Iraq and Roll

So far no one is saying it out loud, in the newspapers I read or the TV I've seen. But I imagine it's on the minds of many people, especially Americans, in this suspended moment before the war promoted by the President of the United States takes center stage: namely, we didn't really elect this guy.

Especially after the immense media concentration on the September 11 anniversary-much of it sincere, some clearly exploitive, but also some which seemed to be forced-we seem to have forgotten this other event that now looms so large in what is to come: the election of 2000.

We are being led, forced, on a course that defies historical standards and national ethics in modern times-- essentially a very radical course-by an administration that took power after losing the popular vote across the nation, and assumed office only by virtue of an extraordinary intervention by the Supreme Court, in a decision tainted by the evident conflict of interests of several Justices.

Its claim on being a democratically elected government is fragile at best. Yet this government is behaving with an arrogance that seems to lend credence to the proposition that it has contempt not only for the rest of the world but for the will of the American people. At the very least one would expect a certain political modesty from a government that came into power not quite by election, and not quite by a coup. (Though their arrogance tells me that in their minds, it was a coup.) But perhaps September 11 changed the equation of power-or perhaps it's just that they can count on the peculiar instant amnesia of this age.

Though no one now is connecting those dots, I'm sure future historians (if any) will do so in a matter of a few paragraphs. The first paragraph on George W. Bush will refer to his dubious claim to the presidency---that it came down to how to count or not count votes in a single state, where as result of error and designed suppression of votes, he carried the state and hence the election by a handful of actual votes---but only as validated by a split Supreme Court decision, defying both logic and law.

The second paragraph of this history will note that the G.W. Bush administration was dominated by the political cronies of the president's father, who spent their time out of government using their contacts to enrich themselves and large corporations, and blatantly represented those same interests when in government. It will note that the Bush administration was floundering until terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Then Bush made an off-the-cuff remark while standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center and saw immediately the makings of a political identity in the cheers of rescue workers that obviously surprised him. He could be the symbol of fighting back, even though he wasn't going to be doing any of the fighting, just as he could cry "Let's roll!" into Iraq, and then go take a nap. He could parlay that figurehead/talking head leadership into time-tested political manipulation based on patriotism and the fear of seeming not patriotic.

The third paragraph, I imagine, will be about the invasion of Iraq, and its tragic consequences. This history will perhaps note the puzzling lack of emotion and debate opposing this war until it was too late to stop it. It will note however that most of what then happened was foreseen at least in outline (columnists like Molly Ivins, Robert Scheer, and locally in San Francisco, Jon Carroll and Rob Morse, have been remarkably clear.)

These historians will fill in the details of the ensuing chaos and violent death in the Gulf region and the Middle East, the chaos and strife spreading to various political and economic alliances. This history will note the damage to the world economy, weakening it at a time when it needed to be strong to cope with the changes slowly but surely taking hold as consequences of the climate crisis. It will note the costs on life in the United States of more economic hardship and a greater siege mentality against real and imagined threats-with one of the real threats being an increasingly intrusive, powerful and arrogant police state government.

We owe all of this partly to the blindness of Americans who fell for the simplistic idea that it did not matter if Bush or Gore won the 2000 election. That Bush and Gore are part of the same corrupt political system is true, and has consequences. But that doesn't deny their differences, and one or the other was going to be president.

We reap the whirlwind of this failure to understand the differences between these two men, and the people they bring into power. Millions of Americans voted on small differences. If you can believe the media conventional wisdom, many voted for Bush because he seemed like a nice guy, not as stiff as Gore. This extraordinarily stupid test for presidential fitness was granted legitimacy by media's failure to even question it-but then how could many TV "news" personalities challenge the wisdom of judging on nice guy appearances when they owe their jobs to the same standards.

The Bush presidency is leading America and the world to a disastrous twenty-first century in three interlocking ways: internationally, by arrogance and war; domestically, by bankrupting the federal government on tax breaks for the wealthy; and globally, by ignoring global heating and other environmental threats.

The agenda behind all of this is pretty clear: favor entrenched corporate interests, keep the oppressed people of the world in control through force, and keep the American people scared: scared for their safety and their country, so they will support Bush and the Republican establishment from now until doomsday, and scared for their own livelihoods so they won't rock the boat, so they will keep fighting each other for crumbs, with their nose to the grindstone and nothing in their heads but dreams of sudden wealth and celebrity.

We can see the consequences of those apparently small differences between Bush and Gore and between these two parties pretty clearly now. Though most Democrats are too scared of appearing unpatriotic to do more than stutter, at least Al Gore has spoken forthrightly about the folly and arrogance of the Bush administration's march towards war, and its foreign policy pretensions that would make the Roman Empire jealous, especially as it was falling.

We can hear echoes of Gore's campaign call to fight for middle class Americans who are being lacerated now, and who will have their futures mortgaged by Bush war and tax policies. That call was ridiculed by the wealthy and wannabe-wealthy minions of the media, and disbelieved by the Naderites. It's not hard to justify the Naderite skepticism or even cynicism, but it's also not hard to see where the important lines of difference are. Some are large, like the tax cut that Gore never would have proposed or allowed to become law.

Other differences may seem smaller, but loom as large. Clearly, Gore would talk differently on global heating and other environmental matters, though even if he had become president, environmentalists would have had to keep the pressure on to get real change. But at least they wouldn't have to spend such an immense amount and proportion of energy and resources to even get the climate crisis on the table.

And here's an apparently small but very real difference. It isn't just that Gore is a lot smarter than Bush (though incredibly this was held against him much of the time) but that he respects the process and conclusion of science and thought. Intellectual integrity is something Gore actually understands. So we would not be seeing the folly now being perpetrated in Washington of replacing scientists with political and corporate hacks at EPA and on the federal scientific advisory boards to the CDC, the FDA and other agencies charged with health and safety. It's a virtual certainty that at some point people will get sick and die because of these decisions. With the challenges inevitably ahead-the health impact of global heating alone is going to be monstrous---this small act may turn out to be among the most consequential, just as important as that handful of votes in Florida.

At this moment it may seem pointless to revisit the 2000 election, but even beyond the need to understand history or be condemned to idiotically repeat it, there is in this moment, at least for me, the feeling that something truly terrible was set in motion, not just in September 2001 but in November 2000.

The fall of western civilization, the beginning of the end of humanity's hegemony on the planet---if you've been paying attention for the past few years, these things are not only being discussed as real possibilities, in some quarters they are virtual clichés. That western civilization is about to collapse is something like an assumption. The premise that humanity and perhaps all life on earth is in real peril in this century is also a kind of starting point for discussions among respectable scientists and knowledgeable observers.

A feature of collapse in its early stages, and perhaps even when it is well underway, is likely to be that not many people notice. They continue to judge problems in the same narrow frameworks; they fail to "connect the dots" in today's favorite cliché.

There was an article in The New Yorker a few years back that caught my eye, called "The Tipping Point." The author expanded it into a book I found disappointing, because I believe he missed the obvious ramifications of the theory on important issues. The Tipping Point theory sounds like systems theory I heard discussed some years ago. It says that there is a particular point in change-the tipping point-when the change can no longer be reversed until it plays itself out. The behavior of epidemics is an example.

The tipping point of the twenty-first century may very well turn out to be the moment American forces invade Iraq. If so, and it tips over this extraordinarily complex and fragile house of cards until it all falls down, there may not be future historians to record any of this. But if there are, my guess is that of all the dates they rank in significance from the first years of this century, September 11---for all its horror and importance--will turn out to be no greater than a close third.