Your Call Is Important To Us (28 page)

The Bush administration is the latest in a long line of wartime bullshitters. When the threat-based justifications for the war, like weapons of mass destruction, were proven to be false or exaggerated, the administration simply switched emphasis, pushing the just cause and the spread of freedom and democracy. In Bush’s 2005 inaugural speech—which was pretty short—he used the word
freedom
twenty-five times and
liberty
fifteen times. Freedom, and the glorious struggle for liberty, is a classic war speech theme. How do you disagree with it? Everybody except evildoers likes freedom. Even though the Bush administration has curtailed civil liberties in a host of ways, it consistently wraps itself in the flag of freedom and liberty. It also uses the rhetoric of freedom to push its domestic agenda; whether the issue is tax cuts or the privatization of Social Security, Bush spins it as freeing people to spend their own money and make their own choices.

What I find really pernicious about this is not just the fact that Bush bullshits, like every politician. Bush and company distinguish themselves by
believing
their own bullshit. I don’t think Paul Wolfowitz was spinning when he said that American troops would be welcomed in the Middle East as liberators. I think he actually thought that, and refused to entertain evidence to the contrary. This is the other big problem with the Bush regime: It brooks no dissent, and does not take kindly to being called on its bullshit. Moderate Republicans like Paul O’Neill, Christine Todd Whitman, and Colin Powell have been driven out of the government for questioning, or disagreeing with, the policy initiatives of the inner circle. Several commentators have noted that this inner circle is as clenched and concealed as a sphincter.

In a chilling October 2004
New York Times Magazine
article, writer Ron Suskind detailed Bush’s distaste for debate, and reliance on instinct and religion to the detriment of evidence or fact. One of Bush’s aides mocked Suskind’s attachment to quaint notions like facts and evidence, and the writer’s allegiance to “the reality-based community”: “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

In your face, you fact-loving pussies! Have fun studying us, losers, while we remake the world in our image and then remake it again. This attitude gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I am not alone. The phrase “reality-based community” has migrated to the blogosphere, where progressive bloggers declare themselves proud members.

The declaration that the empire is creating its own reality, and that the rest of us can just take notes, is not just bullshit but meta-bullshit, bullshit about bullshitting. The disdain for the reality-based community is merely the latest manifestation of a long and successful campaign of right-wing reality creation, of bullshitting about their own bullshit. For example, Bush and his ilk have done an excellent job of redefining certain words, like elitist, conservative, and liberal. Elite used to mean somebody with lots of wealth and power, like, say, Dick Cheney. Now elite means somebody who reads books and indulges in hated nuance, like that ol’ flip-flopper John Kerry. Bush and the gang are not conservatives in the traditional, Burkean sense of having respect for established authority and tradition. They may be social conservatives, but more than anything else they are free-market radicals, who dismantle established programs rather than conserving them. Some are bloody anarchists. Talk to the kid at the protest rally with all the anarchy symbols on his jacket, and you will probably discover that he wants more government, like fairer trade regulations. Grover Norquist wants to drown the government in a tub.

Even though the United States and Canada are founded on the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, like freedom and democracy, the word
liberal
has been hijacked and turned into a synonym for treasonous America-hater. Bush’s insistence that America was founded on Christian faith is historically inaccurate; most of the Founding Fathers were Deists, who put far more faith in reason than they did in religion. Paine, for example, famously declared that the only church he needed was the one in his head. Jefferson edited his own Bible, which kept Jesus’ practical moral teachings and tossed out all the dogma and supernatural events. Sure, they believed in a benevolent Creator, but they were also pretty serious about the separation of church and state, for the benefit of both institutions. After the election, historian Garry Wills wrote an editorial for the
New York Times
that the reelection of Bush marked a turn away from the Enlightenment, and a turn towards theocracy and blind faith. His claim might be a tad hyperbolic, but it is not without merit. Bush’s declaration that freedom is a gift God gives us all skips a step in the old Deist formula. God gives us reason, and then we use that blessed faculty to build states that foster and protect freedom. The Bible certainly didn’t lay the groundwork for free and democratic societies. Reason did. Liberals did. And I do not trust Bible-thumpers to maintain their precious legacy.

As Bush’s aide noted, history’s actors are not bound. They are not bound by history, obviously, nor are they bound by truth and facts. They are not bound by costs, either. Another bullshit aspect of this war is that the costs of war are being kept, like a CEO’s stock options, off the books. The 2005 budget did not include costs for operations in Iraq. The $2.5 trillion budget slashed social services, including education, in an attempt to reduce the ever-swelling deficit, but experts are still projecting it will rise to over $400 billion this year, before military costs are factored in. Spending for the U.S.’s Iraqi adventure is over $150 billion, and Bush has recently requested another $80 billion toward the cost of rebuilding Iraq. Who is going to pay for all this? Not Bush, and not Cheney, but the generations to come, that’s who.

One of the reasons why war needs bullshit is to cover up the gruesome, unnatural truth: Wars gorge themselves on the young. Most of the soldiers fighting this war are young and poor. Jessica Lynch couldn’t even celebrate her homecoming with a beer, being two years shy of the legal drinking age. The deficits that Bush is racking up, for war costs and tax cuts and corporate welfare, are also burdens that the youth will have to bear. When MoveOn ran a contest called Bush in 30 Seconds to solicit ads opposing the president’s reelection, the winning entry, Child’s Pay, made this case graphically, showing kids toiling in factories and washing dishes to pay down billions in Bush debt.

I’m not surprised the ad with the little spuds won. “Think of the children” is the ultimate equal-opportunity piety, invoked in the name of lefty causes like gun control and the environment, and of right-wing ones like censorship and the drug war. Bush has been selling his plan to privatize Social Security as an intervention on behalf of children’s retirement funds. On the morning of September 11, when he first heard news of the attacks, Bush was, as everyone knows, in an elementary-school classroom reading to little kids. Education has long been one of his pet causes—leave no child behind!—but his policies hurt kids now, and will have deleterious effects on them in the future.

Bush engages in think-of-the-childrenism because every politician does. Children are the last innocents in our hopelessly profaned world. Though I have met little tiny assholes, I do not recommend expressing such sentiments aloud. It is a commonplace that crimes against kids are the worst crimes of all. Chester the Molester is the guy most likely to be beaten to a pulp by crackheads and murderers in jail. And when he gets out of jail, he is the criminal most likely to inspire furious poster campaigns by the residents of his new neighborhood. Throughout the past few years, even as the war machine trundled on, the news ran beaucoup de endangered child stories, about kiddies snatched from bedrooms by strangers or fondled by Catholic priests. When prudes freaked out about Janet Jackson’s boob, they did so in the name of the children.

You can see our tender care for the youth in the way that we market heart attacks on buns directly at the little darlings, so that every time they pass a golden arch, the begging begins. You can feel the love for the young in each new product line, each new buddy like Barney and Elmo and SpongeBob, available in TV, book, movie, CD, T-shirt, plush, plastic, and cereal form. You can see plain evidence of our concern in the millions of children who live in grievous poverty. You can also see the love in the gentle attentions of the juvenile justice system and the lavish hands of our speed-dispensing kiddie shrinks. You can really see the love in the way that we work increasingly long hours and spend less and less time with our beloved kids, leaving them plunked in front of a blinky box munching neon crud for hours at a time. And then there’s the way we glut ourselves on nonrenewable resources like oil and clean water and arable land and blithely keep churning out smog and sludge and trash for an unspecified somebody to clean up . . . later. Think of the children? Don’t make me laugh myself new holes. We’re lucky if we can think of next Monday.

One of the reasons why think-of-the-childrenism enervates me is that I spend long hours with people’s children. Don’t worry, by the time I get my hands on them, they are in college, almost adults, and already ruined. Many are working way too many hours outside the classroom just to pay for class, or putting themselves into major hock before they’ve had their first legal bender. Plenty have no desire whatsoever to be there, and are merely in school because that is what you gotta do to get a good job. Several emerge from high school without a clue about stringing together a paragraph or reading and interpreting a complex document, and many of them view reading as a chore, rather than a necessary survival skill, or one of the world’s great pleasures. I’m not saying your kids are dumb or lazy. Most of the kids I have taught, from the D students to the A pluses, have been perfectly delightful. They have just been marinating in ease, soaking in fun and cool, and so what’s boring and hard is all the boringer and harder.

I am not the only concerned university educator out there, fretting about the decline of literacy and standards. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a group of virtuecrats that advocate for academic freedom, more history in the schools, and university accountability. The group, co-founded by Second Lady Lynne Cheney, issued a report in 2001 called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” It is a real humdinger. The report collects more than a hundred comments from seditious university professors in the wake of 9–11, which are mostly innocuous, wishy-washy root-cause stuff, like the suggestion that we ought to use our strength for peace, not war. The report thoroughly excoriates the academics for holding such views; rather than serve the cause of liberty, Ivory Tower nerds choose to BLAME AMERICA FIRST. Their caps, not mine.

Let us leave aside the absurdity of an organization ostensibly devoted to academic freedom censuring the insufficient jingoism of the Ivory Tower set. Let’s consider the corrective. What, they ask, is to be done about Professor Granola, and Doctor Peacenik? Well, the angelic doctors who make up the ACTA think that kids should be learning about Lady Liberty’s glorious past, boning up on their Western Civ instead of absorbing all that trendy hogwash about postcolonialism and postmodernity. Consequently, the report enthusiastically endorses great-books programs. It just so happens that I am also an enthusiastic endorser of great-books programs, being both a product and a teacher of one, but reading all those canonical books by Dead White Males sure didn’t make me a patriot or a Republican. I may be a positively arteriosclerotic conservative when it comes to syllabi, but it is, in part, my time as a Western Civ nerd that makes me revile the shoddy fraudulence of everything else that the cons stand for and continue to perpetrate.

You don’t really want the kids to take up and read, Lynne, believe me. That would totally fuck with the obfuscation and ignorance upon which your husband’s fortune and the rest of his regime depend. Just think of all the subversive material in a great-books program. Young kids might pick up Plato’s
Republic
and read about how democracy, though the most attractive and colorful form of political life, is fundamentally unstable and gives way to tyranny. The kids might notice how hard a task it was to found the Roman Empire,
secundum
Vergil. They might notice that usurers, rather than waiting for nations to come bow and scrape for their credit ratings, wander the burning sands in Dante’s
Inferno,
and that barrators, those who profit from political office, are sunk in a
bolgia
of boiling pitch, eternally poked and tortured by demons. They might notice that the last round of major Allah vs. Jesus-my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God smackdowns raged on for at least five centuries. They might encounter inconveniently stringent statements like Kant’s “to be truthful in all declarations is, therefore, a sacred and unconditionally commanding law of reason that admits of no expediency whatsoever.” This is not even to mention the latter half of your average great-books year, which includes skeptics like Hume, liberals like Mill, commies like Marx, scientists like Darwin, and atheists like Nietzsche. Even a cursory reading of such texts by middling students may well leave the beloved children scratching their heads after the latest State of the Union address.

ACTA is only one of the groups taking academia to task. Right-wing activist David Horowitz has recently been campaigning for an Academic Bill of Rights, to protect the youth from the fulminations of Professor Peacenik. Horowitz does a swell job of spinning this crusade into a fight for academic freedom and intellectual diversity, but it is actually a right-wing assault on one of the last bastions of genuine liberalism in American culture. Having successfully captured all three branches of government, the judiciary, and a goodly chunk of the media and public discourse, the right now wishes to seize academia, too, to protect their children from the trauma of having a hippie professor. Professor Stanley Fish, who has written several essays arguing that the university should be an apolitical environment, devoted solely to the search for knowledge, has described Horowitz’s Bill of Academic Rights as a Trojan horse. Under the guise of diversity, the bill calls for more right-wing professors, and tells liberal professors to stuff a sock in it.