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December 26, 2001
John Chuckman
In
Praise of the Unspeakable
Sam Bahour
2002:
Year of the Twos
December 25, 2001
Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's
Human Rights Record
December 24, 2001
Sam Bahour
It
Happened One Morning
Yair Khilou
Why I Resisted
Being Drafted into the Israeli Army
Michael
Chisari
War
as Diversionary Tactic
Cockburn/St. Clair
Enron
and the Green Seal
December 21, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
War
Good for Bush
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
December 18, 2001
Shahid
Alam
Clash
of Civilizations?
Carl Estabrook
Who
Opposes This War?
December 17, 2001
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
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by Douglas Valentine
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December 28,
2001
Inspiration from
the Top
Observations on the President Addressing
the Nation
By John Chuckman
Millions of Americans settle into their couches
with bowls of popcorn, bags of potato chips, and diet cola. They
enjoy the color pictures on the evening news report of bombs
exploding in Afghanistan. Pictures of explosions are always popular
in America, no matter what their meaning or origin.
True, news pictures are less impressive
than Hollywood special effects, and you generally don't get to
see any blood or bodies -- that would be unsuitable for a family
show--but these pictures have their own thrilling quality, much
like those grainy pictures of violent arrests or sting operations
photographed with pin-hole cameras that are so popular.
They offer the satisfaction of peeping
into the face of horror, into the anguish of others from the
complete safety of your living room.
The television pictures do bring a satisfying
sense of justice being done, of having witnessed America's retribution
on the godless, or at least on those unlucky enough to have embraced
the wrong god. Satisfaction lingers into the evening while families
munch their way through the next couple of hours before the big
event: The president is going to address the nation.
"Boy, he'll tell us what we need
to know!" flashes through minds as the scene from the Oval
Office suddenly snaps on.
An objective observer, perhaps a de Tocqueville-like
visitor from another planet, might wonder at such thoughts, for
here is a provincial politician, a flop at business but with
impeccable contacts, who bragged about never reading the international
section of the newspaper just before his election to national
office. But an objective observer might not be aware that except
for enjoying explosions on the evening news, most Americans share
the president's level of interest when it comes to foreign affairs.
The boyish-faced president, his hair
suitably graying enough to suggest the heavy burden of office,
with a perfectly-knotted, thick silk tie and an obviously expensive
suit whose shoulders look a little over-padded, seems just slightly
uncomfortable at his desk, like a home-town actor playing his
first big role in the amateur-theater group, but it is a look
generally interpreted as humility or decency rather than ineptitude
or fear.
If he were a better actor, a few gulps
to tug at his Adam's apple and a suggestive bit of moisture at
the corners of his eyes might evoke images of Jimmy Stewart speaking
on behalf of the little man. But Jimmy Stewart through the lens
of Frank Capra is as outdated in America as the stirring tones
of Franklin Roosevelt re-assuring people with ideas like fear
itself being the only fear they need have. And, as for the little
man, well, that's just not a topic of discussion any more, suggesting,
as it does, the existence of class in America.
Heavens! America long ago abolished class
by declaring everyone a consumer. No bleeding-heart garbage about
class and society, no boring stuff about citizenship and responsibilities--just
a nation of open mouths with differing abilities to fill them.
Inspiring.
Indeed, ideas themselves are pretty much
outdated in a place totally immersed in the shallow fantasies
of advertising, self-help books, television series, and vacations
in Disneyland - the only exceptions being ideas about how to
make lots of money.
And besides, this president is a man
who actually works for the likes of Claude Rains' and Raymond
Massey's most memorably villainous characters. Nothing he says,
nothing he does, is not first carefully scrutinized and sniffed
by teams of mole-like eyes and noses. He went through a few hundred
million dollars of their money getting elected and he's not about
to let them down now.
As always, he is surrounded by flags,
beautifully-sewn flags, as thickly textured and elegantly draped
as the president's custom-made clothes, undoubtedly provided
fresh from a supportive manufacturer hoping to receive the much-coveted
White House letter on elegant stationery suitable for framing
and showroom display. In fact, it is known that this president
goes nowhere without two fresh, four-hundred square foot flags,
one just for backup. Rumor has it that the labels, "Made
in China," are carefully snipped before shipment.
The excessive use of flags and patriotic
slogans has always been suggestive of the tyrant's temperament,
even when soft words are used (after all, Hitler, who never went
anywhere without scores of monster flags, made one of the most
effective speeches about peace ever heard). But this man could
not possibly be confused with a tyrant. First off, he's just
too gawky and ordinary.
Yes, there is an underlying sense of
meanness that pokes through his words, here or there, like elbows
protruding from the frayed fabric of a comfortable jacket, especially
when he talks about death-row inmates or terrorists dying. His
harsh, almost adolescent sense of humor, displayed on a number
of occasions during the campaign, betrays something fairly mean
in his make-up. Maybe Mama Bush wasn't all that warm and loving
after all.
But for the most part, the look and sound
are what Americans like to call family: it's a kind of a code
word for a set of qualities that might be summed as three-car-garage
Christian.
There is something in his character much
like the hamburger oases that dot the American landscape, so
beloved by suburban families on shopping safaris in air-conditioned
Jeeps--safe-and-cheerful way stations replicated beyond counting
across a continent, offering the assurance today in Wichita of
exactly what you had last year in Greensboro.
Of course, these are the very qualities
for which he had his pockets stuffed with cash to play leader
of a party actually run by people whose faces won't bear much
direct exposure without revealing the hard lines and ugly attitudes
of lives spent in predatory behavior.
And when you have nothing to say, flags
help a lot. It is almost impossible for any crowd to boo when
flags are present in a country whose Congress has passed an anti-flag-burning
amendment to the Constitution 437 times. Only the ponderously
slow, complex, and costly provisions of an 18th century constitution
have prevented this glorious measure from taking its rightful
place with freedom of speech.
This president is Disney's version of
Fred McMurray giving calm, fatherly advice about joining Neighborhood
Watch or coaching Little League as a helpful public response
to terrorists crashing airliners into skyscrapers.
This is Fred McMurray without the cigarettes
and booze of his early film-noir career. There is an aura in
his tone and looks of redemption, of having moved on from drunken
midnight pranks and naked table-dancing to bowing in prayer and
dispensing the Lord's justice as Governor of Texas. Some might
say his manner of dispensing justice in Texas, or in Afghanistan
for that matter, reflects the self-hatred characteristic of alcoholic
personalities.
And redemption is a favorite with Americans
who just never tire of the tales of country-and-western singers
who hit bottom and live to strum and strut with a wireless mike
once again. Only celebrity beats redemption in the admiration
of America. And anyone who gets to spend hundreds of millions
of dollars to put his benignly smiling face on television, no
matter how wooly and slurred his words, no matter how banal his
thoughts, no matter how unexceptional his achievements, is a
celebrity in America.
For some sentences the president manages
to keep a carefully-coached cadence, but too often his words
take on the urgency of a nervous teen-ager trying to speed through
a recitation without missing a line. You almost expect to hear
him to say, "Whew, Miss Jones, I did it!" at the end
of tough passages. He arouses the same kind of anxiety you feel
about watching a kid wobble down the street on a bicycle for
the first time - eliciting the indulgence of viewers brought
up on The Little Engine That Could and winning the same kind
of unearned praise that a cute child receives for a charmingly
bad performance in a school pageant.
It is very important for politicians
in class-less America, even when they come from wealthy, privileged
families and hold offices in which they serve almost exclusively
the interests of other wealthy, privileged families, to assume
a tone of ordinariness, with no high-falutin' airs. And this
president excels at doing so. He is the best since Richard Nixon
talking about his wife's cloth coat.
His accent is a disconcerting blend of
slightly ineffectual, preppy kid who never did his own homework
and the corn-husk intonations of the land of armadillos, rattlesnakes,
stolen elections, and Confederate battle flags on pick-up trucks
- a place that has blessed the country with a vastly-disproportionate
share of its more lunatic politicians.
And tent-preachers--yes, there is the
unmistakable cadence, however subdued for a national audience,
of innumerable, heads-bowed invitations under the sweltery fabric
of tents filled with damp white shirts stuck to the backs of
folding chairs and mosquitoes droning between the notes of electric
organs.
It is difficult to reconcile this man
in this office with the Founding Fathers' vision of the nation.
What an immense distance for a people to have traveled in just
two centuries under the influence of a feverish consumerism,
of a selfish, grasping, child-centered culture in which the children
are the adults, of entitlements with no sense of responsibility
or citizenship, of unspoken imperialistic attitudes that color
all foreign policy under the guise of freedom, and of the influence
of a section of the country that supposedly lost the Civil War
but now dominates the nation's political culture and imbues it
with stagnant, backwater values.
John Chuckman
is a columnist for Yellowtimes.org.
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