by Richard Farr
At first, the countless violations of the law by our new rulers still caused a degree of disquiet. But among the incomprehensible features of those months, my father later recalled, was the fact that soon life went on as if such crimes were the most natural thing in the world. —Joachim Fest, Not I – Berlin, early 1930s
[Y]ou have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. —Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Book II, Chapter VI
The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. —Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Sometimes it’s hard to stay on top of things. While trying to rank-order Nuclear War Over Taiwan, Deforestation in the Amazon, Child Slavery Linked to my own Spending Habits, The Latest Data from the Thwaites Glacier, and What’s Being Done Right Now to the Uighurs the Rohingya the Palestinians the Hazara the Yazidis the Kurds and the Tigrayans, I keep being distracted by trivia, like How Irritated I am to Have Received Yet Another Cloyingly Chummy Fund-Raising Email from the Biden-Harris Campaign.
Sometimes you have to put Now aside and get the cool perspective of ancient sources. So this week I dug around in my shelves and dusted off a book from a distant era. Written by Al Gore, and entitled The Assault on Reason, it’s an eyewitness account of the decline of more or less everything back when the American throne was occupied by the Kennebunkport Dauphin, George II.
Preoccupied with our current traumas, how quickly we forget! Gore is not a neutral observer, but his account is stolidly factual. And the fact is, George II’s reign at the great White Palace in Washington was astonishingly awful. Vandalizing, reckless, arrogant and ignorant; cruel and authoritarian; chaotic and incompetent beyond all previous measure; contemptuous of the law, of democracy, of transparency, of innocent life, of any “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” In sum, what strikes the modern reader most forcibly perhaps is that the era, half lost in the mists of history, was so strikingly Trumpian.
Back then we had Evildoers, and an Axis of Evil too. But luckily we had unlimited executive power, or anyway George II had it on our behalf because you don’t need the rule of law when instead you can have, per the England America fought to escape, the Divine Right of Kings. Just in case we did need some laws, we also had 357 terrified little rabbits Representatives and 98 terrified little rabbits Senators who had so badly soiled themselves (terrified out of their wits by terrorism, which is after all the point of terrorism) that they signed away unnumbered civil rights in a piece of legislation sufficiently paradoxical that they they had to dig up George Orwell to think of a name for it: the Patriot Act.
We had mass surveillance of American citizens, and mass lying about mass surveillance of American citizens. (This, hard on the heels of the ignoring of surveillance of certain Iraqis, sorry Saudis, who should not have been taking flying lessons.) We had yellowcake, or anyway we had lying about it. We had Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Pericles and Cicero of our national strategic genius, explaining to us that UN inspectors — some of whom were European, so what can you expect? — were being naive about Saddam’s WMD. (Only later did we discover the great stockpiles of Fictionalase and Feverdream.)
We had Ahmed Chalabi! Partly because of Chalabi, we had Colin Powell — ill at ease but blinded by loyalty to the King — going to the UN and spouting either a pack of lies or else unmitigated drivel that he only later realized was a pack of lies. It emerged later that the lies had come from the office of Chalabi’s friend Pericles. They certainly had not come from the King himself, who only sat on the throne like a wind-up doll saying Sadda-yum Sadda-yum Sadda-yum.
Pericles said we would be greeted as liberators. We got reports — bravely brushed aside by the King’s Ministers — that on the contrary an invasion would be a financial, diplomatic, military and strategic disaster, even a moral disaster if anyone was interested in that, and would, as any child familiar with a playground could have predicted, increase the threat of terrorism rather than reduce it.
While the NSA tapped our phones, the FBI came for our library records. The country’s librarians, being both more disgusted by autocracy and more intelligent than either the Congress or the FBI, responded with “warrant canaries,” an idea so delightful it’s worth looking up. (Smile at the wit of it or cry over the need, according to taste.) Meanwhile the CIA protected our sacred honor by flying terrified innocent people to “black sites” in eyes-averted regimes, well out of sight of law and scruple, so that they could be subjected to enhanced underwater hospitality.
We had the biggest government reorg since King Harry of the House of Truman created the modern panoptic state in 1947; thus the “Department of Homeland Security.” Some of us squirmed at the name, because it sounded like a joke about a sketchy outfit in a tin-pot dictatorship. Later we got used to the name while squirming about the thing itself. Most of us forgot to squirm at all about the tens of thousands of Americans whose loss of the right to unionize was such a marvelous side-benefit of the legislation. (The King himself explained that their sacrifice was essential to “National Security,” a magic incantation that always and forever evaporates all other considerations, trampled liberties included.)
We had Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer and all the other neocons defining themselves as erstwhile sophomoric liberals who grew up and swerved to the right after being “mugged by reality.” This seemed like a good line, but turned out not to be when the rest of the world (and especially the people of Iraq) were mugged by the reality of what happens when self-satisfied soi-disant “realists” get a bit of power and turn out to be not only blood-thirsty tub-thumping warmongers but also complete surrealists about how the world actually works.
We had “shock and awe,” and were so amazed by our own excellence that we could not see it for what it was, which was both shocking and in many different ways awful.
We had lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who had barely visited the White House at all, really as could surely have been proved except that in contravention of long-standing policy the King himself instructed the Secret Service’s dog to eat the visitor logs.
In case we needed advice about energy policy, and a ride in a corporate jet, we had Ken Lay. In case we wanted aggressive redistricting to ward off the threat of democracy, plus free lessons in money laundering and criminal conspiracy, we had Tom DeLay. In case we needed unnumbered men of Arab descent rounded up and treated with unabashed thuggery, we had John Ashcroft.
Many others were working hard for the health of the republic. Karl Rove kept up production of the WMD Kool-Aid. Scooter Libby obstructed justice over the Valerie Plame affair. Alberto Gonzales backed himself into so many tight legal corners that it’s a book in itself. Dennis Hastert relentlessly cheer-led the very Patriot Act under which, years later, he would himself be indicted for illegally paying millions in hush money over stuff I’ll spare you even reading about.
We had Abu Ghraib. Luckily, to help us get over the nauseating waves of shame, we were taught a healing mantra: the gleeful abuse and torture of prisoners of war was only the work of “a few bad apples.” Not, definitely not, the direct responsibility of people with bigger piles of scrambled egg on their shoulder, who in a stricter dispensation might have been, say, stripped of their uniforms in public and given lifetime jobs cleaning the Guantánamo latrines.
Out in the battle zone, we had war crime after war crime after war crime. But they were committed by US and Coalition forces, who were having a rough time so it was natural to give them a bit of leeway in the raping-and-executing department. They were our rapists and executioners, after all, and you had to be some kind of bleeding heart if you wanted them held to account. It wasn’t like they were terrorists; they were in the business of terrifying the terrorists, or anyway people who looked like they might be terrorists, and that was different. In any case it was, again, only a few bad apples. (One might have said that the 9/11 terrorists were a few bad apples too, but that line of thought risked sowing confusion. Nobody wanted some Iraqi getting the idea that they would be justified in invading the US and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in revenge for what our apples did at Mahmudiyah or Haditha.)
We had a postwar plan for Iraq. Only we didn’t, because Donald Cicero — widely touted as the best Secretary of Preemptive Violence since Ghengis Khan — was in fact almost incomprehensibly incompetent. And our Mission was Accomplished. Only it wasn’t, because George II on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln was if anything less connected to reality than Ahab on the deck of the Pequod.
We had broken promises about carbon, the environment, and the planet. That wasn’t surprising; as Pericles with his lucrative connections was not good at concealing, the government wore some clothing loosely associated with the will of the people but was really a wholly-owned subsidiary of the extractive industries; the leaders of those industries were understandably worried about what would happen to the short term if people got their heads around the effect of decades of lying (that word again; so sorry, so tedious) on the long term.
We had corpses floating in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, but “Brownie” was “doing a great job.” And the actual activation of competent government help was not a good idea anyway because that sort of thing smacks of socialism.
American troops kept being blown to pieces because their vehicles were not adequately armored against IED. A much larger number of Iraqis kept being blown to pieces too, many of them women and children in no vehicles at all, because of our own not-at-all-I (in fact, unlike the Humvees, no expense spared) ED.
We lost billions of dollars in contractor fraud. We also had the Federal Reserve shipping great pallets of cash to Baghdad, and billions of that went AWOL too. But if you were a serious person you understood that war’s a big thing and billions are rounding errors.
Looming in the background was an idea so thrillingly idiotic that it might have been the set-up for a Mel Brooks movie. Preemptively invading a country whose resources you have economic designs on, but cannot invade without violating international law, is a pretty good premise (though one you should never discuss around ex-KGB agents, who might one day become President of Russia and have to be vilified by you for imitating your own example). But what if the King really lost it and declared war on… a word?
A war on terror itself. George II was a man of faith, as we were ceaselessly reminded, and you needed to borrow some faith from him because this was radical theology. It was the idea that, just as the world had once been saved by a Palestinian Jew in a loincloth, it could be saved all over again again by a moon-faced absurdity from Texas, who would single-handedly cast the Devil out of the broken world, ridding it once and for all of a problem that has plagued us since the Fall, namely that violence blooms lushly in human hearts when the desperation of the oppressed leaves them no other way to respond to the ignorant, pity-free smugness of the powerful.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Gore published a new edition of his book, warning that with Trumpty Dumpty on the throne things would only get worse. Perhaps they did, but it’s worth considering that they only seemed to do so because Donnie Boy is, unlike George II, so personally repulsive. Anyway, let’s look on the bright side. Four years of the Great Orange Cheeto continued to erode America’s claim to be a functioning democracy. But in 2020 his four years on the throne failed (barely, skin of teeth) to remove the core element of democracy, which is that one can have a change of heart and not discover it’s too late.
Unfortunately the Covfefe-16 virus has now mutated into a more dangerous form. Our weakened institutional immune systems may not survive another outbreak, and Covfefe-24 really could give a final negative answer to Lincoln’s hypothetical about long endurance. Yet many Americans still find the final defeat of liberty, at the hands of those who shriek loudest about liberty, almost impossible to imagine. After all, the institutions bequeathed to us by the Founders are without parallel in the history of all Creation in their wisdom, balance, wisdom, incorruptibility, and wisdom. It’s a comfort we’re reminded of every time we think about the unmatched dignity of the Senate, the House under its sober new leadership, the Supreme Court watching over us benignly from the Cayman Islands, the latest mass shooting, the lobbying industry, or the marvels of democracy that are Tuesday voting and gerrymandering and the Electoral College and Citizens United.
Ping ping ping. Another three emails from Joe and Kamala. Batting away these messages leaves me feeling almost as tired and helpless as I do after seeing the latest headline about Donnie Darko.
I mean, the underlying message is simple and I agree with every word: “If you understand the threat presented by a second attack of Donorrhea, you must support us, really ought to contribute to us, and will have to vote for us. Not because we’re exciting, energetic, and have an intelligent, imaginative, and persuasive vision for the future of the country and the world. (What have you been smoking?) No: because even though it’s obvious that we should have stepped aside in favor of people more likely to win, we’re now the only alternative to a future that doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Either J+K or Don Corleumpe: it is indeed a no-brainer. If the steward on your American flight comes back into cattle class offering either freezer-burned eggplant casserole or strychnine-laced cat vomit, your choice is clear. And yet — Biden-Harris? I’m not going to defend my reaction to them; I just want to record the bald fact that the whole business makes me want to weep. It even helps me sympathize with the millions who feel so disenfranchised, and so despairing of change, that they mistakenly identify a ray of hope in the raging and lying of the Rancid Cheese Melt.
Ping.
I look down at my phone and there’s another one. My thumb hovers and wavers, but finally my defenses crack. In a fizz of electrons I’m $25 poorer.
Pathetic, $25. I should get serious and really support these guys. You too, wherever you are: the wrong result in November will be even worse for open government, democracy, common decency and world peace than the tyranny we once endured under George II.
As Gore usefully reminds us, that’s a a high bar.
*
Al Gore, The Assault on Reason, ISBN 1-59420-122-6.
For further reading you can scarcely do better, or worse, than start with Amnesty International’s 2013 report on U.S. abuse of detainees, available at https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/012/2013/en/.