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As it so happened, Coretta Scott King died the day George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union address. An unsettling juxtaposition. That noted, the public has gotten it wrong. Our President's policies, most notably the position he has taken on the wiretapping of American citizens, are not a threat to democracy. They are a threat to the dream of democracy. Remember, we are talking about the United States of America. A country that came up with a most impressive Constitution but then undermined it for about 100 years by sanctioning slavery. After a lot of bloodletting, slavery ended but racism and inequality thrived. At about the same time, the Industrial Revolution thundered in to create armies of working poor. Today, both issues -- race and class -- remain works in progress. In addition, the framers of the Constitution and their contemporaries took a somewhat jaundiced view of popular democracy and so they worked it a bit. States had to individually hold their own so each got two senators and a certain number of votes in the Electoral College. In collusion with the senate seniority system, this has made it possible for small states to impose their will on big states. And made it possible, as we all know, for a President to be elected without a majority of votes. The list certainly goes on. Medical experiments on blacks. Incarceration of innocent Japanese Americans. An Indian massacre or two…hundred. Ships with doomed refugees turned away. People exposed unwittingly to high doses of atomic radiation. Natural resources destroyed by greed. Governing officials taking bribes and succumbing to corruption. Wars fought for completely self-interested reasons. Dubious regimes propped up in the name of freedom, others toppled in the name of national security. People blacklisted. A veritable Pandora's box of evils. A box no more loaded than in any other country, yes, we understand that. Unfortunately, our excesses often have a disproportionately large effect on the rest of the world. That's because we are disproportionately powerful. To our credit, we've made something of ourselves, unlike many other countries, not so blessed, maybe not so ingenious, where the negatives run much deeper and the positives are buried in historical inequities. But to our discredit, in terms the President might understand, we've also behaved a bit like Radical Islam. Call it Extreme Capitalism perhaps, but the net effects are similar. Innocent people die, the already suffering suffer more, and our diplomats clink glasses and insist everything is going to be fine. Why is the public not more incensed about what the President is doing? Surely they don't believe that every call he's listening to is coming from an Al Qaeda operative. If our intelligence were that good, the war on terror would have been shut down years ago. No, for most people, it doesn't directly affect them, so they can afford to be sanguine. Unless they're calling their grandmother in Pakistan, they don't really believe Uncle Sam is listening to their phone calls. Unless they spent a summer at a Taliban training camp, they don't really worry that Alberto Gonzales is looking at their library records. Unless they're hatching a scheme to detonate their footwear on a plane, they're pretty much blasé about the chances of finding themselves hanging upside down in Guantanamo. And unless they have a kid over in Iraq, perhaps, or a folded American flag in his or her place, well -- why should they care? Miners trapped underground, that's a nail-biter, but American troops on foreign soil engaged in a conflict with no clear goal except, as the Prez says, "...we are in this fight to win...," well that's very old hat. If we're old enough to remember Viet Nam we recall enough protesting to stop a thousands wars, and yet it couldn't stop one. If we're not old enough, then we're either in school or climbing that corporate ladder or yes, working at a car wash vaguely worried about not having health insurance. Who really has time for politics other than a glance at the morning paper? There are some people who do make the time, and they've certainly been sounding the alarm. But nobody listens to these Cassandras much. Not many are listening , true, but there is a heaviness in the air. I would say only diehard Bush supporters believe that this country is really the democracy he and most of his party affiliates describe. The President could declare martial law, and set up concentration camps for defeatists and pessimists, and the President's loyal base would rally behind him. But the rest of us -- not just staunch Democrats and "liberals" but average Joes -- filing to work every day, worrying about bills, looking forward to a few days in Florida or Hawaii, going to our kid's school performance, making the most out of our American-ness even if we feel the limitations of not being ________ (you fill in the blank: white, rich, straight, documented, degreed, etc.) -- we know that true, pure democracy is an illusion, albeit one we like to hold onto. Even when confronted with news every day about democracy gone wrong -- children falling through the cracks in the social welfare system, people scrambling to get medications, workers dying because of lax or nonexistent government oversight, endangered species slipping closer to the edge because local governments are bought and paid for, soldiers returning from Iraq without their arms and legs -- even then, we do like to think, as Panglossian as it may be, that this is the best of all possible nations. Of course, we may never have really lived anywhere else, but it's not just that; we have a great national anthem, an impressive arsenal, incredible technology, a good amount of rich people, some lovely national parks, lots of new cars and humongous televisions, and supermarkets that are the envy of the universe -- so with all these positives, why can't we just believe in liberty and justice for all? We do believe in it. We do, we do. When the President says, "Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror," yes, democracies do all those good things, don't they? We have our gripes, but nobody's going to win an election here on a platform of military dictatorship or the creation of a Protestant state. But when the President refuses to back down and admit that he was wrong to dodge the law when it wasn't even necessary to do so, when he tells us that "based on authority given to me by the Constitution and by statute, I have authorized a terrorist surveillance program to aggressively pursue the international communications of suspected al Qaeda operatives and affiliates to and from America," what he's really saying is that this may be a democracy, but not that much of a democracy. Or, for those of us who lean a little more than most towards skepticism, this was never quite a full-fledged democracy to begin with, and now I'm making it less so. When we hear our President so cocksure about his own authority; when we hear our leader tell us that only he and his team -- the King and all the King's men -- can protect and save us before we get "hit again," it takes something away from us all. Not a big something, and surely if and when there are more deadly airplanes headed our way, it would be nice if the government knew about and could stop them. But I wager I'm not the only one who believes that the government will never perfect our protection to the degree that no terrorist can touch us. And if the government itself slowly, incrementally, seductively, arrogantly, and in the name of our own good, becomes a terrorist in its own right, then suddenly -- or not so suddenly -- we have two enemies to fear, not one. The nineteen 9/11 hijackers were a pretty fearsome bunch, but should we be any less concerned about the present administration in Washington, an administration that has more than amply demonstrated its "ends justifies the means" mentality? Rest in peace, Coretta, and put in a good word for us. We'll need it. February 08, 2006 |
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