Gore Vidal believes, as I have theorized, that the hurricane that
devastated Louisiana was sent by Jehovah to us because President J.
Jonah Bush has fallen out of favor with him.
It's a very rough form of justice, and if the Easter Bunny were the
grand poobah (or should I say pookah) instead of a minor deity in a
chaotic cosmology, he would run things in a more orderly fashion.
In the mean time, we are stuck with the current system. It is good
that we have keen thinkers like Gore Vidal to help us navigate through
it. I would like to note that the Orthodox Mystic Knights of the
Easter Bunny has no quarrel with science, logic, and rationality, the
three arch enemies of the Klan of the Kave Monkey Boy.
Vidal is a supreme literary stylist:
"...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded
that the United States was 'careening toward insolvency.'
Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number
one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of
our apish neocons, in second place. Well, we still have Kraft cheese
and, of course, the death penalty."
I herebye appoint Gore Vidal as one of the 13 Popes of the Orthodox
Mystic Knights of the Easter Bunny. Congradulations, Pope Vidal!
President Jonah
by GORE VIDAL
While contemplating the ill-starred presidency of G.W. Bush, I looked
about for some sort of divine analogy. As usual, when in need of
enlightenment, I fell upon the Holy Bible, authorized King James
version of 1611; turning by chance to the Book of Jonah, I read that
Jonah, who, like Bush, chats with God, had suffered a falling out
with the Almighty and thus became a jinx dogged by luck so bad that a
cruise liner, thanks to his presence aboard, was about to sink in a
storm at sea. Once the crew had determined that Jonah, a passenger,
was the jinx, they threw him overboard and--Lo!--the storm abated.
The three days and nights he subsequently spent in the belly of a
nauseous whale must have seemed like a serious jinx to the digestion-
challenged whale who extruded him much as the decent opinion of
mankind has done to Bush.
Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people,
God noted disdainfully, "cannot discern between their right hand and
their left hand," so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom
what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush
cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the
hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not
only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes
before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs.
Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the
curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale,
thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the
people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in
Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest.
Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his
resignation! One can see former President Jonah in his sumptuous
library happily catering to faith-based fans with animated scriptures
rooted in "The Simpsons."
Not since the glory days of Watergate and Nixon's Luciferian fall has
there been so much written about the dogged deceits and creative
criminalities of our rulers. We have also come to a point in this
dark age where there is not only no hero in view but no alternative
road unblocked. We are trapped terribly in a now that few foresaw and
even fewer can define despite a swarm of books and pamphlets like the
vast cloud of locusts which dined on China in that '30s movie "The
Good Earth."
I have read many of these descriptions of our fallen estate, looking
for one that best describes in plain English how we got to this now
and where we appear to be headed once our good Earth has been
consumed and only Rapture is left to whisk aloft the Faithful.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can learn quite a lot from "Dark Ages
America: The Final Phase of Empire," by Morris Berman, a professor of
sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
I must confess that I have a proprietary interest in anyone who
refers to the United States as an empire since I am credited with
first putting forward this heretical view in the early '70s. In fact,
so disgusted with me was a book reviewer at Time magazine that as
proof of my madness he wrote: "He actually refers to the United
States as an empire!" It should be noted that at about the same time
Henry Luce, proprietor of Time, was booming on and on about "The
American Century." What a difference a word makes!
Berman sets his scene briskly in recent history.
"We were already in our twilight phase when Ronald Reagan, with all
the insight of an ostrich, declared it to be 'morning in America';
twenty-odd years later, under the 'boy emperor' George W. Bush (as
Chalmers Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in
earnest, pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our
decline. For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics
of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over
reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the
integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture--a
troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-
Enlightenment world; and the political and economic marginalization
of our culture.... The British historian Charles Freeman published an
extended discussion of the transition that took place during the late
Roman empire, the title of which could serve as a capsule summary of
our current president: "The Closing of the Western Mind."
"Mr. Bush, God knows, is no Augustine; but Freeman points to the
latter as the epitome of a more general process that was underway in
the fourth century: namely, 'the gradual subjection of reason to
faith and authority.' This is what we are seeing today, and it is a
process that no society can undergo and still remain free. Yet it is
a process of which administration officials, along with much of the
American population, are aggressively proud."
In fact, close observers of this odd presidency note that Bush, like
his evangelical base, believes he is on a mission from God and that
faith trumps empirical evidence. Berman quotes a senior White House
adviser who disdains what he calls the "reality-based" community, to
which Berman sensibly responds: "If a nation is unable to perceive
reality correctly, and persists in operating on the basis of faith-
based delusions, its ability to hold its own in the world is pretty
much foreclosed."
Berman does a brief tour of the American horizon, revealing a
cultural death valley. In secondary schools where evolution can still
be taught too many teachers are afraid to bring up the subject to
their so often un-evolved students.
"Add to this the pervasive hostility toward science on the part of
the current administration (e.g. stem-cell research) and we get a
clear picture of the Enlightenment being steadily rolled back.
Religion is used to explain terror attacks as part of a cosmic
conflict between Good and Evil rather than in terms of political
processes.... Manichaeanism rules across the United States. According
to a poll taken by Time magazine fifty-nine percent of Americans
believe that John's apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation
will be fulfilled, and nearly all of these believe that the faithful
will be taken up into heaven in the 'Rapture.'
"Finally, we shouldn't be surprised at the antipathy toward democracy
displayed by the Bush administration.... As already noted,
fundamentalism and democracy are completely antithetical. The
opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is tribalism, groupthink;
and more and more, this is the direction in which the United States
is going...Anthony Lewis who worked as a columnist for the New York
Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has happened in the
wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the rights of a few
detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation of democracy.
Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys, years of
interrogation in isolation--these are now standard American practice,
and most Americans don't care. Nor did they care about the revelation
in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek), that for several months the
White House and the Department of Justice had been discussing the
feasibility of canceling the upcoming presidential election in the
event of a possible terrorist attack."
I suspect that the technologically inclined prevailed against that
extreme measure on the ground that the newly installed electronic
ballot machines could be so calibrated that Bush would win handily no
matter what. [Read Rep. Conyers' report (pfd) on the rigging of
Ohio's vote.]
Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. "In
a 'State of the First Amendment Survey' conducted by the University
of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First
Amendment 'goes too far'; 46 percent said there was too much freedom
of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to
publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent
wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50
percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on
the religious freedom of 'certain religious groups' in the name of
the war on terror."
It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman's to stop abruptly
the litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart,
that once the people have been informed of what is happening, the
truth will set them free and a quarter-billion candles will be lit
and the darkness will flee in the presence of so much spontaneous
light. But Berman is much too serious for the easy platitude. Instead
he tells us that those who might have struck at least a match can no
longer do so because shared information about our situation is meager
to nonexistent. Would better schools help?
Of course, but, according to that joyous bearer of ill tidings, the
New York Times, many school districts are now making sobriety tests a
regular feature of the school day: apparently opium derivatives are
the opiate of our stoned youth.
Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans, presumably undrugged, have no
idea who our enemies were in World War II. Many college graduates
don't know the difference between an argument and an assertion (did
their teachers also fail to solve this knotty question?). A travel
agent in Arizona is often asked whether or not it is cheaper to take
the train rather than fly to Hawaii. Only 12% of Americans own a
passport. At the time of the 2004 presidential election 42% of voters
believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. One high school
boy, when asked who won the Civil War, replied wearily, "I don't know
and I don't care," echoing a busy neocon who confessed proudly: "The
American Civil War is as remote to me as the War of the Roses."
We are assured daily by advertisers and/or politicians that we are
the richest, most envied people on Earth and, apparently, that is why
so many awful, ill-groomed people want to blow us up. We live in an
impermeable bubble without the sort of information that people living
in real countries have access to when it comes to their own reality.
But we are not actually people in the eyes of the national ownership:
we are simply unreliable consumers comprising an overworked,
underpaid labor force not in the best of health: The World Health
Organization rates our healthcare system (sic--or sick?) as 37th-best
in the world, far behind even Saudi Arabia, role model for the
Texans. Our infant mortality rate is satisfyingly high, precluding a
First World educational system.
Also, it has not gone unremarked even in our usually information-free
media that despite the boost to the profits of such companies as
Halliburton, Bush's wars of aggression against small countries of no
danger to us have left us well and truly broke. Our annual trade
deficit is a half-trillion dollars, which means that we don't produce
much of anything the world wants except those wan reports on how
popular our Entertainment is overseas.
Unfortunately the foreign gross of "King Kong," the Edsel of that
assembly line, is not yet known. It is rumored that Bollywood--the
Indian film business--may soon surpass us! Berman writes, "We have
lost our edge in science to Europe...The US economy is being kept
afloat by huge foreign loans ($4 billion a day during 2003). What do
you think will happen when America's creditors decide to pull the
plug, or when OPEC members begin selling oil in euros instead of
dollars?...An International Monetary Fund report of 2004 concluded
that the United States was 'careening toward insolvency.' "
Meanwhile, China, our favorite big-time future enemy, is the number
one for worldwide foreign investments, with France, the bete noire of
our apish neocons, in second place. Well, we still have Kraft cheese
and, of course, the death penalty.
Berman makes the case that the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944
institutionalized a system geared toward full employment and the
maintenance of a social safety net for society's less fortunate--the
so-called welfare or interventionist state. It did this by
establishing fixed but flexible exchange rates among world
currencies, which were pegged to the U.S. dollar while the dollar,
for its part, was pegged to gold. In a word, Bretton-Woods saved
capitalism by making it more human. Nixon abandoned the agreement in
1971, which started, according to Berman, huge amounts of capital
moving upward from the poor and the middle class to the rich and
super-rich.
Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently, has history.
When the admirable Tiberius (he has had an undeserved bad press),
upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which
the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted
would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this
was outrageous. "Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?"
He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: "How
eager you are to be slaves."
I often think of that wise emperor when I hear Republican members of
Congress extolling the wisdom of Bush. Now that he has been caught
illegally wiretapping fellow citizens he has taken to snarling about
his powers as "a wartime president," and so, in his own mind, he is
above each and every law of the land. Oddly, no one in Congress has
pointed out that he may well be a lunatic dreaming that he is another
Lincoln but whatever he is or is not he is no wartime president.
There is no war with any other nation...yet. There is no state called
terror, an abstract noun like liar.
Certainly his illegal unilateral ravaging of Iraq may well seem like
a real war for those on both sides unlucky enough to be killed or
wounded, but that does not make it a war any more than the appearance
of having been elected twice to the presidency does not mean that in
due course the people will demand an investigation of those two
irregular processes. Although he has done a number of things that
under the old republic might have got him impeached, our current
system protects him: incumbency-for-life seats have made it possible
for a Republican majority in the House not to do its duty and impeach
him for his incompetence in handling, say, the natural disaster that
befell Louisiana.
The founders thought two-year terms for members of the House was as
much democracy as we'd ever need. Therefore, there was no great
movement to have some sort of recall legislation in the event that a
president wasn't up to his job and so had lost the people's
confidence between elections. But in time, as Ecclesiastes would say,
all things shall come to pass and so, in a kindly way, a majority of
the citizens must persuade him that he will be happier back in
Crawford pruning Bushes of the leafy sort while the troops not killed
or maimed will settle for simply being alive and in one piece. We may
be slaves but we are not unreasonable.
One way that a majority of citizens can help open the road back to
Crawford is by heeding the call of a group called the World Can't
Wait. They believe that the agenda for 2006 must not be set by the
Bush gang but by the people taking independent mass political action.
On Jan. 31, the night of Bush's next State of the Union address, they
have called for people in large cities and small towns all across the
country to join in noisy rallies to make the demand that "Bush Step
Down" the message of the day. At 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, just
as Bush starts to speak, people can make a joyful noise and
figuratively drown out his address. Then on the following Saturday,
Feb. 4, converge in front of the White House with the same message:
Please step down and take your program with you.
Novelist, playwright and essayist Gore Vidal is a contributing editor
to The Nation. Visit Truthdig.com to read the essay in its original
context or listen to an audio file of Vidal reading the entire piece.
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