesitate to use that most overused of rhetorical terms—irony—to describe the emergence of this narrative at the center of our national life, but nonetheless, and with apologies: It is ironic. The fact is that officials of the Bush administration did believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though they vastly exaggerated the evidence they had to prove it and, even more, the threat that those weapons might have posed, had they been there. In doing this, the officials believed themselves to be “framing a guilty man”; that is, like cops planting a bit of evidence in the murderer’s car, they believed their underlying case was true; they just needed to dramatize it a bit to make it clear and convincing to the public. What matter, once the tanks were rumbling through Baghdad and the war was won? Weapons would be found, surely; and if only a few were found, who would care? By then, the United States military would have created a new reality.
I have often had a daydream about this. I see a solitary Army private—a cook perhaps, or a quartermaster—breaking the padlock on some forgotten warehouse on an Iraqi military base, poking about and finding a few hundred, even a few thousand, old artillery shells, leaking chemicals. These shells—forgotten, unusable—might have dated from the time of the first Gulf War, when Iraq unquestionably possessed chemical munitions. (Indeed, in the 1980s, the United States had supplied targeting intelligence that helped the Iraqis use them effectively against the Iranians.) And though now they had been forgotten, leaking, unusable, still they would indeed be weapons of mass destruction—to use the misleading and absurd construction that has headlined our age—and my solitary cook or quartermaster would be a hero, for he would have, all unwittingly, “proved” the case.
My daydream could easily have come to pass. Why not? It is nigh unto miraculous that the Iraqi regime, even with the help of the United Nations, managed so thoroughly to destroy or remove its once existing stockpile. And if my private had found those leaky old shells, what would have been changed thereby? Yes, the administration could have pointed to them in triumph and trumpeted the proven character of Saddam’s threat. So much less embarrassing than the “weapons of mass destruction program related activities” that the administration still doggedly asserts were “discovered.” But, in fact, the underlying calculus would have remained: that, in the months leading up to the war, the administration relentlessly exaggerated the threat Saddam posed to the United States and relentlessly understated the risk the United States would run in invading and occupying Iraq. And it would have remained true and incontestable that—as the quaintly fact-bound British foreign secretary put it eight months before the war, in a secret British cabinet meeting made famous by the so-called Downing Street Memo—“the case [for attacking Iraq] was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Which is to say, the weapons were a rhetorical prop and, satisfying as it has been to see the administration beaten about the head with that prop, we forget this underlying fact at our peril. The issue was never whether the weapons were there or not; indeed, had the weapons really been the issue, why could the administration not let the U.N. inspectors take the time to find them (as, of course, they never would have)? The administration needed, wanted, had to have, the Iraq war. The weapons were but a symbol, the necessary casus belli, what Hitchcock called the maguffin—that glowing, mysterious object in the suitcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: that is, a satisfyingly concrete object on which to fasten a rhetorical or narrative end, in this case a war to restore American prestige, project its power, remake the Middle East.
The famous weapons were chosen to play this leading role for “bureaucratic reasons,” as Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense and until quite recently the unhappy president of the World Bank, once remarked to a lucky journalist. Had a handful of those weapons been found, the underlying truth would have remained: Saddam posed nowhere remotely near the threat to the United States that would have justified running the enormous metaphysical risk that a war of choice with Iraq posed. Of course, when you are focused on magical phrases like “preponderant power” and “the unipolar moment,” matters like numbers of troops at your disposal—and the simple fact that the United States had too few to sustain a long-term occupation of a country the size of Iraq—must seem mundane indeed.
Imperial Words and the Reality-Based Universe
I must apologize to you, Rhetoric Class of 2007. Ineluctably, uncontrollably, I find myself slipping back into the dull and unimaginative language of the reality-based community. It must grate a bit on your ears. After all, we live in a world in which the presumption that we were misled into war, that the Bush officials knew there were no weapons and touted them anyway, has supplanted the glowing, magical image of the weapons themselves. It is a presumption of great use to those regretful souls who once backed the war so fervently, not least a number of Democratic politicians we all could name, as well as many of my friends in the so-called liberal punditocracy who now need a suitable excuse for their own rashness, gullibility and stupidity. For this, Bush’s mendacity seems perfectly sized and ready to hand.
There is, however, full enough of that mendacity, without artificially adding to the stockpile. Indeed, all around us we’ve been hearing these last many months the sound of ice breaking, as the accumulated frozen scandals of this administration slowly crack open to reveal their queasy secrets. And yet the problem, of course, is that they are not secrets at all: One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed—and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.
If this Age of Rhetoric has a tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the frozen scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and revealed, in a never-ending torture familiar to the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor half-eaten liver. A full three years ago, the photographs from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS on 60 Minutes II and published by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far back, I wrote a book entitled Torture and Truth (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590171527/nationbooks08) , made up largely of Bush administration documents that detailed the decision to use “extreme interrogation techniques” or—in the First President of Rhetoric’s phrase—“an alternative set of procedures” on prisoners in the War on Terror.
He used this phrase last September in a White House speech kicking off the 2006 midterm election campaign, at a time when accusing the Democrats of evidencing a continued softness on terror—and a lamentable unwillingness to show the needed harshness in “interrogating terrorists”—seemed a winning electoral strategy. And indeed Democrats seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of last October, which arguably made many of these “alternative sets of procedures” explicitly legal. And Democrats did win both houses of Congress, a victory perhaps owed in part to their refusal to block Bush’s interrogation law. Who can say? What we can say is that if torture today remains a “scandal,” a “crisis,” it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.
Perhaps the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley is not the worst of places to call for a halt to this spinning merry-go-round. I know it will brand me forever a member of the reality-based community if I suggest that the one invaluable service the new Democratic Congress can provide all Americans is a clear accounting of how we came to find ourselves in this present time of war: an authorized version, as it were, which is, I know, the most pathetically retrograde of ideas.
This would require that people like Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld, and many others be called before a select, bipartisan committee of Congress to tell us what, in their view, really happened. I squirm with embarrassment putting forward such a pathetically unsophisticated notion, but failing at least the minimally authorized version that Congress could provide, we will find ourselves forever striving—by chasing down byways like the revelation of the identity of Valerie Plame, or the question of whether or not George Tenet bolstered his slam-dunk exclamation in the Oval Office with an accompanying Michael Jordan-like leap—to understand how precisely decisions were made between Sept. 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq 18 months later.
Don’t worry, though, Rhetoric graduates: such a proposal has about it the dusty feel of past decades; it is as “reality-based” as can be and we are unlikely to see it in our time. What we are likely to see is the ongoing collapse of our first Rhetoric-Major President, who, with fewer than one American in three now willing to say they approve of the job he is doing, is seeing his power ebb by the day. Tempting as it is, I will urge you not to draw too many overarching conclusions from his fate. He has had, after all, a very long run—and I say this with the wonder that perhaps can only come from having covered both the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns, from Florida, and the Iraq war.
I last visited that war in December, when Baghdad was cold and gray and I spent a good deal of time drawing black X’s through the sources listed in my address book, finding them, one after another, either departed or dead. Baghdad seemed a sad and empty place, with even its customary traffic jams gone, and the periodic, resonating explosions attracting barely glances from those few Iraqis to be found on the streets.
How, in these “Words in a Time of War,” can I convey to you the reality of that place at this time? Let me read to you a bit of an account from a young Iraqi woman of how that war has touched her and her family, drawn from a newsroom blog. The words may be terrible and hard to bear, but—for those of you who have made such a determined effort to learn to read and understand—this is the most reality I could find to tell you. This is what lies behind the headlines and the news reports and it is as it is.
“We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over. ...
“So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I. ...
“When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. ‘We identified him by the cell phone in his pants’ pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We don’t know what he looks like.’
“We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning, we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side, complete bodies; on that side, halves; and everywhere, body parts.
“We were asked what we were looking for. ‘Upper half,’ replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. ‘Over there.’ We looked for our boy’s broken body between tens of other boys’ remains, with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.
“Millennia later we found him, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony.”
The foregoing were words from an Iraqi family, who find themselves as far as they can possibly be from the idea that, when they act, they create their own reality—that they are, as Bush’s Brain put it, “history’s actors.” The voices you heard come from history’s objects and we must ponder who the subjects are, who exactly is acting upon them.
The car bomb that so changed their lives was not set by Americans; indeed, young Americans even now are dying to prevent such things. I have known a few of these young Americans. Perhaps you have as well; perhaps they are in the circles of your family or of your friends. I remember one of them, a young lieutenant, a beautiful young man with a puffy, sleepy face, looking at me when I asked whether or not he was scared when he went out on patrol—this was October 2003, as the insurgency was exploding. I remember him smiling a moment and then saying with evident pity for a reporter’s lack of understanding: “This is war. We shoot, they shoot. We shoot, they shoot. Some days they shoot better than we do.” He was patient in his answer, smiling sleepily in his young beauty, and I could tell he regarded me as from another world, a man who could never understand the world in which he lived. Three days after our interview, an explosion near Fallujah killed him.
Contingency, accidents, the metaphysical ironies that seem to stitch history together like a lopsided quilt—all these have no place in the imperial vision. A perception of one’s self as “history’s actor” leaves no place for them. But they exist and it is invariably others, closer to the ground, who see them, know them, and suffer their consequences.
You have chosen a path that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that you have studied and into the heart of those consequences. Of all people, you have chosen to learn how to see the gaps and the loose stitches and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this Age of Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams. You have made your study in a propitious time, oh graduates, and that bold choice may well bring you pain, for you have devoted yourselves to seeing what it is that stands before you. If clear sight were not so painful, many more would elect to have it. Today, you do not conclude, but begin: today you commence. My blessings upon you, and my gratitude to you for training yourself to see. Reality, it seems, has caught up with you.
Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590172078/nationbooks08) ; Torture and Truth; and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and Henry R. Luce professor at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other subjects appears regularly in The New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/) . His work is archived at MarkDanner.com (http://www.markdanner.com/) .
Copyright 2007 Mark Danner
That said, it is my hope that as the lens of history draws itself upon the acts of this administration, it has the cool demeanor and sensibilities of Mark Danner. Mr. Danner recently delivered this commencement to Berkeley's graduating Department of Rhetoric class.
A Study in the Rhetoric of George W. Bush
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070601_a_study_in_bushs_rhetoric/
Posted on Jun 1, 2007
Mark Danner
Words in a Time of War
Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President
By Mark Danner
[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]
Originally posted at TomDispatch.com (http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=200332)
When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I’m afraid, that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety—the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.
The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and in particular you, the parents.
Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world—and I use “get on in the world” in the very broadest sense—well then, oh esteemed parents, it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen, is truly the Age of Rhetoric.
Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something intrinsic, something indeed ... intimate about this age we live in. Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your entire undergraduate years during time of war—and what a very strange wartime it has been.
When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq war had already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the president, clad jauntily in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a banner famously marked “Mission Accomplished,” had declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today—“Words in a Time of War”—surely those words of George W. Bush must stand as among the era’s most famous, and most rhetorically unstable. For whatever they may have meant when the president uttered them on that sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different today, almost exactly four years later. The president has lost control of those words, as of so much else.
At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003, fits handily into the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast aircraft carrier—a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off, would not be glimpsed by the television audience—the event and its staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1 extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to bind the country together in a second precise image of victory—the first being the pulling down of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, also staged—an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004 election. The president was the star, the sailors and airmen and their enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.
However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl’s famous film spectacular of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something different here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If ever there was a need for a “disciplined grasp” of the “symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse”—as your Rhetoric Department’s website puts it—surely it is now. For we have today an administration that not only is radical—unprecedentedly so—in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.
I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put forward by the proverbial “unnamed Administration official” and published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind’s recounting, is what that “unnamed Administration official” told him:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”
I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante’s welcome above the gates of Hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from “Bush’s Brain”—for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment, Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname—these words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the “reality-based community”—those such as we—are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.
Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be “truth”—in quotation marks—for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?
Of course I should not say “those such as we” here, for you, dear graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else altogether. This is, after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades—though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we in the “reality-based community” may just now be discovering it, you have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the object has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first Rhetoric-Major President.
The Dirtied Face of Power
I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of—I hope—permitted rhetorical pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the history of the present age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major President came to power after a savage and unprecedented electoral battle that was decided not by the ballots of American voters—for of these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival—but by the votes of Supreme Court justices, where Republicans prevailed 5 to 4, making George W. Bush the first president in more than a century to come to the White House with fewer votes than those of his opponent.
In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the president shortly achieved this first success in “creating his own reality.” To act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had overwhelming political power.
This, however, was only the overture of the vast symphonic work to come, a work heralded by the huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of 9/11. We are so embedded in its age that it is easy to forget the stark, overwhelming shock of it: 19 young men with box-cutters seized enormous transcontinental airliners and brought those towers down. In an age in which we have become accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide attacks in a single day—often these multiple attacks from Baghdad don’t even make the front pages of our papers—it is easy to forget the blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image of the second airliner disappearing into the great office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it, and emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red blossom of flame, on the other side; and then, half an hour later, the astonishing flowering collapse of the hundred-story structure, transforming itself, in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to great plume of heaven-reaching white smoke.
The image remains, will always remain, with us; for truly the weapon that day was not box-cutters in the hands of 19 young men, nor airliners at their command. The weapon that day was the television set. It was the television set that made the image possible, and inextinguishable. If terror is first of all a way of talking—the propaganda of the deed, indeed—then that day the television was the indispensable conveyor of the conversation: the recruitment poster for fundamentalism, the only symbolic arena in which America’s weakness and vulnerability could be dramatized on an adequate scale. Terror—as Menachem Begin, the late Israeli prime minister and the successful terrorist who drove the British from Mandate Palestine, remarked in his memoirs—terror is about destroying the prestige of the imperial regime; terror is about “dirtying the face of power.”
President Bush and his lieutenants surely realized this and it is in that knowledge, I believe, that we can find the beginning of the answer to one of the more intriguing puzzles of these last few years: What exactly lay at the root of the almost fanatical determination of administration officials to attack and occupy Iraq? It was, obviously, the classic “over-determined” decision, a tangle of fear, in the form of those infamous weapons of mass destruction; of imperial ambition, in the form of the neoconservative project to “remake the Middle East”; and of realpolitik, in the form of the “vital interest” of securing the industrial world’s oil supplies.
In the beginning, though, was the felt need on the part of our nation’s leaders, men and women so worshipful of the idea of power and its ability to remake reality itself, to restore the nation’s prestige, to wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the president, when asked by Bush’s speechwriter why he had supported the Iraq war, responded: “Because Afghanistan was not enough.” The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” In other words, the presiding image of The War on Terror—the burning towers collapsing on the television screen—had to be supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly through a vanquished Arab capital. It is no accident that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the first “war cabinet” meeting at Camp David the Saturday after the 9/11 attacks, fretted over the “lack of targets” in Afghanistan and wondered whether we “shouldn’t do Iraq first.” He wanted to see those advancing tanks marching across our television screens, and soon.
In the end, of course, the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks, though they were perfectly happy to have us do so, the better to destroy these multi-million-dollar anachronisms with so-called IEDs—improvised explosive devices—worth a few hundred bucks apiece. This is called asymmetrical warfare, and one should note here with some astonishment how successful it has been these last half-dozen years. In the post-Cold War world, after all, as one neoconservative theorist explained shortly after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare “unipolar moment.” It deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy and Air Force, than the rest of the world combined.
It was the assumption of this so-called preponderance that lay behind the philosophy of power enunciated by Bush’s Brain and that led to an attitude toward international law and alliances that is, in my view, quite unprecedented in American history. That radical attitude is brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: “Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.” Let me repeat that little troika of “weapons of the weak”: international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions), judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and ... terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything. In such a world, courts—indeed, law itself—can only limit the power of the most powerful state. Wielding preponderant power, what need has it for law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon of the weak. The most powerful state, after all, makes reality.
Asymmetric Warfare and Dumb Luck
Now, here’s an astonishing fact: Fewer than half a dozen years into this “unipolar moment,” the greatest military power in the history of the world stands on the brink of defeat in Iraq. Its vastly expensive and all-powerful military has been humbled by a congeries of secret organizations fighting mainly by means of suicide vests, car bombs and improvised explosive devices—all of them cheap, simple and effective, indeed so effective that these techniques now comprise a kind of ready-made insurgency kit freely available on the Internet and spreading in popularity around the world, most obviously to Afghanistan, that land of few targets.
As I stand here, one of our two major political parties advocates the withdrawal—gradual, or otherwise—of American combat forces from Iraq and many in the other party are feeling the increasing urge to go along. As for the Bush administration’s broader War on Terror, as the State Department detailed recently in its annual report on the subject, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has never been higher, nor more effective. True, al-Qaida has not attacked again within the United States. They do not need to. They are alive and flourishing. Indeed, it might even be said that they are winning. For their goal, despite the rhetoric of the Bush administration, was not simply to kill Americans but, by challenging the United States in this spectacular fashion, to recruit great numbers to their cause and to move their insurgency into the heart of the Middle East. And all these things they have done.
How could such a thing have happened? In their choice of enemy, one might say that the terrorists of al-Qaida had a great deal of dumb luck, for they attacked a country run by an administration that had a radical conception of the potency of power. At the heart of the principle of asymmetric warfare—al-Qaida’s kind of warfare—is the notion of using your opponents’ power against him. How does a small group of insurgents without an army, or even heavy weapons, defeat the greatest conventional military force the world has ever known? How do you defeat such an army if you don’t have an army? Well, you borrow your enemy’s. And this is precisely what al-Qaida did. Using the classic strategy of provocation, the group tried to tempt the superpower into its adopted homeland. The original strategy behind the 9/11 attacks—apart from humbling the superpower and creating the greatest recruiting poster the world had ever seen—was to lure the United States into a ground war in Afghanistan, where the one remaining superpower (like the Soviet Union before it) was to be trapped, stranded and destroyed. It was to prepare for this war that Osama bin Laden arranged for the assassination, two days before 9/11—via bombs secreted in the video cameras of two terrorists posing as reporters—of the Afghan Northern Alliance leader, Ahmed Shah Massood, who would have been the United States’ most powerful ally.
Well aware of the Soviets’ Afghanistan debacle—after all, the U.S. had supplied most of the weapons that defeated the Soviets there—the Bush administration tried to avoid a quagmire by sending plenty of air support, lots of cash and, most important, very few troops, relying instead on its Afghan allies. But if bin Laden was disappointed in this, he would soon have a far more valuable gift: the invasion of Iraq, a country that, unlike Afghanistan, was at the heart of the Middle East and central to Arab concerns, and, what’s more, a nation that sat squarely on the critical Sunni-Shia divide, a potential ignition switch for al-Qaida’s great dream of a regional civil war. It is on that precipice that we find ourselves teetering today.
Critical to this strange and unlikely history were the administration’s peculiar ideas about power and its relation to reality—and beneath that a familiar imperial attitude, if put forward in a strikingly crude and harsh form: “We’re an empire now and when we act we create our own reality.” Power, untrammeled by law or custom; power, unlimited by the so-called weapons of the weak, be they international institutions, courts or terrorism—power can remake reality. It is no accident that one of Karl Rove’s heroes is President William McKinley, who stood at the apex of America’s first imperial moment, and led the country into a glorious colonial adventure in the Philippines that was also meant to be the military equivalent of a stroll in the park and that, in any event, led to several years of bloody insurgency—an insurgency, it bears noticing, that was only finally put down with the help of the extensive use of torture, most notably water-boarding, which has made its reappearance in the imperial battles of our own times.
If we are an empire now, as Mr. Rove says, perhaps we should add, as he might not, that we are also a democracy, and therein, rhetoric graduates of 2007, lies the rub. A democratic empire, as even the Athenians discovered, is an odd beast, like one of those mythological creatures born equally of lion and bird, or man and horse. If one longs to invade Iraq to restore the empire’s prestige, one must convince the democracy’s people of the necessity of such a step. Herein lies the pathos of the famous weapons-of-mass-destruction issue, which has become a kind of synecdoche for the entire lying mess of the past few years. The center stage of our public life is now dominated by a simple melodrama: Bush wanted to invade Iraq; Bush told Americans that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Iraq did not have such weapons. Therefore Bush lied, and the war was born of lies and deception.
I hesitate to use that most overused of rhetorical terms—irony—to describe the emergence of this narrative at the center of our national life, but nonetheless, and with apologies: It is ironic. The fact is that officials of the Bush administration did believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though they vastly exaggerated the evidence they had to prove it and, even more, the threat that those weapons might have posed, had they been there. In doing this, the officials believed themselves to be “framing a guilty man”; that is, like cops planting a bit of evidence in the murderer’s car, they believed their underlying case was true; they just needed to dramatize it a bit to make it clear and convincing to the public. What matter, once the tanks were rumbling through Baghdad and the war was won? Weapons would be found, surely; and if only a few were found, who would care? By then, the United States military would have created a new reality.
I have often had a daydream about this. I see a solitary Army private—a cook perhaps, or a quartermaster—breaking the padlock on some forgotten warehouse on an Iraqi military base, poking about and finding a few hundred, even a few thousand, old artillery shells, leaking chemicals. These shells—forgotten, unusable—might have dated from the time of the first Gulf War, when Iraq unquestionably possessed chemical munitions. (Indeed, in the 1980s, the United States had supplied targeting intelligence that helped the Iraqis use them effectively against the Iranians.) And though now they had been forgotten, leaking, unusable, still they would indeed be weapons of mass destruction—to use the misleading and absurd construction that has headlined our age—and my solitary cook or quartermaster would be a hero, for he would have, all unwittingly, “proved” the case.
My daydream could easily have come to pass. Why not? It is nigh unto miraculous that the Iraqi regime, even with the help of the United Nations, managed so thoroughly to destroy or remove its once existing stockpile. And if my private had found those leaky old shells, what would have been changed thereby? Yes, the administration could have pointed to them in triumph and trumpeted the proven character of Saddam’s threat. So much less embarrassing than the “weapons of mass destruction program related activities” that the administration still doggedly asserts were “discovered.” But, in fact, the underlying calculus would have remained: that, in the months leading up to the war, the administration relentlessly exaggerated the threat Saddam posed to the United States and relentlessly understated the risk the United States would run in invading and occupying Iraq. And it would have remained true and incontestable that—as the quaintly fact-bound British foreign secretary put it eight months before the war, in a secret British cabinet meeting made famous by the so-called Downing Street Memo—“the case [for attacking Iraq] was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”
Which is to say, the weapons were a rhetorical prop and, satisfying as it has been to see the administration beaten about the head with that prop, we forget this underlying fact at our peril. The issue was never whether the weapons were there or not; indeed, had the weapons really been the issue, why could the administration not let the U.N. inspectors take the time to find them (as, of course, they never would have)? The administration needed, wanted, had to have, the Iraq war. The weapons were but a symbol, the necessary casus belli, what Hitchcock called the maguffin—that glowing, mysterious object in the suitcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: that is, a satisfyingly concrete object on which to fasten a rhetorical or narrative end, in this case a war to restore American prestige, project its power, remake the Middle East.
The famous weapons were chosen to play this leading role for “bureaucratic reasons,” as Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense and until quite recently the unhappy president of the World Bank, once remarked to a lucky journalist. Had a handful of those weapons been found, the underlying truth would have remained: Saddam posed nowhere remotely near the threat to the United States that would have justified running the enormous metaphysical risk that a war of choice with Iraq posed. Of course, when you are focused on magical phrases like “preponderant power” and “the unipolar moment,” matters like numbers of troops at your disposal—and the simple fact that the United States had too few to sustain a long-term occupation of a country the size of Iraq—must seem mundane indeed.
Imperial Words and the Reality-Based Universe
I must apologize to you, Rhetoric Class of 2007. Ineluctably, uncontrollably, I find myself slipping back into the dull and unimaginative language of the reality-based community. It must grate a bit on your ears. After all, we live in a world in which the presumption that we were misled into war, that the Bush officials knew there were no weapons and touted them anyway, has supplanted the glowing, magical image of the weapons themselves. It is a presumption of great use to those regretful souls who once backed the war so fervently, not least a number of Democratic politicians we all could name, as well as many of my friends in the so-called liberal punditocracy who now need a suitable excuse for their own rashness, gullibility and stupidity. For this, Bush’s mendacity seems perfectly sized and ready to hand.
There is, however, full enough of that mendacity, without artificially adding to the stockpile. Indeed, all around us we’ve been hearing these last many months the sound of ice breaking, as the accumulated frozen scandals of this administration slowly crack open to reveal their queasy secrets. And yet the problem, of course, is that they are not secrets at all: One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed—and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.
If this Age of Rhetoric has a tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the frozen scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and revealed, in a never-ending torture familiar to the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor half-eaten liver. A full three years ago, the photographs from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS on 60 Minutes II and published by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far back, I wrote a book entitled Torture and Truth (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590171527/nationbooks08) , made up largely of Bush administration documents that detailed the decision to use “extreme interrogation techniques” or—in the First President of Rhetoric’s phrase—“an alternative set of procedures” on prisoners in the War on Terror.
He used this phrase last September in a White House speech kicking off the 2006 midterm election campaign, at a time when accusing the Democrats of evidencing a continued softness on terror—and a lamentable unwillingness to show the needed harshness in “interrogating terrorists”—seemed a winning electoral strategy. And indeed Democrats seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of last October, which arguably made many of these “alternative sets of procedures” explicitly legal. And Democrats did win both houses of Congress, a victory perhaps owed in part to their refusal to block Bush’s interrogation law. Who can say? What we can say is that if torture today remains a “scandal,” a “crisis,” it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.
Perhaps the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley is not the worst of places to call for a halt to this spinning merry-go-round. I know it will brand me forever a member of the reality-based community if I suggest that the one invaluable service the new Democratic Congress can provide all Americans is a clear accounting of how we came to find ourselves in this present time of war: an authorized version, as it were, which is, I know, the most pathetically retrograde of ideas.
This would require that people like Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld, and many others be called before a select, bipartisan committee of Congress to tell us what, in their view, really happened. I squirm with embarrassment putting forward such a pathetically unsophisticated notion, but failing at least the minimally authorized version that Congress could provide, we will find ourselves forever striving—by chasing down byways like the revelation of the identity of Valerie Plame, or the question of whether or not George Tenet bolstered his slam-dunk exclamation in the Oval Office with an accompanying Michael Jordan-like leap—to understand how precisely decisions were made between Sept. 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq 18 months later.
Don’t worry, though, Rhetoric graduates: such a proposal has about it the dusty feel of past decades; it is as “reality-based” as can be and we are unlikely to see it in our time. What we are likely to see is the ongoing collapse of our first Rhetoric-Major President, who, with fewer than one American in three now willing to say they approve of the job he is doing, is seeing his power ebb by the day. Tempting as it is, I will urge you not to draw too many overarching conclusions from his fate. He has had, after all, a very long run—and I say this with the wonder that perhaps can only come from having covered both the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns, from Florida, and the Iraq war.
I last visited that war in December, when Baghdad was cold and gray and I spent a good deal of time drawing black X’s through the sources listed in my address book, finding them, one after another, either departed or dead. Baghdad seemed a sad and empty place, with even its customary traffic jams gone, and the periodic, resonating explosions attracting barely glances from those few Iraqis to be found on the streets.
How, in these “Words in a Time of War,” can I convey to you the reality of that place at this time? Let me read to you a bit of an account from a young Iraqi woman of how that war has touched her and her family, drawn from a newsroom blog. The words may be terrible and hard to bear, but—for those of you who have made such a determined effort to learn to read and understand—this is the most reality I could find to tell you. This is what lies behind the headlines and the news reports and it is as it is.
“We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over. ...
“So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I. ...
“When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. ‘We identified him by the cell phone in his pants’ pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We don’t know what he looks like.’
“We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning, we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side, complete bodies; on that side, halves; and everywhere, body parts.
“We were asked what we were looking for. ‘Upper half,’ replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. ‘Over there.’ We looked for our boy’s broken body between tens of other boys’ remains, with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.
“Millennia later we found him, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony.”
The foregoing were words from an Iraqi family, who find themselves as far as they can possibly be from the idea that, when they act, they create their own reality—that they are, as Bush’s Brain put it, “history’s actors.” The voices you heard come from history’s objects and we must ponder who the subjects are, who exactly is acting upon them.
The car bomb that so changed their lives was not set by Americans; indeed, young Americans even now are dying to prevent such things. I have known a few of these young Americans. Perhaps you have as well; perhaps they are in the circles of your family or of your friends. I remember one of them, a young lieutenant, a beautiful young man with a puffy, sleepy face, looking at me when I asked whether or not he was scared when he went out on patrol—this was October 2003, as the insurgency was exploding. I remember him smiling a moment and then saying with evident pity for a reporter’s lack of understanding: “This is war. We shoot, they shoot. We shoot, they shoot. Some days they shoot better than we do.” He was patient in his answer, smiling sleepily in his young beauty, and I could tell he regarded me as from another world, a man who could never understand the world in which he lived. Three days after our interview, an explosion near Fallujah killed him.
Contingency, accidents, the metaphysical ironies that seem to stitch history together like a lopsided quilt—all these have no place in the imperial vision. A perception of one’s self as “history’s actor” leaves no place for them. But they exist and it is invariably others, closer to the ground, who see them, know them, and suffer their consequences.
You have chosen a path that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that you have studied and into the heart of those consequences. Of all people, you have chosen to learn how to see the gaps and the loose stitches and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this Age of Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams. You have made your study in a propitious time, oh graduates, and that bold choice may well bring you pain, for you have devoted yourselves to seeing what it is that stands before you. If clear sight were not so painful, many more would elect to have it. Today, you do not conclude, but begin: today you commence. My blessings upon you, and my gratitude to you for training yourself to see. Reality, it seems, has caught up with you.
Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590172078/nationbooks08) ; Torture and Truth; and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and Henry R. Luce professor at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other subjects appears regularly in The New York Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/) . His work is archived at MarkDanner.com (http://www.markdanner.com/) .
Copyright 2007 Mark Danner
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
A great debate between atheism and faith
I read Larry Flynt's ode to Jerry Falwell this last week. I was profoundly struck by it and reminded of the generosity human beings are capable of. Flynt's comments hit me between the eyes as I thought on my own shallow response to Falwell's passing... something along the lines of my hope that he liked his food spicy as he was sure to receive his meals hot. Anyway, my point is that the comment was more the poor reflection on my own poor intolerance than on any action Falwell may have made.
For some reason Flynt' article cajoled me into completing this peice by Chris Hedges. This article has been sitting open in my Opera browser for at least two weeks. I'm not sure why I didn't just close it or, for that matter, read it before yesterday. But I'm glad I didn't get rid of it because it was a thoughtful read.
I'm reprinting Chris Hedges opening statement here because I found it first. I have not read Sam Harris' opening statement yet, so I cannot fairly comment on it. That said, it took me several days to decide I was going to read this. After finishing it, I'm sorry it took so long. I hope it gives you pause as well...
Chris Hedges: I Don’t Believe in Atheists
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070523_chris_hedges_i_dont_believe_in_atheists/
Posted on May 23, 2007
By Chris Hedges
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday night, Chris Hedges (http://www.truthdig.com/about/staff/70) and Sam Harris (http://www.truthdig.com/about/staff/23) debated “Religion, Politics and the End of the World.” The following is Hedges’ opening statement, in which he argues that Harris and other critics of faith have mistakenly blamed religion for the ills of the world, when the true danger lies in the human heart and its capacity for evil. We will a recording of the debate soon.
Sam Harris has conflated faith with tribalism. His book is an attack not on faith but on a system of being and believing that is dangerous and incompatible with the open society. He attacks superstition, a belief in magic and the childish notion of an anthropomorphic God that is characteristic of the tribe, of the closed society. He calls this religion. I do not.
What he fails to grasp is not simply the meaning of faith—something I will address later—but the supreme importance of the monotheistic traditions in creating the concept of the individual. This individualism—the belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that at times defy the clamor of the tribe or the nation—is a gift of the Abrahamic faiths. This sense of individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for a deep altruism. And this laid the foundations for the open society. This individualism is the central doctrine and most important contribution of monotheism. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience is the starting point of the great ethical systems of our civilization. The prophets—and here I would include Jesus—helped institutionalize dissent and criticism. They initiated the separation of powers. They reminded us that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious life required us to often oppose and defy those in authority. This is a distinctly anti-tribal outlook. Immanuel Kant built his ethics upon this radical individualism. And Kant’s injunction to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means” runs in a direct line from the Christian Gospels. Karl Popper rightly pointed out in the first volume of “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” when he writes about this creation of the individual as set against the crowd, that “There is no other thought which has been so powerful in the moral development of man” (P. 102, Vol. 1). These religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and destiny ruled human fate—a belief that when challenged by Socrates saw him condemned to death. They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstances and simple human weaknesses, could shape and give direction to society. And most important, individuals could give direction to their own lives.
Human communication directly shapes the quality of a culture. These believers were being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity. This deity could not be captured in pictures, statues or any concrete, iconographic form. God exists in the word and through the word, an unprecedented conception in the ancient world that required the highest order of abstract thinking. “In the beginning,” the Gospel of John reads, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is why the second of the Ten Commandments prohibits Israelites from making concrete images of God. “Iconography thus became blasphemy,” Neil Postman writes, “so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.”
God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty. To argue about whether God exists or does not exist is futile. The question is not whether God exists. The question is whether we concern ourselves with, or are utterly indifferent to, the sanctity and ultimate transcendence of human existence. God is that mysterious force—and you can give it many names as other religions do—which works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty and goodness. God is perhaps best understood as our ultimate concern, that in which we should place our highest hopes, confidence and trust. In Exodus God says, by way of identification, “I am that I am.” It is probably more accurately translated: “I will be what I will be.” God is better understood as verb rather than a noun. God is not an asserted existence but a process accomplishing itself. And God is inescapable. It is the life force that sustains, transforms and defines all existence. The name of God is laden, thanks to our religious institutions and the numerous tyrants, charlatans and demagogues these institutions produced, with so much baggage and imagery that it is hard for us to see the intent behind the concept. All societies and cultures have struggled to give words to describe these forces. It is why Freud avoided writing about the phenomenon of love.
Faith allows us to trust, rather, in human compassion, even in a cruel and morally neutral universe. This is not faith in magic, not faith in church doctrine or church hierarchy, but faith in simple human kindness. It is only by holding on to the sanctity of each individual, each human life, only by placing our faith in the tiny, insignificant acts of compassion and kindness, that we survive as a community and as a human being. And these small acts of kindness are deeply feared and subversive to institutional religious and political authorities. The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote in “Life and Fate”:
I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
It is by the seriousness of our commitments to compassion, indeed our ability to sacrifice for the other, especially for the outcast and the stranger, our commitment to justice—the very core of the message of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus—that we alone can measure the quality of faith. This is the meaning of true faith. As Matthew wrote. “By their fruits shall you know them.” Professed faith—what we say we believe—is not faith. It is an expression of loyalty to a community, to our tribe. Faith is what we do. This is real faith. Faith is the sister of justice. And the prophets reminded us that nothing is exempt from criticism. Revelation is continuous. It points beyond itself. And doubt, as well as a request for forgiveness, must be included in every act of faith, for we can never know or understand the will of God.
The problem is not religion but religious orthodoxy. Most moral thinkers—from Socrates to Christ to Francis of Assisi—eschewed the written word because they knew, I suspect, that once things were written down they became, in the wrong hands, codified and used not to promote morality but conformity, subservience and repression. Writing freezes speech. George Steiner calls this “the decay into writing.” Language is turned from a living and fluid form of moral inquiry to a tool of bondage.
The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions—indeed within any institutions—for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority. Samuel Beckett’s voice is one of modernity’s most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist. He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves. He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom. In Ecclesiastes God has put ’olam into man’s mind. ’Olam usually means eternity, but it also means the sense of mystery or obscurity. We do not know what this mystery means. It teases us, as Keats wrote, out of thought. And once we recognize it and face it, simplistic answers no longer work. We are all born lost. Our vain belief in our own powers, in our reason, blinds us.
Those who silenced Jesus represented all human societies, not the Romans or the Jews. When Jesus attacks the chief priests, scribes, lawyers, Pharisees, Sadducees and other “blind guides” he is attacking forms of oppression as endemic to Christianity, as to all religions and all ideologies. If civil or religious authority enforces an iron and self-righteous conformity among members of a community, then faith loses its uncertainty, and the element of risk is removed from acts of faith. Faith is then transformed into ideology. Those who deform faith into creeds, who use it as a litmus test for institutional fidelity, root religion in a profane rather than a sacred context. They seek, like all who worship idols, to give the world a unity and coherency it does not possess. They ossify the message. And once ossified it can never reach an existential level, can never rise to ethical freedom—to faith. The more vast the gap between professed faith and acts of faith, the more vast our delusions about our own grandeur and importance, the more intolerant, aggressive and dangerous we become.
Faith is not in conflict with reason. Faith does not conflict with scientific truth, unless faith claims to express a scientific truth. Faith can neither be affirmed nor denied by scientific, historical or philosophical truth. Sam confuses the irrational—which he sees as part of faith—with the non-rational. There is a reality that is not a product of rational deduction. It is not accounted for by strict rational discourse. There is a spiritual dimension to human existence and the universe, but this is not irrational—it is non-rational. Faith allows us to transcend what Flaubert said was our “mania for conclusions,” a mania he described as “one of humanity’s most useless and sterile drives.”
Reason allows us to worship at the idol of our intrinsic moral superiority. It is a dangerous form of idolatry, a form of faith, certainly, but one the biblical writers knew led to evil and eventually self-immolation.
"We are at war with Islam,” Harris writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet” (P. 110).
He assures us that “the Koran mandates such hatred” (P. 31 ), that “the problem is with Islam itself” (P. 28). He writes that “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death” (P. 123).
Now after studying 600 hours of Arabic, spending seven years of my life in the Middle East, most of that time as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, I do not claim to be a scholar on Islam. But I do know the Koran is emphatic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs and unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. The Koran states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. More important, the tactic of suicide bombing was pioneered as a weapon of choice by the Tamils, who are chiefly Hindu, in Sri Lanka long before it was adopted by Hezbollah, al-Qaida or Hamas. It is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror.
I also know from my time in the Muslim world that the vast majority of the some 1 billion Muslims on this planet—most of whom are not Arab—are moderate, detest the violence done in the name of their religion and look at the Pat Robertsons and Franklin Grahams, who demonize Muslims in the name of Christianity, with the same horror with which we look at Osama bin Laden or Hamas. The Palestinian resistance movement took on a radical Islam coloring in the 1990s only when conditions in Gaza and the West Bank deteriorated and thrust people into profound hopelessness, despair and poverty—conditions similar to those that empowered the Christian right in our own country. Before that the movement was decidedly secular. I know that Muslim societies are shaped far more by national characteristics—an Iraqi has a culture and outlook on life that are quite different from an Indonesian’s—just as a French citizen, although a Catholic, is influenced far more by the traits of his culture. Islam has within it tiny, marginal groups that worship death, but nearly all suicide bombers come from one language group within the Muslim world, Arabic, which represents only 20 percent of Muslims. I have seen the bodies—including the bodies of children—left in the wake of a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem. But I have also seen the frail, thin bodies of boys shot to death for sport by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Tell me the moral difference. I fail to see one, especially as a father.
Finally, let us not forget that the worst genocides and slaughters of the last century were perpetrated not by Muslims but Christians. To someone who lived in Sarajevo during the Serbian siege of the city, Sam’s demonization of the Muslim world seems odd. It was the Muslim-led government in Bosnia that practiced tolerance. There were some 10,000 Serbs who remained in the city and fought alongside the Bosnia Muslims during the war. The city’s Jewish community, dating back to 1492, was also loyal to the government. And the worst atrocities of the war were blessed not by imams but Catholic and Serbian Orthodox priests. Sam’s argument that atheists have a higher moral code is as specious as his attacks on Islam. Does he forget Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot? These three alone filled the earth with more corpses in the last century than all of the world’s clerics combined.
The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion. It is the human heart—the capacity we all have for evil. All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction, whether this comes through the worship of God, destiny, historical inevitability, the master race, a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte or the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Religion is often a convenient vehicle for this blood lust. Religious institutions often sanctify genocide, but this says more about us, about the nature of human institutions and the darkest human yearnings, than it does about religion. This is the greatest failing of Sam’s book. He externalizes evil. And when you externalize evil, all tools, including violence and torture, become legitimate to eradicate an evil that is outside of you. This worldview—one also adopted by the Christian right—is dangerous, for if we fail to acknowledge our own capacity for evil it will grow unchecked and unheeded. It is, in essence, the call to live the unexamined life.
This externalization of evil is what allows Sam to endorse torture. He, of course, deludes himself into believing that it is reason that requires us to waterboard detainees in the physical and moral black holes we have set up to make them disappear. He quotes Alan Dershowitz, not only to reassure us that the Israelis treat Palestinians—400 of whom they have killed in Gaza over the past few months—humanely, but to trot out the absurd notion of a ticking time bomb, the idea that we know a terrorist has planted a large bomb in the center of the city and we must torture him, or in the glib phrase of Harris, we must dust off “a strappado” and expose “this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone times” (P. 193).
I guess this reference to torture is amusing if you have spent your life encased in the protected world of the university. As someone who was captured and held for over a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the 1991 Shiite uprising in Basra and then turned over for my final 24 hours to the Iraqi secret police—who my captors openly expected to execute me—I find this glib talk of physical abuse repugnant. Dershowitz and Harris cannot give us a legal or historical precedent where such a case as they describe actually happened. But this is not the point; the point is to endow themselves with the moral right to abuse others in the name of their particular version of goodness. This is done in the name of reason. It is done in the name of a false god, an idol. And this god—if you want it named—is the god of death, or as Freud stated, Thanatos, the death instinct, the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For once you torture, done in the name of reason, done to make us safe, you unleash sadists and killers. You consign some human beings to moral oblivion. You become no better than those you oppose.
The danger of Sam’s simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous. All this is done in the name of reason, in the name of his god, which looks, like all idols, an awful lot like Sam Harris.
"Necessity,” William Pitt wrote, “is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.”
Sam ends his book with a chapter that can best be described as Buddhism light. His spirituality, which apparently includes life after death and telepathy, fuels our narcissistic obsession with our individual unconscious. I am not against solitude or meditation, but I support it only when it feeds the moral life rather than serves as an excuse to avoid moral commitment. The quest for personal fulfillment can become an excuse for the individual to negate his or her responsibilities as a citizen, as a member of a wider community. Sam’s religion—for Sam in an odd way tries at the end of his book to create one—is in tune with this narcissism. His idealized version of Buddhism is part of his inability to see that it too has been used to feed the lusts of warriors and killers, it too has been hijacked in the name of radical evil. Buddhist Shinto warrior cults justified and absolved those who carried out the worst atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanjing. By the end of World War II Buddhist and Shinto priests recruited and indoctrinated kamikaze (divine wind) pilots in the name of another god. It is an old story. It is not the evil of religion, but the inherent capacity for evil of humankind.
The point of religion, authentic religion, is that it is not, in the end, about us. It is about the other, about the stranger lying beaten and robbed on the side of the road, about the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, the sick, the destitute, about those who are being abused and beaten in cells in Guantanamo and a host of other secret locations, about what we do to gays and lesbians in this country, what we do to the 47 million Americans without health insurance, the illegal immigrants who live among us without rights or protection, their suffering as invisible as the suffering of the mentally ill we have relegated to heating grates or prison cells. It is about them.
We have forgotten who we were meant to be, who we were created to be, because we have forgotten that we find God not in ourselves, finally, but in our care for our neighbor, in the stranger, including those outside the nation and the faith. The religious life is not designed to make you happy, or safe or content; it is not designed to make you whole or complete, to free you from anxieties and fear; it is designed to save you from yourself, to make possible human community, to lead you to understand that the greatest force in life is not power or reason but love.
As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
For some reason Flynt' article cajoled me into completing this peice by Chris Hedges. This article has been sitting open in my Opera browser for at least two weeks. I'm not sure why I didn't just close it or, for that matter, read it before yesterday. But I'm glad I didn't get rid of it because it was a thoughtful read.
I'm reprinting Chris Hedges opening statement here because I found it first. I have not read Sam Harris' opening statement yet, so I cannot fairly comment on it. That said, it took me several days to decide I was going to read this. After finishing it, I'm sorry it took so long. I hope it gives you pause as well...
Chris Hedges: I Don’t Believe in Atheists
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070523_chris_hedges_i_dont_believe_in_atheists/
Posted on May 23, 2007
By Chris Hedges
Editor’s Note: On Tuesday night, Chris Hedges (http://www.truthdig.com/about/staff/70) and Sam Harris (http://www.truthdig.com/about/staff/23) debated “Religion, Politics and the End of the World.” The following is Hedges’ opening statement, in which he argues that Harris and other critics of faith have mistakenly blamed religion for the ills of the world, when the true danger lies in the human heart and its capacity for evil. We will a recording of the debate soon.
Sam Harris has conflated faith with tribalism. His book is an attack not on faith but on a system of being and believing that is dangerous and incompatible with the open society. He attacks superstition, a belief in magic and the childish notion of an anthropomorphic God that is characteristic of the tribe, of the closed society. He calls this religion. I do not.
What he fails to grasp is not simply the meaning of faith—something I will address later—but the supreme importance of the monotheistic traditions in creating the concept of the individual. This individualism—the belief that we can exist as distinct beings from the tribe, or the crowd, and that we are called on as individuals to make moral decisions that at times defy the clamor of the tribe or the nation—is a gift of the Abrahamic faiths. This sense of individual responsibility is coupled with the constant injunctions in Islam, Judaism and Christianity for a deep altruism. And this laid the foundations for the open society. This individualism is the central doctrine and most important contribution of monotheism. We are enjoined, after all, to love our neighbor, not our tribe. This empowerment of individual conscience is the starting point of the great ethical systems of our civilization. The prophets—and here I would include Jesus—helped institutionalize dissent and criticism. They initiated the separation of powers. They reminded us that culture and society were not the sole prerogative of the powerful, that freedom and indeed the religious life required us to often oppose and defy those in authority. This is a distinctly anti-tribal outlook. Immanuel Kant built his ethics upon this radical individualism. And Kant’s injunction to “always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as mere means” runs in a direct line from the Christian Gospels. Karl Popper rightly pointed out in the first volume of “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” when he writes about this creation of the individual as set against the crowd, that “There is no other thought which has been so powerful in the moral development of man” (P. 102, Vol. 1). These religions set free the critical powers of humankind. They broke with the older Greek and Roman traditions that gods and destiny ruled human fate—a belief that when challenged by Socrates saw him condemned to death. They offered up the possibility that human beings, although limited by circumstances and simple human weaknesses, could shape and give direction to society. And most important, individuals could give direction to their own lives.
Human communication directly shapes the quality of a culture. These believers were being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity. This deity could not be captured in pictures, statues or any concrete, iconographic form. God exists in the word and through the word, an unprecedented conception in the ancient world that required the highest order of abstract thinking. “In the beginning,” the Gospel of John reads, “was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is why the second of the Ten Commandments prohibits Israelites from making concrete images of God. “Iconography thus became blasphemy,” Neil Postman writes, “so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.”
God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty. To argue about whether God exists or does not exist is futile. The question is not whether God exists. The question is whether we concern ourselves with, or are utterly indifferent to, the sanctity and ultimate transcendence of human existence. God is that mysterious force—and you can give it many names as other religions do—which works upon us and through us to seek and achieve truth, beauty and goodness. God is perhaps best understood as our ultimate concern, that in which we should place our highest hopes, confidence and trust. In Exodus God says, by way of identification, “I am that I am.” It is probably more accurately translated: “I will be what I will be.” God is better understood as verb rather than a noun. God is not an asserted existence but a process accomplishing itself. And God is inescapable. It is the life force that sustains, transforms and defines all existence. The name of God is laden, thanks to our religious institutions and the numerous tyrants, charlatans and demagogues these institutions produced, with so much baggage and imagery that it is hard for us to see the intent behind the concept. All societies and cultures have struggled to give words to describe these forces. It is why Freud avoided writing about the phenomenon of love.
Faith allows us to trust, rather, in human compassion, even in a cruel and morally neutral universe. This is not faith in magic, not faith in church doctrine or church hierarchy, but faith in simple human kindness. It is only by holding on to the sanctity of each individual, each human life, only by placing our faith in the tiny, insignificant acts of compassion and kindness, that we survive as a community and as a human being. And these small acts of kindness are deeply feared and subversive to institutional religious and political authorities. The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote in “Life and Fate”:
I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.
Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.
It is by the seriousness of our commitments to compassion, indeed our ability to sacrifice for the other, especially for the outcast and the stranger, our commitment to justice—the very core of the message of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus—that we alone can measure the quality of faith. This is the meaning of true faith. As Matthew wrote. “By their fruits shall you know them.” Professed faith—what we say we believe—is not faith. It is an expression of loyalty to a community, to our tribe. Faith is what we do. This is real faith. Faith is the sister of justice. And the prophets reminded us that nothing is exempt from criticism. Revelation is continuous. It points beyond itself. And doubt, as well as a request for forgiveness, must be included in every act of faith, for we can never know or understand the will of God.
The problem is not religion but religious orthodoxy. Most moral thinkers—from Socrates to Christ to Francis of Assisi—eschewed the written word because they knew, I suspect, that once things were written down they became, in the wrong hands, codified and used not to promote morality but conformity, subservience and repression. Writing freezes speech. George Steiner calls this “the decay into writing.” Language is turned from a living and fluid form of moral inquiry to a tool of bondage.
The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions—indeed within any institutions—for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority. Samuel Beckett’s voice is one of modernity’s most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist. He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves. He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom. In Ecclesiastes God has put ’olam into man’s mind. ’Olam usually means eternity, but it also means the sense of mystery or obscurity. We do not know what this mystery means. It teases us, as Keats wrote, out of thought. And once we recognize it and face it, simplistic answers no longer work. We are all born lost. Our vain belief in our own powers, in our reason, blinds us.
Those who silenced Jesus represented all human societies, not the Romans or the Jews. When Jesus attacks the chief priests, scribes, lawyers, Pharisees, Sadducees and other “blind guides” he is attacking forms of oppression as endemic to Christianity, as to all religions and all ideologies. If civil or religious authority enforces an iron and self-righteous conformity among members of a community, then faith loses its uncertainty, and the element of risk is removed from acts of faith. Faith is then transformed into ideology. Those who deform faith into creeds, who use it as a litmus test for institutional fidelity, root religion in a profane rather than a sacred context. They seek, like all who worship idols, to give the world a unity and coherency it does not possess. They ossify the message. And once ossified it can never reach an existential level, can never rise to ethical freedom—to faith. The more vast the gap between professed faith and acts of faith, the more vast our delusions about our own grandeur and importance, the more intolerant, aggressive and dangerous we become.
Faith is not in conflict with reason. Faith does not conflict with scientific truth, unless faith claims to express a scientific truth. Faith can neither be affirmed nor denied by scientific, historical or philosophical truth. Sam confuses the irrational—which he sees as part of faith—with the non-rational. There is a reality that is not a product of rational deduction. It is not accounted for by strict rational discourse. There is a spiritual dimension to human existence and the universe, but this is not irrational—it is non-rational. Faith allows us to transcend what Flaubert said was our “mania for conclusions,” a mania he described as “one of humanity’s most useless and sterile drives.”
Reason allows us to worship at the idol of our intrinsic moral superiority. It is a dangerous form of idolatry, a form of faith, certainly, but one the biblical writers knew led to evil and eventually self-immolation.
"We are at war with Islam,” Harris writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet” (P. 110).
He assures us that “the Koran mandates such hatred” (P. 31 ), that “the problem is with Islam itself” (P. 28). He writes that “Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death” (P. 123).
Now after studying 600 hours of Arabic, spending seven years of my life in the Middle East, most of that time as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, I do not claim to be a scholar on Islam. But I do know the Koran is emphatic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs and unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. The Koran states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. More important, the tactic of suicide bombing was pioneered as a weapon of choice by the Tamils, who are chiefly Hindu, in Sri Lanka long before it was adopted by Hezbollah, al-Qaida or Hamas. It is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror.
I also know from my time in the Muslim world that the vast majority of the some 1 billion Muslims on this planet—most of whom are not Arab—are moderate, detest the violence done in the name of their religion and look at the Pat Robertsons and Franklin Grahams, who demonize Muslims in the name of Christianity, with the same horror with which we look at Osama bin Laden or Hamas. The Palestinian resistance movement took on a radical Islam coloring in the 1990s only when conditions in Gaza and the West Bank deteriorated and thrust people into profound hopelessness, despair and poverty—conditions similar to those that empowered the Christian right in our own country. Before that the movement was decidedly secular. I know that Muslim societies are shaped far more by national characteristics—an Iraqi has a culture and outlook on life that are quite different from an Indonesian’s—just as a French citizen, although a Catholic, is influenced far more by the traits of his culture. Islam has within it tiny, marginal groups that worship death, but nearly all suicide bombers come from one language group within the Muslim world, Arabic, which represents only 20 percent of Muslims. I have seen the bodies—including the bodies of children—left in the wake of a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem. But I have also seen the frail, thin bodies of boys shot to death for sport by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Tell me the moral difference. I fail to see one, especially as a father.
Finally, let us not forget that the worst genocides and slaughters of the last century were perpetrated not by Muslims but Christians. To someone who lived in Sarajevo during the Serbian siege of the city, Sam’s demonization of the Muslim world seems odd. It was the Muslim-led government in Bosnia that practiced tolerance. There were some 10,000 Serbs who remained in the city and fought alongside the Bosnia Muslims during the war. The city’s Jewish community, dating back to 1492, was also loyal to the government. And the worst atrocities of the war were blessed not by imams but Catholic and Serbian Orthodox priests. Sam’s argument that atheists have a higher moral code is as specious as his attacks on Islam. Does he forget Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot? These three alone filled the earth with more corpses in the last century than all of the world’s clerics combined.
The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion. It is the human heart—the capacity we all have for evil. All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction, whether this comes through the worship of God, destiny, historical inevitability, the master race, a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte or the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Religion is often a convenient vehicle for this blood lust. Religious institutions often sanctify genocide, but this says more about us, about the nature of human institutions and the darkest human yearnings, than it does about religion. This is the greatest failing of Sam’s book. He externalizes evil. And when you externalize evil, all tools, including violence and torture, become legitimate to eradicate an evil that is outside of you. This worldview—one also adopted by the Christian right—is dangerous, for if we fail to acknowledge our own capacity for evil it will grow unchecked and unheeded. It is, in essence, the call to live the unexamined life.
This externalization of evil is what allows Sam to endorse torture. He, of course, deludes himself into believing that it is reason that requires us to waterboard detainees in the physical and moral black holes we have set up to make them disappear. He quotes Alan Dershowitz, not only to reassure us that the Israelis treat Palestinians—400 of whom they have killed in Gaza over the past few months—humanely, but to trot out the absurd notion of a ticking time bomb, the idea that we know a terrorist has planted a large bomb in the center of the city and we must torture him, or in the glib phrase of Harris, we must dust off “a strappado” and expose “this unpleasant fellow to a suasion of bygone times” (P. 193).
I guess this reference to torture is amusing if you have spent your life encased in the protected world of the university. As someone who was captured and held for over a week by the Iraqi Republican Guard during the 1991 Shiite uprising in Basra and then turned over for my final 24 hours to the Iraqi secret police—who my captors openly expected to execute me—I find this glib talk of physical abuse repugnant. Dershowitz and Harris cannot give us a legal or historical precedent where such a case as they describe actually happened. But this is not the point; the point is to endow themselves with the moral right to abuse others in the name of their particular version of goodness. This is done in the name of reason. It is done in the name of a false god, an idol. And this god—if you want it named—is the god of death, or as Freud stated, Thanatos, the death instinct, the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For once you torture, done in the name of reason, done to make us safe, you unleash sadists and killers. You consign some human beings to moral oblivion. You become no better than those you oppose.
The danger of Sam’s simplistic worldview is that it does what fundamentalists do: It creates the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, brutal occupation and even torture, anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous. All this is done in the name of reason, in the name of his god, which looks, like all idols, an awful lot like Sam Harris.
"Necessity,” William Pitt wrote, “is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.”
Sam ends his book with a chapter that can best be described as Buddhism light. His spirituality, which apparently includes life after death and telepathy, fuels our narcissistic obsession with our individual unconscious. I am not against solitude or meditation, but I support it only when it feeds the moral life rather than serves as an excuse to avoid moral commitment. The quest for personal fulfillment can become an excuse for the individual to negate his or her responsibilities as a citizen, as a member of a wider community. Sam’s religion—for Sam in an odd way tries at the end of his book to create one—is in tune with this narcissism. His idealized version of Buddhism is part of his inability to see that it too has been used to feed the lusts of warriors and killers, it too has been hijacked in the name of radical evil. Buddhist Shinto warrior cults justified and absolved those who carried out the worst atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanjing. By the end of World War II Buddhist and Shinto priests recruited and indoctrinated kamikaze (divine wind) pilots in the name of another god. It is an old story. It is not the evil of religion, but the inherent capacity for evil of humankind.
The point of religion, authentic religion, is that it is not, in the end, about us. It is about the other, about the stranger lying beaten and robbed on the side of the road, about the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, the sick, the destitute, about those who are being abused and beaten in cells in Guantanamo and a host of other secret locations, about what we do to gays and lesbians in this country, what we do to the 47 million Americans without health insurance, the illegal immigrants who live among us without rights or protection, their suffering as invisible as the suffering of the mentally ill we have relegated to heating grates or prison cells. It is about them.
We have forgotten who we were meant to be, who we were created to be, because we have forgotten that we find God not in ourselves, finally, but in our care for our neighbor, in the stranger, including those outside the nation and the faith. The religious life is not designed to make you happy, or safe or content; it is not designed to make you whole or complete, to free you from anxieties and fear; it is designed to save you from yourself, to make possible human community, to lead you to understand that the greatest force in life is not power or reason but love.
As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Another spin for Orwell... who must feel like he's in a clothes washer at this point
I can't hope to do any justice to this. But I would remind you that this was enacted by a president with a 29% approval rating.
I shit you not.
I shit you not.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)