WAKEFULNESS IS BETTER THAN TV
|
Other than that, what
else could go wrong? I used to think President Bush was dumb. But I can’t think that any more. Any leader who manages to convince 70% of an electorate that he has the requisite judgment to launch a preemptive war on the basis of his peculiar two-year record as chief executive can’t be dumb. He could however be the most brilliant fool ever to occupy the Oval Office. Either that or Osama Bin Laden has managed to slip a potent soporific into the nation’s water supply. Senator Robert Byrd, in his courageous floor speech of Feb. 12th lays out the Bush administration’s record vividly. Byrd said, "In (a) scant two years, this Administration has squandered a projected surplus of some $5.6 trillion over the next decade and taken us to projected deficits as far as the eye can see...its domestic policy has put many of our states in dire financial condition, under-funding scores of essential programs for our people...it has fostered policies which have slowed economic growth...has ignored urgent matters such as the crisis in health care for our elderly...has been slow to provide adequate funding for homeland security...has been reluctant to better protect our long and porous borders." And, if that wasn’t enough to make the American people question their judgment in permitting this president to be the nation’s most powerful and belligerent sleepwalker, the senator from West Virginia goes on, "In foreign policy, this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden...has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO...has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper...has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence...of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come." I’ve never claimed to be a genius, but being a good citizen doesn’t require membership in Mensa. Conversely, there are a lot of smart people in the Bush Administration who, as my very plain-spoken father would have said, "...don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground." Being a good citizen requires, first, a most basic state: wakefulness. You can’t be a good citizen if you’re so hypnotized by fear (or righteousness) you allow yourself to be led into a kick-ass abyss. Columnist Nicholas Kristof stated recently that, "The big problem with liberals in international affairs is... they've been too idealistic." His point being that liberals, blinded by idealism, have pushed policies that have created as many problems as they’ve solved. Whether or not you agree with his assessment of outcomes, it’s not a stretch to accept his premise. There’s even an old aphorism for it. It’s called throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But it’s an approach not limited to liberals. Right now babies are being thrown out all over the place and bathwater’s flowing like the Big Muddy in bad year. As Kristof points out, "President Bush is also trying to be a foreign policy idealist — from the right — and is showing the same cavalier obtuseness to practical consequences." Here’s some Bush baby-with-bathwater
scenarios: 1. The president, outraged at the way the Chinese
government forces abortions on peasants, cuts off all $34 million
in U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund which
leads to program cancellations in Africa to train midwives, fight
AIDS and help pregnant women. 2. North Korea, Bush’s most
blatant, festering screw-up. Maybe for the noblest reasons, George
Dubya devised a pointedly religious epithet and lumped North
Korea into it. "Axis of evil" he intoned; which, as
Kristof observes, is the conservative version of the liberal
"Make love, not war" — and equally hollow. But why blame Powell? He and this nation (along the rest of the people of the world), are caught in an awful misguided inertia. We’ve been launched into a war to protect ourselves from war. Sound familiar? But as Jonathan Schell wrote last week in his piece The Case Against War, "In this imperative (of regime change) we’ve arrived at a new formula that has no precedent for dealing with weapons of mass destruction: nonproliferation by forced democratization. Schell cites Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard who says that a republic that turns into an empire risks "endangering its identity as a free people"--thus menacing democracy at home by trying to force it on others abroad. What’s wrong with an Imperial America? Well, as Schell points out, "The Bush Administration... has given little encouragement to the evangelists of armed democratization. Notoriously, it has kept silent regarding its plans for postwar Iraq and its neighbors. But if its actions in the "war on terror" are any guide, democracy will not be required of Washington's imperial dependencies." Nor, possibly, of the government of the United States of America itself. We should all understand at the outset that we start down this road of naked imperialism at great risk to our own freedoms and national character. Other than that, what else could go wrong? |
All materials by Jim Culleny copyright 2003 ][ contact: info@noutopia.com