Tricky's Back. In yesterday's Times, Safire channeled the smarmy cockiness and deft Realpolitik of Richard Nixon, who has been generously resigned, according to the editorialist, to purgatory, "where he is still being cleansed of his sin of imposing wage and price controls." This is such a dead-on analysis of Bush's political agenda. My favorite exchange:
Q: [Tax cuts] would appeal to the business types, and the upper middle class in suburbia, but what attraction does a tax cut have for the religious right? What's it got to do with abortion, with same-sex marriage and all the social issues that turn out the troops?
Nixon: Tax cuts and terrorism — and his just not being Clinton — will keep 'em in line. Add to that the evangelicals' love affair with Israel, where George W. is a world apart from his old man. And toss in some faith-based programs that don't cost much but show his heart's in the right place. Cut the death tax and dividend tax and jack up the child credit this year, and campaign next year on making them permanent, and Bush is home free.
I would add, "Oh yeah, and pay lip service to the 'sanctity of human life'" (a phrase first popularized by ol' Dick), but other than that I think Safire/Nixon has wrapped it all up nicely. There's nothing quite like regressive tax programs and vaguely millenarian foreign policy to placate conservative evangelical voters.
Facing Reality in Iraq. The editors of the Washington Post have chimed in with some helpful advice, but Bush and company won't like it. Along with increased resources ("more money, more civilian administrators and more troops"), they also call for improved diplomacy, particularly regarding our former friends and allies in the UN and NATO. Doing so, however, will demand a sensitive touch and just a modicum of humility, something seldom evidenced in the behavior of "Bring 'em on" Bush.
And One More Thing.< In "Bush's War Against Evil," James Carroll mucks up Bush's black and white world by exploring an important paradox: "The record of this deadly paradox is written in the full range of literature, from Sophocles to Fyodor Dostoyevski to Ursula K. LeGuin, each of whom raises the perennial question: What is permitted to be done in the name of 'ridding the world of evil'?" What most surprises me about this editorial is that the questions asked by Carroll are so seldom asked by the rest of us. How, in other words, have we allowed the leader of our democracy to wage a war against so nebulous a foe as "evil" without forcing him to acknowledge the historical, philosophical, political, and even theological problems of the term?
What is evil anyway? Is it the impulse only of tyrants? Of enemies alone? Or is it tied to the personal entitlement onto which America, too, hangs its bunting? Is evil the thing, perhaps, that forever inclines human beings to believe that they are themselves untouched by it? Moral maturity, mellowed across the distance of history, begins in the acknowledgement that evil, whatever its primal source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self. There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that, shy of history's end, there is no ridding the self of it.
For Carroll, that Bush is able to traffic in such language is evidence of moral and intellectual vacuousness. He concludes:
To address concerns about the savage violence engulfing "postwar" Iraq with a cocksure "Bring `em on!" as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination shocking in a man of such authority. It showed a lack of capacity to identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to such a taunt or with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his own soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness.
No human being with a minimal self-knowledge could speak of evil as he does, but there is no self-knowledge without a self. Even this short ''distance of history'' shows George W. Bush to be, in that sense, the selfless president, which is not a compliment. It's a warning.
And Just for Fun. Somehow I ended up at a fantastic Wes Anderson Website today. Biggest perk? You can download the original, 15-minute version of Bottle Rocket.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
« Home