[A-List] US state: ruling class split

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Further evidence that Lou Proyect's identification of a split in the US
ruling class is on the money. Here's Simon Schama, celebrity historian,
pouncing on the activities of Cheney, among others, in a fashion
reminiscent of E.P. Thompson's (an altogether more respectable
historian) haranguing of Chapman Pincher.


The dead and the guilty

Simon Schama on the questions Americans should be asking on the
anniversary of September 11

Wednesday September 11, 2002
The Guardian

For one afternoon, at least, it was grievously simple: Britons and
Americans gathered, indivisibly, to mourn a shared massacre.

No terrorist attack in history had ever claimed more British lives: 67.
So it seemed right that a dark Manchester drizzle was falling on Fifth
Avenue on September 20 as mourners - and we were all mourners - climbed
the steps of St Thomas's church, a piece of pure Barsetshire dropped
into midtown Manhattan.

The usual suspects filed in: the Clintons; Kofi Annan, Mayor Giuliani,
Governor Pataki. But before Tony and Cherie Blair arrived, a side door
beside the choir opened and the British bereaved walked in to take their
pews at the front of the church.

At once the brittle stylishness of the city collapsed into pathos. They
were Britain: shapeless tweed jackets with leather elbow patches;
reading glasses by Boots; Jermyn Street shirts for the upper crust. They
looked lost in calamity; lost in New York. Bravery masked some faces;
jaws set; staring straight ahead, afraid to blink.

Others bore the unmistakeable marks of helpless, uncomprehending sorrow:
red-rimmed eyes; cheeks pale with distraction, or bearing layers of
repeatedly and hopelessly applied make-up. During the service, heads
would suddenly bow as if bent with unsupportable feeling. At no point in
particular, shoulders gently shook. An arm would reach round to do what
it could.

Body language was everything that day and that week. Words had never
seemed so redundant; so incapable of carrying the weight of trauma.
Explicitly acknowledging this, knowing that simply showing up counted
for more than any eloquence, the prime minister kept it brief.

A gaping, blackened ground zero had opened inside every New Yorker (and
everyone who had, through the catastrophe, become a New Yorker) and at
the smoking core of the misery were, instead of words, images: spools of
them, the ones you all know, looping mercilessly. The implausible glide
into the steel; the blooming flower of flame; the slow, imploding
crumple; the rolling tsunami of dust and shredded paperwork; the
terrible drop of bodies, falling with heartbreaking grace like hunted
birds.

Icons did the talking. The word means image, but also copy, and the
iconology of 9/11, unlike the real thing which was utterly singular,
drew on past images to guide instinctive response. Stored memories of
the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima (itself an organised photo op)
prompted the shot of firemen raising the flag on the torn steel ribs of
the World Trade Centre; a phoenix in the storm of dun ash.

The flags shouted, howled, roared. Tied as fluttering pennants to the
radio antenna of Jeeps, they conquered the suburbs, as if drive-by
patriotism could of itself make things better.

But other icons wept. In the days and weeks after 9/11 the city was
papered with home-made or office-copied posters, bearing photos of
missing loved ones, a format hitherto reserved for lost pets. Some of
them bore heartrending pocket attributes as if their indisputable
likeability ("she smiles a lot"; "he has three-day stubble") would jog
memories, help find them, bring them back safe and sound.

Quietness spoke volumes. Long lines of blood donors snaked round
hospitals and clinics. Cartons of bottled water for rescue workers rose
in charitable ziggurats outside police stations and schools.

And when words did finally return they came back first as inspirational
chorale: Irving Berlin's God Bless America replacing Take Me Out to the
Ballpark as the anthem of the seventh-inning break when baseball fans
get up and stre...tch.

In St Thomas's too, on the 20th, nothing was sung more fiercely than
both national anthems, the Clintons singing God Save the Queen; game
Britons rising to the vocal and verbal challenge of The Star Spangled
Banner, a song composed during the 1812 war in which we burned
Washington and the White House.

Speech returned, haltingly, in two guises: information from the inferno
and pieties from the government. Rudolph Giuliani, often flanked by his
commissioner of police and the fire department chief (who, respectively
lost 80 and 343 of their men), mastered the first genre precisely
because it was, for the mayor, a matter of common decency and practical
necessity.

When George Bush began to vocalise again, it was with the pieties served
up by his speechwriters, confident that his Manichean declaration of war
on evil also answered to a deep need in the American public for moral
clarity, spiritual consolation and recovered nerve.

He was not wrong about this. The homilies, not to mention the Waynesque
vow to hunt the bad guys down - a promise yet to be fulfilled in the
case of the al-Qaida leadership - may have made Islington cringe, but
then again Islington was not under attack.

The European press began to squirm uneasily at talk of evil, as if a
wine and cheese party had suddenly turned into a Pentecostal revival
meeting, and looked nervously round for the exit sign. Some of us, more
accustomed to the religiosity of American life, had, and have, no
problem whatever with using the e-word.

If the calculated mass murder of 3,000 innocent civilians, from 80
countries, many of them Muslims, just ordinary working people going
about their business on a sunny September morning, was not an act of
absolute evil, then I have no idea what is. The more serious problem
with presidential rhetoric was that the Manichean struggle between good
and evil, freedom and terror, was not just the beginning but apparently
also the end of any sustained attempt to articulate just what, in this
particular life-and-death struggle, was truly at stake.

Some weeks later Bill Clinton, both at Harvard and in the Richard
Dimbleby lecture for the BBC, made exactly that effort. For obvious
reasons the ex-president, now a New Yorker (in my very own
neighbourhood) had been sparing with public commentary. But, struggling
between prudence and thinly veiled exasperation, he emerged from
silence, risking the wrath of patriotic blowhards, to venture that a
refusal to understand the roots of terrorism would be to guarantee its
perpetuation.

Lest he be misunderstood, Clinton was also commendably clear on what the
battle lines of the already bloody new century would be: the conflict
between those who not only claimed a monopoly of wisdom, but the right
to impose it on everyone else, against those who claimed neither. Put
another way, the fight is between power based on revelation (and thus
not open to argument), and power based on persuasion, and thus
conditional on argument; militant theocracy against the tolerant
Enlightenment.

Since the United States, notwithstanding the Pilgrims and the Great
Awakening, was very much the child of the Enlightenment, one might have
expected this case for tolerant, secular pluralism to be made in the
most adamant and unapologetic fashion by the country's leadership.

But the shroud of mass reverence which enveloped everyone and everything
after 9/11, and which once again is blanketing the anniversary, has
succeeded in making secular debate about liberty into an act of
indecency, disrespectful of the dead and disloyal to the flag.

The notion that the parliament of tongues is, in fact, our best
vindication wins few hearts and minds right now. The centrepiece of
Public Television's anniversary offerings was a "Frontline" documentary
on how 9/11 had affected the religiosity of the nation.

The unsurprising answer is quite a lot. The steady drip of goodness and
godliness (multi-faith, naturally) is a reminder of how impossible it
seems, two and a half centuries later in America, for the magnitude of a
calamity -in Voltaire's case, the Lisbon earthquake - to prompt awkward
questions about either the competence or the benevolence of the
Almighty.

More than one of the widows of 9/11, though, has been heard to say that
she no longer talks to God; she talks to her dead husband. For the most
part, though, to say out loud, (as a few courageous souls have done)
that religious revelation - Judaic and Christian as well as Muslim, not
least the notion of a paradise for the pure - is the problem, is to risk
immediate and irrevocable patriotic anathema.

Deist scepticism is, I'm sure, too cold a comfort to wish on the
distraught, a mere year after the slaughter. As therapy for the
traumatised, Bruce Springsteen's new hymnal, complete with gospel choir
backing and ringing with resurrectional themes of The Rising, will beat
Candide every time. But the need to break clear from the suffocation of
reverent togetherness is not just a matter of philosophical
self-respect. The immediate future of the American Republic depends on
it.

That the Bush administration would always prefer prayers to politics,
avoiding at all costs debate, both within its own ranks and in the
public arena, has long been apparent. Silence and secrecy, punctuated
with disingenuousness have consistently been its preferred modus
operandi. (The problem with the Clintonites was something like the
opposite: incontinent gabbiness).

To this day, Dick Cheney, the most padlocked of all the senior members
of the administration, refuses, even under legal pressure, to disclose
to Congress the substance of what was discussed in closed meetings with
energy industry executives, leading to the formulation of a policy which
corresponded precisely to the needs of business, rather than
environmental lobbyists.

Effrontery

So we should not wonder at the aversion to debate, for the United States
Inc is currently being run by an oligarchy, conducting its affairs with
a plutocratic effrontery which in comparison makes the age of the robber
barons in the late 19th century seem a model of capitalist rectitude.
The dominant managerial style of the oligarchy is golf club chumminess;
its messages exchanged along with hot stock tips by the mutual
scratching and slapping of backs.

The corporations from which the government draws much of its personnel,
including its chief executive, and which, on taking office boasted of
its business savoir-faire, have not, in truth, produced very much,
though some of them like Dick Cheney's Halliburton, now under
investigation by the securities and exchange commission for creative
accounting practices, have been past masters at converting political
connections into corporate advantage and both into personal wealth.

The president himself owed his position at Harken Energy entirely to his
name, and once there used it to get a stadium built from public funds
for his Texas Rangers baseball team.

The secretary of the army, Thomas White - currently, one supposes,
planning a war not a million miles away from a rich source of oil - was
actually an executive of the spectacularly corrupt and incompetent Enron
Corporation, whose implosion began the unravelling of scoundrel
capitalism.

The administration's position on the scandals and follies of corporate
America - essentially the world it comes from - is to flutter their fans
in shock at the wickedness of Certain Individuals and to allow the
selective distribution of scarlet letters while trumpeting ever more
confidently the purity of the flock and the virtue of the church.
Nothing to do with us, heavens no. And it ploughs merrily ahead with
policies expressly designed to come to the aid of distressed plutocracy.

Never mind that, thanks to the likes of the secretary of the army's and
the vice-president's old management practices, the stock exchange is
mired in a debacle of broken confidence. Never mind that defenceless
ex-employees of Enron, WorldCom and the like have seen their jobs and
their stock-based pension plans evaporate, the president still thinks
that privatisation of social security is the best way to ensure its
future.

In a spin of breathtaking Orwellianism, the elimination of estate duties
(paid only on fortunes of a quarter of a million dollars or more) is
presented as the removal of a "death tax", transforming a surrender of
the public interest into a scene painted by Norman Rockwell with Mom or
Pop able to breathe their last now that their legacy will safely pass to
Junior unthreatened by the horny hand of bureaucratic brigands.

In the unedifying spectacle of the Sucker Economy, there is, as a
mid-term election draws close, fuel for serious public contention; an
argument, in fact, over the relative claims of community or corporation
in post 9/11 America.

There are people to be held accountable, not least the oiligarch energy
traders who, by manipulating demand, turn out to have caused the 2001
"energy crisis" in California which gave Republicans ammunition to
pillory the Democratic governor of the state, Gray Davis. Though the
hard right ideologues who control Republican policy much more
tenaciously than the smileyface bonhomie of the president suggests want
to identify the American Way, both at home and abroad, with the
aggressive pursuit of self-interest, American history actually says
otherwise.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville who, in the 1830s, first noticed the
peculiar coexistence of a feverish, almost animal scramble for wealth,
alongside a deep civic instinct; a feeling, in fact, for community.

The Republican rationalisation is to claim this as the exclusive
territory of churches, but that is to ignore some of the most powerful
urges in modern American life: the secular voluntarism and philanthropy
which sustain museums, public broadcasting, libraries, conservation,
even hospitals, and which flows not just from the rich but untold
millions of middle class Americans.

It is the same public spirit which drove the abolitionists of the 19th
century and the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. It moved
Lady Bird Johnson to become an environmentalist and Jimmy Carter to
build houses for the poor and it is a social patriotism which is
star-spangled Americanism at its most authentic.

And it has, already, made itself felt at Ground Zero. Plans to rebuild
the site were initially subject to the New York port authority's
requirement that the entirety of the 13m square feet of office and
retail space lost to 9/11 be restored. Commercial rents and revenues
were at stake.

This brief duly produced six architectural designs of such staggering
banality, with mean little green spaces and walks shoe-horned into
spaces between bog-standard corporate towers. The public reaction was
almost universal execration.

A series of town meetings made it overwhelmingly clear that the needs of
civic rebirth and a memorial that would serve for lament, memory and
meditation, were a priority over business as usual. Starting over, the
humane imagination, not a quality overvalued in oligarch America -
though one which produced a deeply moving memorial at the site of the
Oklahoma City bombing - has been called on to do its best.

This happened because voices were raised. The danger of the anniversary
is that, out of respect for the dead and through a revisitation of
shock, they will become, once again, reverently muffled. The
administration is counting on just such a pious hush to bestow on its
adventurism the odour of sanctity.

Apparently, the dead are owed another war. But they are not. What they
are owed is a good, stand-up, bruising row over the fate of America;
just who determines it and for what end?

The first and greatest weapon a democracy has for its own defence is the
assumption of common equity; of shared sacrifice. That was what got us
through the Blitz. It is, however, otherwise in oligarchic America.
Those who are most eager to put young American lives on the line happen
to be precisely those who have been greediest for the spoils.

The company run by the Vietnam draft-dodging ("I had other priorities")
Cheney, Halliburton, has told the employees of one of its subsidiary
companies (resold by Cheney) that the pension plans it was supposed to
honour, are now worth a fraction of what the workers had been counting
on. On leaving the company in 2000 to run for vice-president, however,
Cheney himself was deemed to have "retired" rather than resigned, thus
walking away with a multimillion pension deal. So long, suckers.

Never have the ordinary people of America, the decent, working stiffs
whose bodies lay in the hecatomb of Ground Zero, needed and deserved a
great tribune more urgently. The greatest honour we could do them is to
take back the voice of democracy from the plutocrats.

So it is altogether too bad that this Wednesday, Mayor Bloomberg and
Governor Pataki, both liberal Republicans, both decent enough men,
shrinking from the challenge to articulate such a debate, have decided
instead to read from the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg
Address and Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech. Those words -
often sublime - derived their power from the urgency of the moment. To
reiterate them merely to produce a moment of dependable veneration, is
to short-change both history and the present.

Though, in Britain, America is often ignorantly caricatured as a land of
impoverished rhetoric its public speech has often been the glory of its
democracy.

And now it needs to sound off. Starting in New York, starting now, we
need to do what the people of this astoundingly irrepressible city do
best: stand up and make a hell of a noise.

· Simon Schama is professor of history and art history at Columbia
University, New York