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CounterPunch
January
29, 2003
An Extended
Promo with No Payoff
Notes
on the State of George W. Bush's Union
by SHELDON HULL
President Bush's State of the Union address, delivered
to a packed joint session of Congress was a huge success, if
the applause of sycophants is any measure. As a measure of visionary
leadership, however, I found it somewhat lacking.
No less than 77 outbursts of "spontaneous"
applause were counted by C-SPAN's Susan Swain, who, not being
an employee of any "real" news channel, was not otherwise
occupied working up spin on words that should be easily understood
by even the most publicly educated. I'd like to mention here
that C-SPAN, the only channel that had the courage to avoid talking
during Bush's speech, had the best video quality—clear,
with colors properly balanced and no inherently offensive graphics,
which are in this case insulting to the American people for two
reasons: 1) The banners and crawlers, born on a day of real crisis
and complication, perhaps the last day on which "breaking
news" actually broke in real time, implied that people needed
a speech already written for a TV audience (the transcript of
which will be in every newspaper on Jan. 29) simplified even
further, like tap water on an IV drip. 2) They suggest that the
American pe! ople lack the attention span to sit through the
most important hour of television all year, even though most
other options were pre-empted.
Some people will find nothing good about
the SOTU, and others will find nothing bad, but both are wrong.
My biggest critique is the absence of words on education, but
given that the most articulate critics of his war plans come
from within academia, it's almost understandable. Still, though,
he should have said that education provides America's children
with the only legal means to make the most money possible, which
is supposedly the point of capitalism, as well as the intellectual
tools to deal with an unknown future.
There were elements of the speech that
I wasn't expecting, and those were my favorite parts: his pledge
of $1.2 billion for hydrogen fuel research (perhaps he's read
Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy); $400 million to start
a mentoring program for the adolescent children of prisoners
(some of which will be spent on kids whose parents are in prison
on nonviolent drug offenses); $15 billion over three years for
an ambitious program to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa and
to treat those already infected (so they can live long enough
to die from famine or at the hands of warlords). Certainly he
could be doing more in these areas, but he deserves credit for
even mentioning these things at a time when his party, for all
the lip-service it pays to Jesus, leans in an aggressively Darwinian
direction when it comes to domestic policy.
The days of Bush being taunted as a poor
orator by the media should be gone, because he managed to make
even a cynical viewer like me pay attention to a speech that
included nothing new in the crucial areas of war and the economy.
Since he did not link these subjects in a way that seems obvious
to me (but who am I, anyway?), I must assume that he has not
reached a definite conclusion about how to proceed with either
one.
The fact is, regardless of what he chooses
to do to or about Iraq, the United States is indeed at war, a
war against its own worst nature. Moral decay, economic stagnation,
educational decline for all but an ever-shrinking number of the
privileged and the relentlessly ambitious among us—these
are the forces that conspire to undermine this country's future.
Those who seek to destroy America, the bin Ladens and the Ba'athists,
like the Bolsheviks and the British before them, can only find
victory against an already-weakened foe. The real threat to America
in the 21st century cannot be stifled by embargoes or cruise
missiles. Neither diplomacy nor death will stir its resolve,
because they may not even know what they are doing. If America
ever falls, whether it's five years from now or 50, history will
record that our end truly began on February 1, 1996, when the
government began handing nominal control of the country's tele-communicat!
ions infrastructure to unaccountable systems of private power
who have no stake in the future, and then removed the only barriers
to fair and free competition between these systems that ever
existed.
What the President should have done,
in my opinion, was to turn our eyes away from distant lands and
toward the nearest mirror. He should have told the American people
that our strongest allies and our most lethal foes are We the
People, ourselves, before all others, as the Founders intended.
He should have taken aim at the corporations that stole from
their shareholders and ran, thus undermining an economic structure
whose greatest trials are yet to come, as well as those who everyday
place profits above the health and security of Americans. He
should have called out those nations who profess allegiance to
us, yet coddle the terrorists within their borders.
He should have pointed to those Democrats
who side with him against their instinct because it is politically
expedient and said "You are worse than the aging hippies
and their students, who march against war because they believe
they are right. Your double-talk and parsed phrasings are the
reason why the American people have declared you unfit to lead
this nation. By taking a position of contradiction between your
words and your actions, on matters of war and many others, you
expose yourselves as being on the same moral plane as the Iraqi
parliament." He could have looked right at Lieberman and
Clinton, seated behind the same Joint Chiefs who never rose to
applaud the rhetoric of war, and said that "Your party will
go as you go, for better or for worse."
And then he should have turned to us,
the people he is charged to lead, and told us that the quick-fixes,
easy rides and simple solutions we've been trained to hold out
for are fictions, no longer relevant to the increasingly complex
times we live in, that now is the time for America to mobilize,
neighborhood by neighborhood, household to household, in pursuit
of a goal that can not be met by force of arms, nor by government
handout, nor even by Executive demand: perfection, or as close
as we can get. It would have been a great time to invoke the
words of Edward Bernays, who helped Wilson turn the masses toward
World War I: "We must regiment the public mind as an army
regiments its bodies." And he should have made such language
retroactive. (Given the way those words are usually used, the
Bernays family would like it.)
The silence heard from the marks at the
Capitol would be drowned out by cheers from every home in America,
and consensus would then be achieved, for war with Iraq or anything
else the President was proposing. But as it stands, the Union
is scant closer to real unity than it was a year ago, and the
State of the Union remains as it was before Bush took office:
in a word, precarious.
(Thank you, and God bless the United
States of America.)
Shelton Hull can
be reached at: sdh666@hotmail.com
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