[A-List] Uncle Sam

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine (January 2007)


[A free people has] an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to
that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the Characters and
conduct of their rulers. - John Adams


Adams had in mind the ministers of the British crown in the reign of King George
III, and presumably he knew that the knowledge in question was interactive,
moving mostly in the direction of the man afraid of being discovered as a thief
but also toward the man afraid of finding out that he's been robbed. When the
newly elected Congress assembles on January 4 in Washington, the Republican
gentlemen in column A can be counted upon to say nothing apt to reveal a flaw of
character, a proof of misconduct, or the earmark for a prison sentence. Yes,
it's true, the invasion of Iraq proceeded under the flag of an expedient lie,
but the intention was noble, the objective honorable and just - all allegations
to the contrary, Mr Chairman, are false, vindictive, and shamelessly partisan.

The chance for a more illuminating form of public education (Adams's topic in
1765) rests with a Democratic majority recruited from column B into a coherent
body politic willing to acknowledge our current loss of a democratic republic
and unafraid to find in the Bush Administration's specious war on terror a
textbook lesson on the ways in which a predatory movement goes about the work 
of stealing from a free but inattentive people their lives, liberties, fortunes,
good name, and sacred honor. If the Congress can muster enough courage to
exercise the power entrusted to it by the Constitution, the record won't have
much trouble speaking for itself:

1. A foreign war conceived as a means of advancing the Bush Administration's
imposition on the American people of a not-so benevolent despotism, the army
sent to fight and die not for the defense of country but for a corporate dream
of commercial empire.

2. A government that tortures people classified as enemy combatants, denies
their right to hear all the evidence bearing on their confinement and arrest,
forbids their resort to petitions of habeas corpus.

3. The administration's systematic plundering of the Federal Treasury on behalf
of its accomplices in the arms and construction trades.

4. The National Security Agency directed to monitor, without first obtaining a
court order, any and all telephone and email traffic suspected of carrying the
germs of terrorism.

5. The president's use of 136 signing statements since he took office to exempt
himself from the rule of more than 1,000 federal laws.


The sum of the evidence warrants the impeachment of President George W Bush on
charges comparable to those brought by the Declaration of Independence against
the "long train of abuses and usurpations" attendant upon the monarchy of George
III. The odds don't favor the undertaking. Representative Nancy Pelosi (Democrat,
California), the incoming speaker of the House, was quick to declare so
intemperate an initiative "off the table", wholly lacking in the spirit of
bipartisan outreach needed to move the country forward on its patriotic search
for common ground. Consistent with the Democratic Party's fear of being thought
unduly liberal, still lost in the Day-Glo discontent of the 1960s with the
flower children and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, , Pelosi's press
statements during the week following the November elections stressed the
importance of avoiding condemnations and recriminations. The money was gone, 
and what's to be gained by crying over spilt blood. The time had come for the
Democratic Party to behave in the manner of geopolitical adults, to face up to
the hard choices that confront the country, to quit striking poses trembling
with virtuous indignation. "We have made history", Pelosi said, "now let us make
progress".

Not surprisingly, the motion was seconded by the White House - "The most
important priority right now is to win a war on terror and keep America safe 
and figure out ways that both parties can work together with the shared
responsibility of having victory in Iraq" - but it was Robert Reich,
once-upon-a-time secretary of labor in the Clinton Administration, who posted
the notice of a general pardon on the website of The American Prospect. "Some
Democrats", Reich said, "want to expose the malfeasance and nonfeasance of the
Bush Administration - find out who really knew what and when with regard to
weapons of mass destruction, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, payoffs to Abramoff, and all
the other rot. That's understandable, but it would be far better if Democrats
used their newfound power to lay out a new agenda for America. There's no point
digging up more dirt."


Democracy is born in dirt, nourished by the digging up and turning over of as
much of it as can be brought within reach of a television camera or a subpoena.
We can't "lay out a new agenda for America" unless we know which America we're
talking about, the one that embodies the freedoms of a sovereign people or the
one made to fit the requirements of a totalitarian state. We owe it to ourselves
to know the difference. Seldom in our history have we been offered a better
chance to learn a more useful civics lesson, and by holding up to the light the
malfeasance, nonfeasance, and "all the other rot" embedded in the character and
conduct of the Bush Administration, we might discover what we mean by America
the beautiful. Like it or not, and no matter how unpleasant or impolitic the
proceedings, the spirit of the law doesn't allow the luxury of fastidious
silence or discreet abstention.

Whether Congress is controlled by Democrats or Republicans, by Vice President
Dick Cheney or Senator Joe Lieberman, the doctrine of the separation of powers
invites it to remove from office a president committing high crimes and
misdemeanors. A duty implicit in the principle of a democratic republic, not a
judicious or injudicious option subject to the daily verdict of the opinion
polls. The Constitution doesn't serve at the pleasure of Representative Pelosi
any more than it answers to the whim of President Bush, and by taking "off the
table" the mess of an impeachment proceeding, the lady from California joins the
president in his distaste for such an unclean thing as a government of the
people, by the people, and for the people. Rightly understood, democracy is an
uproar, the argument meant to be blunt, vigilant, and fierce, not, as the
purveyors of our respectable opinion would have it, a matter of liveried civil
servants passing one another polite synonyms on silver trays.

Fortunately for any lawyers choosing to poke around in the administration's
several compost heaps (at the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, at the
White House and the Justice Department), the malfeasance won't be hard to smell
or find. Never have the attempts at regime change been so stupidly managed -
those in the United States even more harebrained than those in Iraq; the
testimony already entered on the record suggests that the invasion of Iraq was
designed to the specifications of a criminal fraud, that the threat presented by
the permanent emergency of the "war on terror" is a fiction providing an
extortionate government with an alibi for its seizing, in the name of the
national security, what John Adams would have recognized as the powers of
obnoxious despotism.

In an essay entitled "The State", and published posthumously in 1919, Randolph
Bourne found his premise in President Woodrow Wilson's adoption of the same
maneuver to send 50,000 American troops gloriously off to their destruction on
the battlefields of the First World War. The American people had no quarrel with
Germany (the country hadn't been attacked, no national interest was at stake);
how then did they find themselves fighting the war to end all wars? Bourne
answered the question by drawing a distinction between the American political
democracy (modest, tolerant, easygoing, content to mind its own business) and
the American industrial autocracy, the country's "significant classes",
self-important, vain, eager to extend their economic privileges and appear on
the world stage in the roles of British dukes, pleased to think of war as an
upper-class sport, the means of disguising their own venal and incompetent
politics in the dignity of handsome military uniforms. To play the game they
needed polo ponies, and in the effort to round up the lower social orders for
the work of dying in the French mud, the Wilson Administration's publicists
elevated the idea of the sanctity of the American state, an august and mystical
entity patched together with heroic "bedazzlements" - slogans, flags, band music,
and posters of Uncle Sam. A nom de guerre for the interests of the industrial
autocracy, Uncle Sam, then as now, represents nothing and nobody other than the
cost of his production; the American state for which he stands becomes the
property of the corporate management, conducting his affairs in secret,
dependent for his existence on the subsidies (financial and emotional) 
furnished by the pomp and circumstance of never-ending war.

Bourne died in the course of writing the manuscript, at age thirty-two, of the
Spanish flu that killed 675,000 people in the United States in 1918 and 1919 
(an actual as opposed to an imaginary catastrophe), and on rereading the essay
soon after the November election, I was reminded of the truism usually
attributed to Mark Twain that although history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.
The politicians ascending Capitol Hill on January 4 also might want to reread
the farewell radio and television address that President Dwight D Eisenhower
delivered to the American people in the winter of 1961. Like Bourne, Eisenhower
understood that the exploitation by the American state of the resources of the
American democracy (its wealth and intelligence, the energies and freedom of its
people) presented the country with a clear and present danger as deadly as the
one the American armies had encountered on the roads from Normandy to the Rhine.
A general who knew and once said that "every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those
who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed", Eisenhower
didn't sweeten his last and final word:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry
is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political,
even spiritual - is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the
federal movement. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we
must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and
livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or
democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and
knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial 
and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that
security and liberty may prosper together.

{For a further discussion of this speech, see "Republic or Empire", by Chalmers
Johnson, page 63.}

Both the security and the liberty of America have suffered heavy losses over 
the last fifty years, but none more apparent and therefore easier to weigh 
and count than those indicted on the American political democracy by the
military-industrial complex (aka the industrial autocracy, the commercial
oligarchy) wearing the mask of the Bush Administration. The question now before
the country is the one confronted by the man afraid of finding out that he's
been robbed. How much longer do we wish to pretend that nothing really happened,
or that nothing really valuable is lost; that the crime is the losing of the
Iraq war, not the making of it? That in place of the constitutional questions
asking why, to what end, and in whose interest, we can afford to substitute the
questions of logistics - how many troops to dispatch or withdraw over a period
of how many days or months; when to tell the Iraqi government that we're not
renewing its social contract; what deals to cut with Syria and Iran; where to
find another expedient lie to justify what we can present as an honorable exit
strategy. The answers to the secondary questions will teach us nothing worth the
knowing, but by impeaching President Bush the Congress not only can impart that
most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge without which a free people can't know
whether the adjective is true or false; it also might turn over enough dirt to
unearth the American democracy buried at the feet of Uncle Sam.

_____

Lewis H Lapham is the National Correspondent for Harper's Magazine.


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