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CounterPunch
November
14, 2002
Deferral by
Default
by PIERRE TRISTAM
Dear Gabriel,
Like the rest of the family I've hassled
you quite a bit over the years for just pulling up stakes and
moving to Syria, of all places. (Was Long Island that bad?) But
in light of the election results here last week I wonder, my
dear older brother, if you might have a spare room or two for
my family and me. Damascus suddenly looks like a good place to
spend the next couple of years of this Republican shogunate,
although I wouldn't be surprised if your mayor, too, is a Republican,
if your muezzin is a Republican, if your cats meow Republican.
They're everywhere, those Grand Old Party boomers. Word has it
the GOP expects to sweep the first elections in Baghdad after
the winter's war, then set its sights on a few of those oily
Asian republics and boldly go where no pipeline has gone before.
I'm exaggerating. Even the Democrats
would kill for those pipelines, but you get the idea. The country
is in the mood for monochromatic simplicities like never since
the days when Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge posed as presidents,
Congress was somnolent, and William Howard Taft, that rotund
mediocrity, was chief justice of the very conservative supreme
court he'd packed a few years earlier, when he was president.
Then as now the country had gone through a bit of a trauma --
not World War I, which Americans rather enjoyed as they do most
wars, but a tide of anti-corporate populism that scared Wall
Street stiff. The Harding-Coolidge years lubed up Wall Street
again and stiffed everybody else, with the inevitable consequence
of 1929. We're in for a repeat racket.
You left the country just as the purring
1990s got under way, but think of them as the 1920s uncorked
and unclothed, as the1980s unbound. No prohibitions to worry
about, no more Soviet Union to worry about, not much of anything
to worry about, really. For a while it even seemed as if we had
deficits and the business cycle licked. With the whole nation
pledging allegiance to the markets, politics became so irrelevant,
Democrats and Republicans so interchangeable, that the whole
country settled into governance by toss-up. Then came the attacks.
Wall Street was literally doused in the ashes of Sept. 11, and
for a while the sweat in corporate board rooms smelled of that
1929 vintage. Acridly fruity. The economy was tanking anyway,
like the Bush presidency, and it looked as if having an ellipsis
for a president might prove costly.
But Republican policy is the art of deferral.
The stage managers of the Bush presidency realized immediately
that the trauma this time was at once far more visceral and far
less severe than, say, a real war or a depression. Like any act
of terrorism in an essentially stable society the attacks were
nothing more than a spectacularly deadly freak. They couldn't
change the lives of most Americans one whit, and didn't. The
change was all Bush's. He turned the attacks into his own personal
blessing, milking them for their traumatic value as his only
means of making himself indispensable and his business-scripted
repression necessary. Plagiarizing from the Cold War play book,
he manufactured the kind of fears and enmities that naturally
make Americans more conservative. He succeeded so well that the
likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, two basement-variety
rogues, now seem more threatening to the United States than Stalin,
Kruschev and their ICBMs ever did. (And they said the age of
irony was dead). Just as Harding called the American dream "a
damn good phrase with which to carry an election," Bush
has made perpetual war with one axis or another a damn good plan
with which to carry many elections. Fear and loathing have never
been so politically expedient.
The administration can now resume making
America safer for shareholders and the world safer for America,
all the while paying for the new imperium with Reagan-style debt
and that unfailing electoral bribe, the tax cut. Because most
of those who do vote are older, richer and exclusively concerned
with defying taxes (if not death), the Republican gift has been
to turn their America into a banana republic, the kind of place
where they don't have to pay taxes, but legally. As a result
our social services are beginning to look like those of a banana
republic, too (inmates get better health care than about 50 million
Americans, feedlots are better subsidized than many schools).
You'd think the Democrats would have a thing or two to say about
this splendid little heist. But the opposition is part of the
problem. It doesn't exist. I haven't been a Democrat since Adlai
Stevenson left the building (and I wasn't even born when Adlai
Stevenson was around), but I'm sure I'm only one in many millions
who look at Democrats and despair of their intellectual vapidity,
their cluelessness in the face of so many opportunities to live
up to their name. They've instead stood by like spectators at
their own beheading. The wonder is that despite everything the
nation is still split down the middle between the two parties,
which only confirms the extent to which Republicans are winning
by default. The show is so easily the Democrats' to steal, if
they could muster a spine or two out of their skeletal ideas.
But should I make my way out to you, dear Gabriel, I wouldn't
be surprised if the road to Damascus was full of Democrats falling
off their donkeys. I would be surprised if any of them could
manage a revelation or two to help them make their way back to
where they belong. Chances are they'd get right back on their
donkeys and confuse them with elephants.
Give my love to Faridah and your three
boys. But on second thought, don't leave the porch light on for
us. The best of America was hewed in dissent, and I have too
much faith in this place to turn off my own porch light.
Pierre Tristam
is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial writer and columnist.
He can be reached at ptristam@att.net
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November 10,
2002
Ali Abunimah
Sharon's
Appendix
M. Shahid
Alam
Political Geography
Zionist Theses and Anti-Theses
Michael Neumann
Demonstrating a Genteel Reticence
Rosemary &
Walter Brasch
Personal Possession:
War and Iraq, a Recollection
Ralph Nader
The Mid-term Elections
Mark J. Palmer
Bring Back the Grizzly
Robert Fisk
Bush's "Clean Shot"
Dave Marsh
And the Beat(ing) Goes On
Adam Engel
No Blood for Marijuana in Iraq
Josh Frank
Sleater-Kinney
Rocks
Our Protest Songs Are Here
Clifford Lyle Marshall
Give the Trinity Back to the Salmon
Zeynep Toufe
Turn These Children into Stone
Philip Farruggio
In Name Only
Charles Sullivan
Mountain Party Rising!
Bernard, Krieger, Alam
Poets'Basement
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