Some years ago, in what was not a confession but a roughneck’s boast, GW Bush declared that he didn’t read the papers. But the defining moment of his presidency, to this columnist, was those seven minutes on 9-11 during which, having been told that America was under attack, the President remained sitting there in that Florida classroom pretending to listen to children reading.
‘Pretending to listen’ doesn’t mean Mr Bush was thinking. No – what Mr Bush was doing that fateful morning was trying to think.
You could see the gears in that long-disused brain grinding and seizing, the electrical impulses balking at the synapses. In default, they left on the President’s face an expression of the saddest vacuity – for vacuity in homo sapiens is always sad. In that mortal crisis, in Mr Bush’s head, many things were trying to happen – and couldn’t. Watch the film of those seven minutes if you don’t believe me.
Now, across the length and breadth of the world – everywhere, in fact, except in the mysteriously misshapen hearts of that one-quarter of America that still loves him – Mr Bush’s dunciness has long been the standard fare of jokes. Asked in 2004, for example, why she intended to vote for Kerry and against Bush in the coming election, the American novelist Amy Tan replied, “Because I have a brain.”
And, sure, dunciness is funny.
But such humour is ultimately reactionary. Once we’ve indulged in ‘the laughter that slays,’ we’re apt to think the butt of our joke is somehow dead. There’s a metaphysical truth in that, of course: he or she is now dead in our hearts. But in the real world, s/he isn’t. Millions of Germans and other Europeans who in the 1920s and early ’30s laughed at Hitler’s ‘upstart antics’ never lived to have the last laugh.
So if you laughed, eg, at Mr Bush and his “internets,” stop and take a sober look at what that gaffe meant. It meant that – just as the younger GWB, in his freewheeling, hard-drinking, rich-kid days, never once bothered to leave the US to take a peek at the wide world beyond it – President Bush, the most powerful man in the world, has probably never been on the ’Net.
And what this means in turn is that The Leader of the Free World is radically alienated from the culture of the free world (although, hell, even terrorists use the ’Net) – a world at whose heart that extraordinary invention has been pouring forth an infinite fountain of news, information, knowledge, the wisdom of the ages – as well as, okay, sex – for more than a decade, while at the same time collapsing the barriers of space to put people from all over the planet in the same ‘room’ with one another.
The American constitution debars foreign-born citizens from running for president, the suspicion being that such characters might retain a covert loyalty to the land of their birth. But what virtual country, then, retains the loyalty of GW Bush – a man who in 2004 contrived to remain innocent of the defining instrument of culture in our time?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the
doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Philip Larkin, the late British poet who penned those lines, was talking about a different question, but his stanza applies. In Mr Bush’s country the doctors are always running over the fields – or at least over the sands, and through the streets, of forever-being-bombed Iraq.
And as for the priests, consider this:
In the 2004 presidential election campaign, the New York Times reported that a group of American Roman Catholic bishops were “blanketing” their flock with the news that if they voted for Democrat John Kerry they would be committing a sin; and that they would have to confess and repent their vote before they would be permitted to receive holy communion again.
Again – let the reader pause and take that in.
The likeliest response, I imagine, will be incredulity. But incredulity can be as reactionary as comedy. So pause for a moment and really take that in.
And understand the danger in which the Republic – a nation founded on the seminal principle of the separation of Church and State – stood for a while.
It did not occur to those bishops that it might be a sin to vote for the man who unleashed unwarranted death and destruction upon Iraq; an overwhelming military attack, with a bogus rationale, resulting in the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children. To the contrary, those Men of the Cloth avidly engaged in organizational work intended to deliver the Catholic vote to the man who launched that gratuitous death and destruction. (Meanwhile, Catholics who voted for Mr Kerry could go straight from the polling booth to the confessional booth and repent their ‘sin.’)
It’s hard to imagine the shame and suffering of real Catholics faced with such debasement on the part of their titular spiritual guides.
Dan Cheon again: “I find myself particularly repelled by Bush’s professed ‘Christianity,’ even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents.”
But that is GW Bush’s real country, a country of churches and guns: a place awash with Larkin’s doctors and priests, and quite devoid of newspapers, the ’Net – or, presumably, any scientist not actively engaged in designing either bigger and better oil-drilling platforms or the next generation of nuclear bombs.
For there are in fact today two Americas, and for too long one of them has, like a black hole, been feeding itself by drawing all the forces of darkness unto itself: the unreconstructed, and no longer covert, ‘southern’ racism; the mindless American bellicosity (surf the US TV channels some idle evening and count − you’ll find that at least half of them are airing programmes or films featuring guns); the isolationism, hubris and ignorance of the world; the intolerant religiosity; and the age-old American paranoia that produced ‘Salem’ and, in our time, McCarthyism.
These were and are the Bush legions: the National Rifle Association; the evangelical and fundamental Christian Churches (among which must be numbered, these days, American Roman Catholicism); the impoverished and semi-literate descendants of the Daughters of the American Revolution, from whose consciousness – as they drive around swigging beer with shotguns clipped to the rear windshields of their pick-ups, in a thousand two-mule southern towns – the hope of spotting some innocent deer or beautiful buck to kill is never very far; and, of course, big business – very big business – those ‘leaders of American industry and commerce’ who know that the President’s first order of business was always to licence their looting of the US environment, Treasury and citizenry, and who have no other interests.
These are Bush’s People, and they are in fact the mirror image of militant Islam: a fervid competing presence in the same jostling darkness.
And so Samuel Huntington was wrong: the real ‘clash of civilizations’ in our time is not between cultures in discrete parts of the world but, first and foremost, between civilizations within the United States itself.
Because, after eight years of Bush, we’ve at last been reminded that there’s another America – one that is cosmopolitan, informed, skeptical and secular, and prepared to put its faith in curiosity (science, the ‘internets’), freedom of association and expression, tolerance of the Other, civic responsibility, and the rule of law.
That America exists still, and is the hope of the world.
(We apologize for the fact that there is no Wayne Brown column in the ‘In the Obama era’ series this week. Below is one of his early columns which he has updated)
