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 Ice
Cube 
 "For
me, satire is a powerful tool and it's not sufficiently used; it's
not just for late-night jokes but really to promote fundamental change.
And it's inevitable that when you attempt to change the status quo,
you're going to make some people upset. That's the price of change."
 "Bush's
lame response to North Korea has made it quite clear that all he
wants is to invade Iraq again. North Korea may be more dangerous
in fact, but there's no oil there, and it simply doesn't figure
in the grand eschatological design of Bush's theocratic circle.
Pyongyang isn't even in the Bible!" "It's
a done deal. By the end of 2003, Saddam Hussein will either be out
of power or out of the realm of the living. So who's next in line
for the coveted position of dictator -- uh, leader -- of Iraq, home
to the largest supply of crude reserves on Earth? Here's the list
of nominees."
 "Word
comes that brother Cat Stevens refuses to lend his support to
our virtuous jihad. May this turncoat's Peace Train be laden with
explosives and rammed into the Mountain of Mohammed, peace be
upon him. "
 "America
embodies mimetic relations of rivalry. The ideology of free enterprise
makes of them an absolute solution. Effective, but explosive.
Competitive relations are excellent if you come out of it the
winner. But if the winners are always the same then, one day,
the losers overturn the game table."
 "'When
it comes to learning from its mistakes, corporate America has
fallen off the rehab wagon more times than Robert Downey, Jr.
A quick glance at last week's papers reveals that it's monkey
business as usual on Wall Street."
 "'People
are more aware of the world that they want to live in, and
now they have to realize that they can actually create that
world and fight for the things that are worth fighting for
and not feel apathetic. We are all going to die. There is
no point in holding anything back. ."
"Dubya may not be a rocket scientist, but his handlers
learned the lesson from his father: the crisis must stay or
you won't. We're at war with Eurasia. We've always been at
war with Eurasia."
 "What
do a toilet bowl and a woman's vagina have in common? They
both need to be cleaned with Lysol."
 "For
white people, it will be different. They will be advised to
refer to the U.S. Federal Standard 595B Color Chart (or the
Ralph Lauren color chip guide at Home Depot) to determine
the range of colors permissible in a potential spouse."
 "I
think that there's been a lot of difficulty in defining what
is American, what is considered American. There's a lot of
difficulty with acceptance within our community of foreignness
at this time."
 "That's
an issue I'm dealing with here: what is going to happen with
this next generation of kids? What is their culture but media
culture? What hasn't been sanitized and homogenized?"
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by Ross Levine In 1991, the Soviet Union breathed its last, and the entire world saw the potential for the advent of peace. The Cold War was over; the U.S. faced no enemies of equal power; capitalism, as an economic and social system that favors industrial Darwinism over state-sponsored tutelage, was vindicated as the best we can hope for at this particular time. It was with great modesty that George Bush senior claimed "victory" for the U.S. and proclaimed a "new world order" where "the United Nations, freed from Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations." There were indications, however, that this was not to be. In 1992, thanks to Serbia, Europe reclaimed its old title as the genocide continent, though Rwanda stole the belt for Africa two years later. In 1993 a bomb went off in the parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six and injuring scores. Timothy McVeigh's 1995 show of disenchantment with the U.S. government was a devastating blow to the nation's mid-section, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania left hundreds dead and thousands injured, and Chechnya remained a festering sore on the international scene. This by no means exhausts the man-made ills that befell the world in the 1990s, but nothing came close, of course, at least not for the U.S., and not in its global ramifications, to the cataclysm of September 11, 2001. On that day, President George W. Bush found himself compelled to declare war on terrorism, another no-end-in-sight campaign that seems destined to become the not so "Cold War" of the first half of the 21st century. By simply substituting "terrorists" for "communists," you begin to wonder if it's only a matter of time before the Dixie Chicks are called to testify before a Congressional committee. The image of human beings leaping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center, the heart-wrenching phone calls from the doomed airliners, the gaping wound in the five-sided citadel which defends our materially superior way of life from the barbarians -- all have become the rallying cry of a new planetary war that purportedly seeks the eradication of terrorism from the face of the Earth. But what is terrorism? Depending on which prism you're peering through, terrorism is that which threatens life -- physical, economic, spiritual and/or psychological. That is why there is no absolute definition of a terrorist, just as there was never an absolute definition of a communist. Indeed, Senator Joe McCarthy, in the early 1950s, worked overtime to find a definition that was all-inclusive, but (fortunately for us) ended up destroying his own liver rather than the 5th Amendment. Do you belong to a communist organization? Do you subscribe to a communist publication? Do you fraternize with known communists? Do you ever give support to the communist cause?
Those were some of the key questions in McCarthy's gauntlet, and today they remain the same. Of course, being a terrorist is more heinous than being a communist -- or is it? When you declare war -- when you posit an enemy that must be destroyed before it destroys you -- you create entire populations of people who may be wiped out in the name of protecting yourself from harm; does it matter whether these enemies are called communists, terrorists or savage injuns? Of course, McCarthy was soon discredited, and the House Unamerican Activities Committee, which set the stage for the Senator's witch hunt by blacklisting 10 Hollywood writers in the late '40s, eventually faded into a blemish on U.S. history. Nevertheless, communists remained the specters of terror from the '50s to the '80s, as exemplified by Vietnam, the Domino Theory, Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire," and the real cost of the Cold War -- an immense cache of nuclear arms that we must now somehow store and/or get rid of. And now it's terrorists. Instead of Vietnam, we're mired in the Middle East. The Domino Theory is out, the doctrine of Preemptive War is in (isn't that like knocking the dominoes down from the other end?). It's no longer an "Evil Empire" but an "Axis of Evil." Instead of nuclear weapons, which kill without prejudice, we have smart bombs that (or so they'd have us believe) discriminate against the innocent (i.e., children with their arms blown off are the exception, not the rule). Clearly, there was life for the Department of Defense after the death of the Soviet Union, though for a moment there, it looked like it wouldn't know what to do with itself. That all changed, of course, on the morning of a late summer's day. 9/11 -- not since 1492 have numbers so changed the landscape of the world. Suddenly, national security is no longer a matter of looking at a radar screen to see if unidentified blips are speeding through the stratosphere toward our major cities. We never really had much of a defense against that anyway, other than the counter-threat of destroying the entire planet in exchange; we depended on the good sense of our enemy for this not to happen. But now the enemy is more microbe than missile, something that attacks not from overseas but from within. The Department of Homeland Security is busy protecting us from this new virus by rooting out individuals -- read "foreigners" -- who might possibly be carriers of the terrorist plague. Even if some harmless organisms are destroyed or ejected in the process, the body itself is at least protected. And isn't that what must be accomplished at any cost? Yes, and no. There is a danger, more acute during "wartime," that even a "free" society, in its quest to protect itself, may contract what amounts to an autoimmune disease, causing its own defense system to do life-threatening harm to itself. At such times, our own leaders can become terrorists, leaving our society equally as damaged as if we'd been invaded by foreign pathogens. Whether the enemies come from without or within, the harm can be just as real. Senator Joe McCarthy -- a terrorist insider -- was a great example of how this autoimmune disease can manifest itself. In creating a particular vision of and for America, he was able to demonize all whom he accused of falling outside of it. He hounded some of the greatest artists and intellectuals in the country, making them out to be "un-American" for some of the very qualities that made them great in the first place. The victims of such national fevers are not always the intelligentsia; the Sacco and Vanzetti trial of the 1920s, for instance, in which two Italian immigrants were tried and executed more for their politics than their crimes, can be considered another example of this immuno-response run amuck, as was the execution of Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew who owned a pencil factory. When the power of the government is brought to bear against those who might be suspected of having ideas or beliefs contrary to either the majority of citizens, or the minority in power -- when ideas themselves become the enemy, then the United States -- any state -- becomes a nation at war with itself. One might argue, I suppose, that real freedom of speech doesn't really exist in America at all. To speak against war is OK only when there is no war. In order to wage war, in order to induce a society to sanction killing on its own behalf, a propaganda campaign must be initiated that serves to lay aside certain intrinsic moral values in the name of a greater good. Once these values are laid aside, however, the danger is that actions committed for the greater good may go beyond the scope of simply defeating the enemy. That is, the immune response becomes the autoimmune disease. In World War II, for example, it was absolutely necessary that the Germans and Japanese be defeated, but some of that determination to wage absolute war, to destroy the enemy with all means at our disposal, including not one, but two, atomic bombs, ended up spilling over into the unjustifiable "internment" (government doublespeak for "imprisonment") of Japanese Americans. In the 1950s, legitimate fears of hostile Sino-Soviet intentions created a dark, Manichean vision of the globe, a situation that demagogues like McCarthy and Richard Nixon (in his Senate campaign against "Pink Lady" Helen Gahagan Dougas, for example) were more than able to exploit. To watch the McCarthy hearings today from a post-Cold War perspective is to wonder what country they happened in -- or is it? Was McCarthy an American aberration or the American norm? Is war an American aberration or the American norm? If everything we've been spoonfed to believe about America is true, how could it not have been perfectly acceptable to be a communist if one so desired? How could they have insinuated that an ideology itself was a crime? That going to a lecture by the "wrong" person can be tantamount to treason? What the McCarthys and Nixons do so well is to take an "ism" -- a system of thought -- and criminalize it as unpatriotic, anti-American, and ultimately, counter to God. But how can thought be forbidden in a democracy? That's a question that begs another question: Is democracy (Greek for "people power") as practiced in America the supremacy of the majority or of the individual? The interpretation seems to vary widely, depending on the times and the interpreter.
Of course, governmental and corporate powers have to line up behind a demagogue in order for their demagoguery to catch fire. Red-baiters, Bible-thumpers, white supremacists -- none of them spring from a vacuum. When the powers that be perceive a majority (whether it truly exists or not) backing some policy or another, whether or not that policy is just, its proponents are emboldened to rise to the fore and articulate what their backers -- the real powers -- don't dare say themselves. In other words, McCarthy and his ilk are only the portion of the strangling vine that is visible above ground -- unless the vine has extensive, well-nourished roots, it cannot flourish and grow. In the turbulent days of the 1960s, many of our nation's leaders attempted to vilify those against the Vietnam War, while down South, those in charge remained dead set against any alterations to the white hegemony. From the billy clubs in Chicago to the fire hoses in Alabama, from Kent State to the confrontations of during the Watts and Newark riots, America seemed somewhat akin to a fascist state. It isn't that worse injustices take place here than anywhere else, but nowhere else, it seems, are democracy and its attendant freedoms, as described in the Bill of Rights, held up in such lofty and idealized terms. When a McCarthy rises in America, it's more frightening than when it happens in other countries, and for this reason: in most other countries, autocracy, terror, and persecution by the state are a given, whereas in America, there is such a strong, pervasive belief that "it can't happen here" that, when it does, the vast majority of Americans refuse to acknowledge it. Which is why it needs to be said that Joe McCarthy may indeed be returning from the dead. He's not necessarily John Ashcroft, who seems to have little regard for civil liberties unless they pertain to gun owners; this Joe McCarthy is more of a mood currently enveloping the nation that suggests that to criticize our government (and this has occurred in every war, all of which, including Vietnam, were considerably more defined than this one) is to become a sort of American Taliban. The opposing idea is that to love America, it is not necessary to follow her every flirtation with injustice and imperialism, but to be ever vigilant so that a great nation doesn't end up destroying that which even her enemies admire her for. This, however, is not now the mainstream point of view. In fact, every day, it seems, somebody's career is being compromised because of something said or inferred; that to criticize the President or the terror war or the Iraq action is tantamount to shoving an innocent from the 106th floor of Tower One. Bush has become another Teflon president; as long as he is perceived as the only thing standing between us and the terrorists (something his handlers are happy to reinforce), he can be reinvented in our collective mind as a sort of invincible demigod -- not the man who dodged military service by enlisting in the "Champagne Brigade," not the "C" student who graduated with a drinking problem, not the inarticulate silver spooner who disingenuously represents his policies for the privileged as measures for the public good -- no, Bush, who happened to be in the White House when Mohammed Atta came to call, has now been baptized in blood as the only man who can steer us through the Scylla and Charybdis we and the world are presently enmeshed in. Just as Rudolph Giuliani was but a washed-up philanderer with a prostate tumor until the Trade Center was destroyed, so Bush has been reborn as America's savior. Say anything critical of the President to an ardent Bushie and you will hear them retort that if Gore were residing on Pennsylvania Avenue right now, Americans would be dying left and right as bridges, landmarks and nuclear plants fell one by one to terrorist assaults. Indeed, Democrats, because they are perceived as more supportive of civil liberties and less trusting of the military, now seem as unwelcome in Washington as the terrorists themselves. The Democratic party has become frighteningly impotent as Republican tax cuts and environmental assaults roll their way through the houses of Congress, and as individuals are detained in prisons without due process of law. Although it was Eisenhower, a Republican and a general, who warned over 40 years ago that "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex," we now have a President who is so embedded with the military that he even dresses up like a military pilot and flies military planes. Still, it seems nothing the Democrats do will convince the majority of Americans that the Pentagon should not be in the business of making foreign policy.
It boils down to this -- our wounded country is not in the mood to be self-critical. Americans, perhaps more fearful than they've been since Pearl Harbor, want to follow, not question. They want to look the other way rather than face the possibility that the remedy may be turning worse than the affliction. With their "God Bless America" bumper stickers, they are announcing that the country's experiment with diversity and greater freedom for all is over; that it's time to get back to the America that was, the tough-love society that stepped on whatever individual rights it had to in the service of the "greater good" -- affluence and power for some. The original Joe McCarthy came and went in a flash -- it's OK to attack the intelligentsia, but once you go after the armed forces, you're doomed. Subsequent McCarthys have known better, to attack only those who could not muster the power to protect themselves, or have made the same mistake as their predecessor -- choosing victims with more clout than they suspected. Which brings us to the unfortunate truth that Joe McCarthy is always with us, that there are always those among us who would seek to turn dissent into disloyalty, criticism into blasphemy and thought into a crime. When we don't actively work against these demagogues, when we turn a blind eye to their campaigns of intolerance and imputation, we do so at our own peril. 07 June 03 Ross M. Levine is an author, Marcel Proust marathoner and manatee-hugger who feels safer on the edge; i.e., in New York or California. He agrees with the King of Brobdingnag that we're "the most pernicious race of odious vermin to crawl the surface of the Earth." He thinks Americans have too much freedom -- fries, that is.
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