Contempt

If you are an American citizen, here, today, is where you stand. Your nation may be on the verge of reelecting one of the most divisive, corrupt, and incompetent administrations in its modern history. Your fellow citizens are fragmented, split — irreconcilably, perhaps — between those who see a mythically grand new dawn approaching and those who are so cynical, so depressed, so alienated from mainstream political discourse and practice that only outrage can motivate them to participate — if that. Always viewed as a mixed blessing even by its closest allies, your country has ceased to lead through moral suasion; it retains influence on the world stage only as a bully might, by threats and bribes. It is in fact viewed by most of the rest of the world as precisely that: a bully, and like most bullies it tends to be the recipient of much ill will, spoken and un-; and this is most assuredly a new thing, an unprecedented thing. Worse still, our leaders seem to take pride in such isolation (when, that is, they're not pathetically denying its existence, as Bush did in debates 2 and 3).

Though it is easy, sitting here, at home, in front of the television, to pretend otherwise, your country is mired in a simmering guerilla war that demonstrates to anyone who'd been wondering that nothing whatever was learned in the thirty years since the Vietnam conflict stumbled to its ignominious halt. Men are dying. Men are being forever maimed. Worse yet, women and children, most utter innocents, are also being maimed, also dying. The daily reality for hundreds of thousands of others, soldiers and citizens alike, has been recast as a slog through high levels of Dante's hell. Power and clean water are a struggle. Fear is the air they breathe. Civil war, assassinations loom in the near future, turmoil without predictable cease. Rage percolates in every alley, and divisions grow sharper with each passing day. You can call it freedom if it salves your nerves — sitting here, at home, in front of the television — but surely what it feels like to them is the collapse of hope. And they had little enough to begin with. Is it any wonder so many are now deciding they have nothing left to lose?

Meanwhile, at home, off the television — absolutely off the television — a war of another kind is well underway, sprung from the same authors' pens. You — most of you — are its target, or your "way of life" is. Pause for a moment to consider this phrase. We use it often but its meaning passes by us, not so much forgotten as unremarked. We are a middle-class nation. When we talk about our way of life — this sacred thing — we're referring to a decidedly middle-class set of circumstances, ambitions, ideals. It's modest, really: what we expect above all else is fairness. Reasonable compensation for services rendered, including labor; reasonable assurance that advantages are evenly distributed among competitors, and disadvantages as well, or at least that the lone cause of uneven distribution should be chance. We expect that in return for our abidance by the social contract, our contributions to the common good, we will be reasonably, fairly served by the commonality in our turn: by police and military, whose salaries our taxes pay; by schools we fund; by programs and institutions into whose coffers we dump not insignificant portions of our earnings. Justice: hard work, fair play will be rewarded — this is what we expect.

Such values are now under assault. Consider the following: "The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy... estimates that the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about twenty-three per cent" (The New Yorker, November 1, 2004). There are a lot of inferences to draw from such a statistic, but one of the most compelling is the observation that earnings from work — whether it's intellectual, physical, skilled or not — are now taxed at more than double the rate of earnings from speculation, which is to say not work. Which is to say that if you actually do something to get your income, you are being made to carry a greater share of the national revenue burden than are those who do nothing to get their income — or nothing other than gamble, however loftily. Investment is, after all, a glorified form of speculation. I don't mean to dismiss this: it's an essential element of our economy, one of the means by which companies are able to sustain themselves and grow. But so is work. So is labor. Companies themselves — you know; you probably work for one, or have — companies themselves are fond of telling us that, in fact, their greatest asset is their human capital. Sound familiar? It's in the management textbook, this phrase. It's in the manual, page 7 or 8. And for a moment let's not be cynics: let's take the managers and executives at their word. The greatest asset of the American business community is its human capital. Why then are that capital's efforts doubly taxed?

Three factors have accounted for the small and sluggish upward slog of the American economy over the past two years. One is real estate — home sales, along with home starts and the construction they entail. Another is consumer spending, volatile to be sure but still the prime engine of economic activity in the American economy; it has slowed but it has not stopped. The last growth factor has been spending associated with the war in Iraq. This means not only soldiers' salaries and weapons systems but also civilian contractors, equipment, transportation, and all attendant materials and activities. Investment is not what has led to our recent (and rather less than impressive) growth: investment has been up and down, but slumped overall; stock and bond markets remain cautious at best. To the extent that corporate health has improved, it's done so not by growing so much as by pruning, cutting expenses — really, in many cases, by asking ever dwindling numbers of that all-important human capital to take on additional responsibility without the customary additional pay. When you hear that American workers increased their productivity, this is the translation: fewer people doing the same amount of work. As corporate healths go it's not bad. But it's not as good — for anyone — as growth. It means net job losses rather than net job gains. It also does less to inspire investment. Genuine improvements in corporate health boost investor confidence, which increases investment; in this case, that hasn't happened. Investors know the difference.

So when President Bush claims credit on behalf of his tax cuts for the economy's recovery, ask yourself which of these three factors — real estate sales, consumer spending, or spending associated with the war in Iraq — were assisted by those tax cuts. The answer, more or less, is none of them. Certainly rich folks — and by that I mean really rich folks, not the ordinary run-of-the-mill well-off — they're a part of the economy, too, their habits reflected in both real-estate and consumer spending. But they're a small part of those statistics. Even vast changes in their behavior won't precipitate fundamental shifts. By contrast, the middle class represents an enormous portion of our economy; small shifts in its behavior do have seismic repercussions. In a consumer economy like ours, the very rich constitute a factor not much more significant than the margin of error. The driving force is the middle class. This is why George W.'s father famously called trickle-down fiscal policy "voodoo economics," and why, when Reagan pursued it anyway, it did not work. If you want to affect the course of the American economy in a significant way, tend to the middle class.

But the middle class was ill-served by Bush's tax cuts. The richest 2% of Americans — those in possession of what most of us would consider to be staggering sums — they were served quite well. This makes no economic sense; one person can only eat so much, have so many clothes, stay in so many hotel rooms and fly on so many planes. The goal is to have extravagant numbers doing such things modestly rather than modest numbers doing them extravagantly. Given that, one wonders why they did it. Bush & company are fond of accusing their opposition of fomenting "class warfare." They actually use that phrasing; and they actually use it against mild-mannered (and wealthy) contemporary democrats like Al Gore and Howard Dean. But members of the much-discussed American middle class, along with those who merely have an interest in the future economic prosperity of this nation, may want to ask themselves which class is truly waging war.

And when you do it, you may want to consider more than your taxes. You may also want to consider your political voice. You may want to consider your place in what has for most of your life been admired as the world's leading democracy.

Let me state it plainly: we are now governed by men who have no respect for, no internal devotion to the practice of democracy. They'll tell you otherwise, of course. Of course. And maybe they're even sincere; maybe they mean well and are only misguided. I don't know. But I am skeptical, given that the evidence suggests they'll tell you anything, and by that I mean anything at all. The evidence suggests that as scarce as their respect for democracy may be, their respect for truth is scarcer still. What the evidence suggests, in fact, is that they are ruthless and habitual liars.

An example: long after the 9/11 Commission had announced there were no "operational ties" between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime (the wording itself, by the way, was a concession to White House arm-twisting; what they wanted to say was that there were no substantive links at all, meaning the two were not in league), Vice President Cheney continued to trumpet Saddam's involvement in the 9/11 attacks during campaign speeches. He did this with cameras and microphones present. It was duly reported in the press. And when he was called on it later, he denied it. When his denials were challenged, he growled that he'd never before met John Edwards. That turned out to be a lie as well. Some 40% of the American public remains convinced to this day that Saddam was in league with Osama; a similar number believes that Saddam's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US invasion. The first presumption was investigated and found false by the 9/11 Commission, the second investigated and found false by Charles Dulfer. Cheney, of course, announced — surreally, but with conviction, and with remarkable effect — that both findings supported rather than contradicted his claims.

Another example: Condoleezza Rice before the 9-11 commission. She declared, memorably, that the administration had had no prior warning of the attacks. "It was not a particular threat report," she said. When the now-famous Presidental Daily Briefing was produced, she maintained her denial. When she was compelled to read its title — a vivid and devastating contradiction, to wit: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within the US" — the expression on her face could have cracked stone. And in the very next minute, she said, again — having just read that title &mdash that the memo "did not warn of attacks inside the United States."

But this of course is what they do. They tell us black is white, they tell us night is day. They insist; and they do it with an implacably straight face. They told us that Kerry, a decorated war vet who got his medals the way anyone else got his medals — commentary by superiors and eyewitness testimony to back it up — was a coward and a traitor. It's worth mentioning that these accusations were sponsored by men who, excepting Rumsfeld, had gone to considerable and sometimes questionable lengths to avoid service themselves — worth mentioning not to cast aspersions on them for so doing, but to cast aspersions on them for having so little respect for the men who did fight that they'll resort to third-party smears of their reputations. (If Kerry's medals are not legit, whose are? How can we know? These same men, through other minions, had already impugned the record of John McCain; one can only wonder what they might've said about West Point graduate Wesley Clarke.)

The linguistic gyrations are, in the classic phrase, Orwellian. They are the soul of deception itself. We got a Clean Skies Act that eviscerated controls on pollution. We got a self-professed "good steward of the environment" who invited energy industry executives to craft their own regulations. This is qualitatively the same as inviting crack dealers to revise drug sentencing laws; yet Bush and Cheney are still polling close to 50%.

Perhaps the most damaging mendacity has surrounded the war. We invaded Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction; we invaded Iraq because they'd been in league with Al Qaeda; we invaded Iraq because it would be easy, would help bring peace and stability to the middle east. When all of these turned out to be false, of course, and when stagecraft couldn't put a stop to real killing, we decided we'd invaded Iraq because of our desperation to liberate the Iraqi people. Maybe it was easy to convince Americans of this, but it has not been easy to convince Iraqis.

There are material consequences when our government lies to us, of course, and those can be — surely are, in this day and age — very bad. But there are deeper significances, more serious causes for concern. Fundamentally, lies are gestures of disrespect. They suggest we don't deserve the truth. More disturbingly, they suggest that truth is something these men — our elected officials, our stewards, our trustees — don't believe they owe us. As citizens this shouldn't just bother us, it should anger us. And it should frighten us as well. The very essence of representative democracy is the accountability of governors to the governed. That accountability extends well beyond the vote; the contract we make with leadership obligates them not only to explicate their decisions but also the reasoning behind them, if not in excruciating detail then at least with clarity and candor. It also obligates them to estimate consequences — honestly. We make exceptions in certain rare cases having to do, most often, with national security; and we do so reluctantly, and with scrutiny, as we should. A government not so obligated to its citizenry — not accountable, that is; not transparent — drifts toward dictatorship of one kind or another. This is why we've long criticized such behavior in South American regimes, or regimes in Asia, Africa, even in parts of Europe. It's the kind of behavior we see now in the Bush administration.

Consider a leader who is not elected by the majority of his nation's citizens. Think of a leader who then refuses to speak to his nation's citizens; who hibernates, eshewing conventional (and admittedly imperfect) means of communication like the press conference, by which he can use one of the nation's chief sources of pride — its "free" press — to conduct business with another — its citizens. (Bush gave only 12 press conferences through April 2004, at which point campaign rhetoric overtook whatever meaningful exchange there might have been, which was never much.) Consider a president whose deputies, including the vice president, develop policy in unprecedented secret sessions with committees whose members they refuse to name, even to nonpartisan entities like the Congressional Budget Office, and even under legal threat. It doesn't really matter what reason Cheney gave; no reason is sufficient. This is what, as an American citizen, you may wish to consider.

Consider a president who forces attendees at his campaign rallies to sign loyalty oaths. Loyalty oaths, yes, that's right, as in Joseph McCarthy and Martin Dies: and what might be the purpose of this if not to sew paranoia and distrust, a kind of militant bigotry between those inside and those left outside the tent? Security is the excuse, but it's a hollow one. Surely no one believes that the sort of men who hammered planes into the World Trade Center towers might be deterred from mischief by a piece of paper.

But now consider a president who in addition to oaths uses secret service — his paramilitary bodyguard force — to extract potential dissenters from the proceedings. He won't allow them to participate. Put another way, this means that the president — your president, the president of these United States — will not countenance dissent. Consider that for an American moment. He won't allow it; he banishes it; and yet he asks you to make him the chief executive of a legendary democracy, a place that has since its inception been proud haven to all manner of political dissent, from the mountains to the mud.

Consider a justice department, the very symbol of our commitment to the rule of law, whose chief officer not only sanctions but encourages — you might even say celebrates — the trampling of legal institutions achieved quite literally through the spill of blood. The writ of habeas corpus, older than our nation itself: out the window. The right to counsel, to speedy trial, the right to a jury of one's peers: null and void at the president's whim. What is such behavior if not kinglike in nature, expressions of royal caprice, unassailable by any means at the disposal of ordinary men? Is this not what Jefferson, Jay, even Hamilton most feared: capriciousness in the exercise of justice, willful application of the law? Was this not what they abhorred, spoke and eventually took up arms against against? What is a man's safeguard against tyranny if not the law, and what is the law if it does not apply equally, to each of us, always? Don't ask Ashcroft. He doesn't give a damn.

This president resisted the formation of the 9/11 Commission. I have often wondered why there's been no more discussion of this fact. The greatest attack on our nation in its history and the president didn't feel it was worthwhile to conduct an inquiry into the events surrounding and leading up to it. Ladies and gettlemen, hedidn't want to talk about it. When he could no longer avoid talking about it, he appointed as the commission's chair another king — the king of backroom dealings, quite possibly a war criminal: Kissinger of course, a man skilled at making unpleasant realities disappear. When that effort at scuttling was itself scuttled, he resisted testifying. Finally, famously, he did agree to testify, but only on condition that he be permitted to appear jointly with Vice President Cheney. You know all this, of course; the question is why you are not up in arms about it. Look at it this way: we have a president who needed a nanny in order to testify before congress. Or this way: we have a president who intended deception but could not keep his story straight — was not trusted to pull it off, perhaps did not even trust himself. Think about it. Why did they insist on going in there together? So that their testimonies could not be used against one another. So that one would not inadvertently expose the other in a lie. So that we, the American people, would not inadvertently stumble onto the truth. Such is the esteem in which this administration holds democratic process.

It's trite to complain about the venality of politicians. It's trite to disdain them, view the entire lot as a necessary evil, tolerated but unloved. But circumstances call for more than triteness now. History will not forgive us if we do no more than retreat with our practiced weariness into the trite. So never mind their incompetence; never mind their arrogance toward the community of nations. Never mind their fanaticisms, their misguided evangelical fervor, their bigotry disguised as patriotic resolve. Never mind their intransigence, their refusal even to admit mistakes much less dissect them for fresh wisdom. Never mind their utter refusal to take what they themselves would surely have called "personal responsibility" for anything at all. What you should consider, for a moment, is whether you think it's wise to entrust our nation to men who have demonstrated chronic contempt for its most fundamental moral and philosophical tenets — for the concept of an open society, a pluralistic democracy in which governors are truly the servants of the governed, accountable to them and their interests in everything they do, and obliged to weigh the whole good and the good of the whole when they make policy or otherwise act.

So consider all that, and then do what you can to rebuke them for holding you — for holding us — in such contempt. As of today, you still have that option.