Politics in the 'New Normal' America: New York Review of Books

[oldhat]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17489



Politics in the 'New Normal' America
By Joan Didion

During the spring and summer of 2004 some Americans, most but not all of them nominal Democrats, spoke of the November 2 presidential election as the most important, or "crucial," of their lifetimes. They told not only acquaintances but reporters and political opinion researchers that they had never been more "concerned," more "uneasy," more "discouraged," even more "frightened" about the future of the United States. They expressed apprehension that the fragile threads that bound the republic had reached a breaking point; that the nation's very constitution had been diverted for political advantage; that the mechanisms its citizens had created over two centuries to protect themselves from one another and from others had been in the first instance systematically dismantled and in the second sacrificed to an enthusiasm for bellicose fantasy. They downloaded news reports that seemed to make these points. They e-mailed newsletters and Web logs and speeches and Doonesbury strips to multiple recipients.

These Americans had passed the point of denying themselves broad strokes. They kept one another posted on loosened regulations benefiting previously obscure areas of the economy, for example snowmobile manufacture. They knew how many ringneck pheasants Vice President Cheney and his party had brought down during a morning's stocked shoot at the Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier Township, Pennsylvania: 417, of the 500 released that morning. They collected the vitae of Bush family associates named on the Web site of New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq." They made Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 the most commercially successful documentary ever distributed in the United States, earning in its domestic theatrical release $117.5 million. (By comparison, Moore's 2002 Academy Award–winning Bowling for Columbine had earned less than $22 million.) They were said to be "energized," "worked up," motivated in a way they had not been even by Bush v. Gore, which had occurred at a time, nine months before the mandate offered by September 11, when it had still been possible to imagine the clouded outcome of the 2000 election as its saving feature, an assured deterrent to any who would exercise undue reach.

The July week in Boston of the Democratic National Convention, then, was for these citizens a critical moment, a chance to press their concerns upon the electorate, which had seemed during the month preceding the convention to be at least incrementally moving in their direction. By late June a Washington Post–ABC News poll had shown the President's approval rating on the management of "the war against terrorism," previously considered his assured ace in the hole, down thirteen points since April. In the same poll, the percentage of those who believed the war with Iraq "worth fighting" had dropped to 47 percent. By the week before the convention, the Los Angeles Times was reporting that its own polling showed that 54 percent of those questioned "say the nation is moving in the wrong direction," and that "nearly three-fifths say the country should not 'continue in the direction he set out' and 'needs to move in a new direction.'"

The Democratic nominee for president was nonetheless not a candidate with whom every Democrat who came to Boston could be entirely comfortable. Many of those impatient with what they saw as a self-defeating timidity in the way the party was presenting itself took refuge across the river in Cambridge, at "alternative" events improvised as the week went on by Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America's Future. "Kerry, Kerry, quite contrary," a group of young women calling themselves "Radical Cheerleaders" chanted outside Faneuil Hall. "So far right it's kinda scary." What troubled most was not exactly reducible to "right" or "left." There was the question of Senator Kerry's vote authorizing the President to use force in Iraq, and the unknowable ratio of conviction to convenience that prompted it. There was his apparent inability to say that, "knowing what we know now," he would not cast that vote again.

In fact he said, in an astonishing moment of political miscalculation, since if there was any consensus forming in the country it was to the point of Iraq having been a bad idea, that he would. There was his fairly blank-check endorsement, again raising the convenience question, of whatever Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon chose to do with the occupied territories. There was a predilection for taking cover in largely hypothetical distinctions (he had voted not "for" the war but for giving the President the authority to go to war) that struck many as uncomfortably close to what the Bush campaign had been saying about him all through the spring. Even to the basic question of his "electability," or performance as a campaigner, which seemed to many in Boston the only reason he was being nominated, there had been a certain uneasiness from the outset, notably about the temperamental defensiveness that left him uniquely vulnerable to the kind of schoolyard bullying that was his opponent's default tactic.

Much more...

[Voltaire99]

1. Thanks for posting Didion; she's one of our best (n/t)

[DeepModem Mom]

2. Her last paragraph is absolutely chilling --

Such "improved benefits," like "personal nest eggs" and "healthy forests," had been since 2000 what was meant when the Bush administration talked about restoring "choices" to Americans. What made these misrepresentations seem more grave in 2004 was the larger misrepresentation: the fact that the administration had taken us, ineptly, with the aid and encouragement of those who had "never thought," or who had "misunderstood," or who "didn't realize," into a war, or a "noble expedition," or a "grand historical experiment," which was draining the lives and futures of our children and disrupting fragile arrangements throughout the world even as it provided the unending "crisis" required to perpetuate the administration and enact its agenda. "This is a great opportunity," the President was reported by Bob Woodward to have said in an NSC meeting on the evening of September 11, 2001. That large numbers of Americans continued to support him could be construed as evidence of their generosity, but it was also evidence of how shallowly rooted our commitment to self-government had turned out to be.

[Laughing Mirror]

3. She perfectly describes Gore Vidal's United States of Amnesia

Did we not remember the Nixon White House and the point to which its lust for collecting intelligence had taken it? The helicopter on the lawn, the weeping daughter, the felony indictments? Did we not remember what "congressional oversight" had recently meant? Did we have no memory that the Reagan administration had been operating under congressional oversight even as it gave us Iran-contra? Had we lost even the names of the players? Did "Manucher Ghorbanifar" no longer resonate? Had we lost all memory of Ronald Reagan except in the role assigned him by his creators and certified by the coverage in the week of his death, that of "sunny optimist"? Did we not remember that it was his administration, through its use of Islamic fundamentalists to wage our war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, that had underwritten the dream of unending jihad? Was no trace left of what we had learned about actions and their consequences?

[Snellius]

4. A Brilliant Essay! These passages get at the heart of it:

There were two possibilities here: either the President was receiving his words, emotional cues, and information from his "unvarnished instincts," or he was "strategizing" them with Vice President Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Karen Hughes, and Andrew H. Card Jr. We no longer expected such contradictions to be explored, or even much mentioned. We accepted the fact that not only events but the language used to describe them had been reinvented, inflated, or otherwise devalued, stripped of meaning that did not serve a political purpose. The 2001 tax cut, we learned from former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, was described by its political beneficiaries in the White House as "the investment package." The words "invasion" and "occupation," previously neutral terms in the description of military actions, had each been replaced by the more educational "liberation," to a point at which the administration's most attentive and least wary student, Condoleezza Rice, could speak without irony to the Financial Times about "the devotion of the US in the liberation of Germany from Hitler."

September 11, we were told repeatedly, had created a "new normal," an altered condition in which we were supposed to be able to see, as The Christian Science Monitor explained a month after the events, "what is—and what is no longer—important." "Government," for example, was "important again," and "all that chatter about lockboxes and such now seems like so much partisan noise." The "new normal" required that we adopt a "new paradigm," which in turn required, according to an internal White House memo signed by President Bush, "new thinking in the law of war," in other words a reconsideration of the Geneva Convention's prohibition against torture. "Torture" itself had become "extreme interrogation," which under the "new paradigm" could be justified when the information obtained by interrogation failed to tally with the information required by policy. "We're learning that Tariq Aziz still doesn't know how to tell the truth," the President told reporters in May 2003 about the interrogation sessions that were yielding, for reasons even then inconveniently clear, so little information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "He didn't know how to tell the truth when he was in office. He doesn't know how to tell the truth when he's been—as a captive."

As this suggests, the word "truth" itself had by then been redefined, the empirical method abandoned: "the truth" was now whatever we needed it to be, the confirmation of those propositions or policies in which we "believed in our hearts," or had "faith." "Belief" and "faith" had in turn become words used to drop a scrim, white out the possibility of decoding—let alone debating—what was being said. It was now possible to "believe" in one proposition or another on the basis of no evidence that it was so. The President had famously pioneered this tactic, from which derived his "resolve": he "believed" in the weapons of mass destruction, for example, as if the existence of weapons was a doctrinal point on the order of transubstantiation, and in the same spirit he also believed, he told reporters in July 2003, that "the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence and the speeches I have given are backed by good intelligence." The attraction of such assertions of conviction was the high road they offered for bypassing conventional reality testing, which could be dismissed as lack of resolve. "I do not believe we should change our course because I believe in it," Tony Blair was saying by September 2003. "I carry on doing the job because I believe in what I'm doing."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17489