Who Let the Dogs In? (38 page)

S
O
YOU HAD
to figure George W. would skate through Europe on “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (the most memorable phrase his speechwriters have yet produced for him). He is not as bad as the Europeans thought he was—
quel triomphe!
And have our media not saluted “the spring in his step” and the hilarious moment when he greeted Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain as “Mr. Landslide”?

What a regular guy! Plain-spoken. Straightforward.

Only Jesse Helms is grumpy.

I, too, would be enchanted by Dubya’s splendid performance (only one mispronunciation of a world leader and the slight mishap concerning his assertion that Africa is a nation) if only he weren’t so limited. W. Bush is not plain-spoken or straightforward. He is opaque, diaphanous, and so rarely says anything approaching actual meaning that it’s headlines when he does: e.g., “Major league asshole.” You can listen to an entire forty-five-minute speech by this man and still wonder, “Did he just say anything we should have noticed?” He is much given to reiteration of the obvious, as though it were news. This just in: “The cold war is over.”

Having it both ways is something of a W. Bush signature. For example, when he was governor, he opposed the state’s Patients’ Bill of Rights, first vetoing the bill in ’95 and later letting it become law only after it had been passed by a veto-proof majority, after he had fought it every step of the way, and even then he let the strongest part of the bill become law without his signature. He is apparently about to use the same ploy on the federal patients’ bill: Oppose it every step of the way and then claim credit for it. He just pulled this stunt with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s long-awaited capitulation on price caps for Western energy.

Some progressives are taking comfort in the news that Bush is sinking in the polls, particularly the acute insight by the American people that he’s more interested in helping large corporate donors than the public. Never did think the people were stupid. But the problem is not public recognition of what Bush is—most of us didn’t vote for him to begin with. The problem is wasted time and money, years and billions being frittered away.

Time is especially a problem on three fronts—global warming, AIDS, and Russia, a seriously destabilized nuclear power. Putin promptly countered Bush’s proposal for a National Missile Defense (NMD) shield with a promise to increase Russia’s offensive weapons—duh. For those of you who remember your old arms control jargon, they’re going to MIRV their MARVs, put multiple warheads on every missile. Though Putin, who seems to have a strong grip on reality, did remark he thought they had at least twenty years before they had to worry about the NMD.

The real concern with Russia is not that it is hostile but that it is falling apart. Their radar system is shot: They almost launched a nuclear strike against us in 1995 when they mistook a Norwegian research rocket for an incoming Trident missile. And they’re less likely to lob a nuke at us than they are to sell some of what they’ve got to the usual suspects, or even have it stolen.

Meanwhile, W. continues his Alfred E. Neuman routine on global warming. The people sitting in the mess of Houston being eaten alive by mosquitoes in the wake of Tropical Storm Allison are not the only ones to notice that untoward weather events are coming more frequently. Even the insurance industry is rapidly passing nervous on the subject.

But this cheerful report should perk up your day no end: Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recently said, “If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good.” This is the kind of positive thinking that makes our country great.

August 2001

One Throws Up One’s Hands

I
WAS IN
Paris for all of September. After 9/11, at the American Church on the Left Bank and the American Cathedral on the Right, the steps were covered with the most beautiful flowers and the most touching messages. They ranged from “God Bless America” to
“Nous Vous Aimons”
to
“Vive Les New Yorkers.”
Many of the messages mentioned ’44, Normandy, or the liberation of Paris. One, in a shaky, spidery hand, referred to the famous American declaration of World War I: “Lafayette, we are here,” and added the assurance that the French would be with America once more.

All this was even more remarkable in that the French consider George W. Bush a hopeless fathead. The Europeans were much taken aback by W’s language after the attack, but I must confess, I’m such a Texan I didn’t even react. We’ll “smoke ’em out and round ’em up”—sound plan. “Bring him in, dead or alive”—you bet your butt. I did, however, cringe at his use of the word
crusade.

In the first few days, the French papers featured great deluges of prose on the awfulness and the horror of the attack, backed by tender portraits of the survivors. But there was from the beginning a slightly less sentimental tone in the coverage than in the American press, an immediate practicality about the consequences, and a severe avoidance of the bathetic.

By the weekend of September 15, the French press was pointing out, in the most tactful fashion, that this administration has notably preferred unilateralism to multilateralism but now the great need for fullest cooperation with the allies was revealed. The second point made by the French press was that G. W. Bush must now, surely, recognize the folly of the missile defense shield, it having just been so painfully demonstrated to be not at all what is needed. So when the news came from Washington that actually the missile defense shield was more likely to pass now since no one in Washington was in a mood to deny Bush anything he says he needs, the French press grew impatient.

In the French language,
one
is the preferred pronoun for the opinionated individual. The French avoid the egotistical
I
and the presumptuous
everybody.
So when the illogical decision on missile defense came down, it forced one to throw up one’s hands and shake one’s head and sigh. One was not happy.

One was also gravely concerned by the call-up of fifty thousand reservists and bellicose quotes from Bush and Cheney. The problem, one agreed with one along the
quai,
was the use of the word
war.
For war, the military forces of one country must attack the military forces of another. Therefore, this was not a war. It was a crime of the most horrible variety. One must find the perpetrators. One must bring them to justice. One is inclined to think an international tribunal, such as for Slobodan Milosevic´, would be a proper forum.

BACK HOME IN
Texas, and the sign outside our neighborhood strip joint says,
HOT BABES, COLD BEER, NUKE ’EM, GW.

My worry is that Bush is painting himself into a corner with his rhetoric. This is not a war; it’s a gigantic police operation in the face of a crime beyond all understanding.

Fear is at the root of most evil. As Boots Cooper, age eight, said after a close encounter with a chicken snake: “Some things’ll scare you so bad, you’ll hurt yourself.” These dotty proposals to breach the Constitution fall into that category. We cannot make ourselves more secure by making ourselves less free. According to reporting in the
Los Angeles Times
and
The New York Times,
the terrorists got in and stayed through loopholes in the visa system, not some fundamental constitutional flaw.

When I returned from Paris, I was hoping we’d start thinking outside the box. Now I’m hoping we’ll just start thinking.

One more Texas sign, in front of a pharmacy:
GENERIC PROZAC NOW IN, GOD BLESS AMERICA.

November 2001

Civil Liberties Matter

W
HOA! THE PROBLEM IS
the premise. We are having one of those circular arguments about how many civil liberties we can trade away in order to make ourselves safe from terrorism, without even looking at the assumption—
can
we can make ourselves safer by making ourselves less free? There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.

Exactly what do we want to strike out of the U.S. Constitution that we think would prevent terrorist attacks? Let’s see, if civil liberties had been suspended before September 11, would law enforcement have noticed Mohammed Atta? Would the FBI have opened an investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, as Minneapolis agents wanted to do? The CIA had several of the 9/11 actors on their lists of suspected terrorists. Exactly what civil liberty prevented them from doing anything about it?

In the case of a suspected terrorist, the government already had the right to search, wiretap, intercept, detain, examine computer and financial records, and do anything else it needed to do. There’s a special court they go to for subpoenas and warrants. As it happens, they didn’t do it.

Changing the law retroactively is not going to change that. Certainly, we had a visa system that had more holes than Swiss cheese. What does that have to do with civil liberties? When we don’t give an agency enough money to do its job, it doesn’t get done.

As you may have heard, Immigration and Naturalization has been a bit overwhelmed in recent years. In fairness to law enforcement, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have seen this one coming. It’s always easy to point the finger after the fact. It was just a damnable act.

Absolutely nothing in the Constitution would have prevented us from stopping 9/11, so why would we want to change it? I also think we’re arguing from the wrong historical analogies. Yes, during past wars civil liberties have been abrogated and the courts have even upheld this. We regret it later, but we don’t seem to learn from that.

But the Bush administration’s rhetoric aside, we are not at war. War is when the armed forces of one country attack the armed forces of another. What we’re looking at is more akin to the nineteenth-century problem with anarchists, the terrorists of their day. And we made some memorable errors by giving in to hysteria over anarchists.

In the infamous 1886 Haymarket Square affair in Chicago, after a bomb killed seven policemen, eight labor leaders were rounded up and “tried,” even though there was no evidence against them—four hanged, one suicide, three sentenced. Historians agree they were all innocent.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in 1927, were finally exonerated by the state of Massachusetts in 1977. That outbreak of hysteria over “foreign anarchists” led to, among other abuses, a wave of arrests for DWI: “Driving While Italian.” And no one was ever made safer from an anarchist bomb by the execution of innocent people. We all know that other groups, from the Irish to the blacks to the Chinese, have been targeted for legal abuse over the years—all betrayals of our laws, values, and the sacrifices of generations. Let’s not do it again.