Mind of an Outlaw (80 page)

We are at a major turn in our history. It is possible that the Republican and Democratic Parties are at the edge of an upheaval of ideologies, a schism in each of our two major political configurations that will bend every one of our notions to Left or to Right. Will old-line GOP financial conservatives be in serious conflict with their own radical right? Will there be existential Democrats in rebellion against the rigidities of political correctness?

Ever since FDR, the Democratic Party has been internationalist. So were most Republicans. The power of their corporate center enabled them to withstand intense isolationist sentiments in their own ranks.

Following the end of the Cold War, the triumph of the corporate economy encouraged a vanity until recently that the corporation is a morally estimable body. One manifestation of this sense of superiority is physical presence. The world is now teeming with aesthetically neutered monuments—precisely, those high-rise hotels and offices that surround every major airport and capital in the world, those monotonous, glassy behemoths coming forth as the virtuous architecture of the new corporate religion, an El Dorado of technology.

One fundamental error has begun to rock the globe. It was assumed by us that the most powerful of these corporate entities, that is to say, America, knew what was best for the rest of the
world. The United States was ready to solve the problems of every nation, all of them, all the way from old Europe to the flea- and fly-bitten turpitudes of the Third World.

It could be remarked that the men who set sail with Columbus in 1492 had more idea of where they were going. The best to be said for the gung-ho capitalistas of the Bush administration is that they taught us all over again how extreme vanity is all you need to sail right off the edge of the world.

You cannot bring democracy to tyranny by conquest. Democracy can be neither injected nor imposed. It comes into existence through a long rite of passage. It has achieved its liberty by the actions of its own martyrs, rebels, and enduring believers. It is not a system, it is an ennoblement. Democracy must come from within. Brought into oppressed nations by way of external force, it collides with all the habits those tormented populations were obliged to develop, those humiliating compromises that came from submitting to an ugly and superior force. Now all of that has been jammed into an abruptly ground-up gruel of chopped psychic reflexes, even as a strange people arrived from outside in mighty machines with guns attached, new people whose motives one could not trust. How could one? The prevailing law within a tyranny is to trust nobody. There have been too many shameful adaptations within oneself, as well as decades of long-swallowed rage. The recollection of humiliations early and late has been incorporated into the psychic core. Existence has been imprisoned too long in the virtual reality imposed by the tyrant.

We did not have an administration who could comprehend that. We came in with our guns, our smiles, and our assumption that democracy was there to hand over to these Iraqis. Our gift! Our form of virtual reality, superior to yours!

The truth is, we don’t belong in any foreign country. We are not wise enough, honest enough with ourselves, nor a good enough nation to tell the rest of the world how to live—indeed, such a nation has never existed. But even if we were just so fabulous, so unique, other humans would still not be ready to savage their national pride for the dubious joy of receiving our crusade
against evil. We would do well to become a little more aware of Christian militancy that marches into war against any evil but its own.

The time has come to solve our own problems, our ongoing American problems. We have a direct need to focus on ourselves over the coming span of years and thereby become less displaced from reality. For we are the most mighty of all the nations, and we are secure. Despite all, we are relatively secure. We can absorb new terrorist attacks if they come. We do not need military invasions into foreign lands to protect us. From 1968 through 2000, the world suffered an average of 425 terrorist incidents a year, resulting in an average of 321 deaths annually. In 2001, however, came 9/11. Three thousand lives were lost. A huge number. Yet in that same period, 1968 to 2001, Americans suffered more than forty thousand deaths each year from auto accidents. So even in 2001, there were thirteen times as many deaths resulting from auto accidents as from terrorist attacks. If it be asked why such focus is now being put on automobile mortalities, it is because such tragedies are not without analogy to losing one’s life to a terrorist. You leave your home, you kiss your wife goodbye, and you are dead ten minutes or ten hours later. For those left to grieve, there seems not enough reason to such death. Not enough logic! More than any other event in our lives, our own demise excites just such a need for logic in those who remain. Lung cancer, we know, kills 155,000 people a year. That is nearly four times more than automobiles, but we can comprehend that. We are ready to decide that cigarettes or working with asbestos has something to do with it. But death without any grip on an explanation bothers people more. It does no good to tell ourselves that 2.4 million people die each year in America. We are fixed on the three thousand lost humans of 9/11. They seem more important. In truth, they have been so important to America that we have come to what may be another point of no return.
Will we continue to protect our freedoms, or will we conclude that all effort must go to saving ourselves from every conceivable form of terrorist attack? The second course pursued to conclusion will lead to nothing less than a unique variety of fascism. Brownshirts or Blackshirts will not be needed. Our only certainty is that whatever it will be called, fascism will not be the word. Should Bush remain in office, we can count on virtual reality to suggest the face of the new regime. But then, that is the essence of fascism—you must give the populace a version of cause and effect that has very little to do with how things are.

The question, then, is whether we will be brave enough to dispense with foreign adventures. We know, or we should know, that any nation looking to attack us has to face the might of our armed forces. Any nuclear attack from North Korea or Iran would be an absolute disaster for either. Our power to retaliate is awesome. When it comes to terrorist attacks, however, we are also at the mercy of our deteriorating relations with the rest of the developed world. Military forays are not the answer—you do not wipe out terrorists with airplanes and tanks. Rather, we will be obliged to use—that dreaded term!—collective efforts to build an international police force ready to guard against major attacks comparable to 9/11. Even the best of such collaborative organizations will not prevent small terrorist acts, any more than a local police force can root out all local crime. But to be able to counter a terrorist effort on the scale of the Twin Towers, a global police system with a worldwide network of informants can be developed. It is one thing for terrorists to succeed in suicide bombings; it is another for them to find the necessary cadres, skills, and materials to bring off an immense coup against the sophisticated forces of proscription that can be put in place. Al-Qaeda took several years to prepare 9/11! Since we will, however, never be able to prevent all minor attacks, it is illogical to be ready to sacrifice our remaining liberties in order to search for a total security that will never come to pass. Terrorism, in parallel with cancer, is in total rebellion against established human endeavor. If democracy ever did begin to work in Iraq, the incidence of terrorist acts would, doubtless, increase. Suicide
bombers are stimulated by the presence of the enemy, whether that presence is foreign soldiers or a political system that is anathema to their beliefs. Should Islam ever take over America, our own Christian fundamentalists would be the first to become terrorists.

American freedom now depends on what we learned in elementary school. We must live with arithmetic! Over the last three years, 850 Israelis have been killed in suicide bombings, ambushes, sniper attacks, and gun battles. That, by rough calculation, is one Israeli in 20,000 for each of those three years. If we in America were to suffer at the same rate, we would, given our population, which is roughly fifty times as great as Israel’s, suffer approximately 14,000 deaths a year. That comes to one-third of our American loss of life from automobile accidents. Short of a major disaster, we are not likely to face 14,000 such deaths a year. We do not have the daily problems that Israelis have with Palestinians and Palestinians with Israelis. We have more freedom to explore into what we can become as a nation.

Karl Rove, the man whom many consider the mind inside George W. Bush’s brain, is on record with his hopes for a twenty-year reign of the GOP. If that is not to take place, the need of the Democrats—it is worth repeating—is to be able to appeal to the best and most thoughtful of the conservatives. The time has come for us to understand that not everyone to the right is on the hunt for more money, more power, more conquest, and more worship of the flag. Not every conservative is for suburbs scourged by blank-faced malls, nor is every conservative ready to cheer every corporation that puts its name on a new stadium for professional athletes. Not every conservative believes that our God-given mission is to needle the serum of democracy into nations with no vein for democracy. No, there are conservatives who believe that the United States has been boiling up an unholy brew under the lid of the corporate pot, conservatives who
believe that educating our children is degenerating into a near to autistic mess, conservatives who do not think that all the answers to crime can be solved by building more prisons. No, there are even conservatives who would argue, just like Democrats, that no matter how much we spend on our schools, they don’t seem to be working. There are conservatives who have sensitive feelings on these matters—as sensitive as the Democrats’, by God. Yet neither side knows how to speak to the other.

Still, this variety of conservative—decent not bigoted, open to discussion rather than given over, body and soul, to talk radio—is also aghast at the uneasy but real possibility that George W. Bush might be the worst and most unqualified president America has ever had. Yes, such conservatives, whatever their number, are in the same state of inanition and ideological impotence as all those Democrats who cannot believe where the country is going. Let us as Democrats consider the possibility that such conservatives can also be part of a future in which Democrats draw their political sustenance from the best ideas of Left and Right. At present, that is not easy to believe, but there are new political conceptions in the air, ideas that have not been hardened into the iron load of ideology that sits upon the elephant’s head and the donkey’s saddle. This country was founded, after all, on the amazing notion (for the time) that there was more good than evil in the mass of human beings, and so those human beings, once given not only the liberty to vote but the power to learn to think, might demonstrate that more good than evil could emerge from such freedom. It was an incredible gamble. All society until then had assumed that the masses were incapable of exercising a wise voice and so must be controlled from the top down.

That wager has remained alive through the two centuries and twenty-odd years of our national existence, and often it has seemed that the result was affirmative. Now doubt is with us again. In 2004 we will face what could become the most important election in our history. Since our candidate will never have funds to equal the bursting coffers of an opposition inflamed by power, bad conscience and all the virtual reality of religious fundamentalism itself, the election will be a most furious contest
between their money, self-righteousness, and mental rictus scalding down on us, versus our hope that moral revulsion still exists in more than half of our voting public, enough to let us succeed, despite all our own impurity, in overthrowing the corporate colossus on the other bank. May our wit be clean, our indignation genuine, and our ideas new enough and fine enough to pierce the caterwaul of political advertising that will look to flood our campaign down the river and over the falls.

A VICTORY FOR BUSH
may yet be seen as one of our nation’s unforgettable ironies. No need to speak again of the mendacities, manipulations, and spiritual mediocrity of the post–9/11 years; the time has come to recover from the shock that so abysmal a record (and so complete a refusal to look at the record) looks nonetheless likely to prevail. Who, then, are we? In just what kind of condition are the American people?

A quick look at our movie stars gives a hint. The liberal left has been attached to actors like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. They spoke to our cynicism and to our baffled idealism. But the American center moved their loyalties from the decency of Gary Cooper to the grit and self-approval of John Wayne. Now, we have the apotheosis of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He captured convention honors at the Garden in the course of informing America, via the physicality of his presence, that should the nation ever come to such a dire pass as to need a dictator, why, bless us all, he, Arnold, can offer the best chin to come along since Benito Mussolini. Chin is now prepared to replace spin.