A Tale of Two Americas
By Jackson Thoreau

July 13, 2002 (APJP) -- On July 9, I drove by the house where Dick Cheney lived in the wealthy Dallas suburb of Highland Park when he and other Republicans stole the White House some 20 months before. I have driven by this $2.7 million mansion numerous times since Cheney sold it in late November 2000 to Dianne Cash, a major Republican donor who owns another Highland Park mansion.

I'm not exactly sure what makes me drive by this mansion so much. Perhaps I'm just curious to see whether or not anyone is actually inhabiting this house, or if it was just sold quickly so Cheney could act like he wasn't living there in November 2000 in violation of the 12th Amendment to our Constitution. I've never seen any evidence of inhabitation, no cars parked in the driveway or trash put out for collection.

Perhaps I'm just outraged, searching for anything to hang this guy and administration out to dry. Or perhaps I see in this empty mansion that was quickly sold by an official with an emptier conscience, this sham of a deal in the midst of a wider coup d'état, some symbolism for what is wrong with our country.

On July 9, I observed something different from my other visits to this well-heeled neighborhood, where the cops have the reputation of stopping anyone who doesn't look wealthy [I was once ticketed here for not wearing a seat belt -- as a passenger -- on my way to a fund-raiser for groups that fight hunger in downtown Dallas]. There were several cops in front of the Cash-Cheney mansion, as if they were guarding the home from a potential terrorist attack. A partial roadblock was in view.

An officer waved me past. I looked at Cheney's old home and saw no cars in the circle driveway, no evidence of inhabitation, once again. Why the cops -- was it more symbolism of the approaching police state? It was a weird, almost surreal scene. I nodded to the officer and drove on.

A few miles down the road in the Dallas city limits, I passed by much smaller homes. Many were in need of repair and paint. There were no cops in sight. Some people stood on street corners, asking for money. I opened my window and waved a bearded man to me. "I'm down on my luck, buddy, can you help?" he asked.

I handed him a bill and nodded. "I know what you mean, man. It's like the '80s have returned."

He nodded. "Times are tough. They always seem to be tough for me."

The next day, times got tougher in Cheney's world, too.

Judicial Watch, the same conservative watchdog organization that hounded Clinton for eight years, filed a lawsuit against Cheney and the Dallas-based company, Halliburton, that he headed from 1995 until 2000. The action accuses Halliburton of overstating revenues by $445 million from 1999 through 2001, in an effort to deceive investors and try to keep its stock price high. The previous day, Public Citizen, a more liberal watchdog group, called for an independent counsel to investigate Halliburton's Enron-like phony accounting shenanigans. Others called for action against Bush for his insider trading and other transactions, such as two low-interest loans he received from Harken Energy Corp. when he was a director of the same firm.

And the mainstream media jumped on the actions, for a change -- unlike the situation two months ago when it virtually ignored the SEC investigation of Halliburton [for example, the Dallas Morning News, where I once worked as a reporter, didn't even name Cheney in its May 29 story on the SEC probe and ran it in the business section, not on the front page].

The Judicial Watch lawsuit, which the media covered largely because it was a conservative outfit going after conservatives and because members of groups like Democrats.com and Citizens for Legitimate Government hounded them [Public Citizen was mostly ignored], was featured on the Web sites of MSNBC, CNN, USA Today, and others all day Wednesday. Some, like the Dallas Morning News, which has largely overlooked Cheney's misdeeds at Halliburton despite him working right under its nose, downplayed or ignored the lawsuit on Wednesday, once again.

While Bush hypocritically called for an end to the kind of insider loans and deals he once benefited from, Cheney cowardly hid in his White House bunker all day, letting his spokespeople issue the expected "no comments" or pathetic, unspecific denials.

Yep, that's a great example of corporate and political leaders taking responsibility, huh, kids?

In my mind, there's little question Bush and Cheney are corporate and political criminals. The case against Bush has been documented more extensively than the one against Cheney -- for example, read the late J.H. Hatfield's bio on Bush, Fortunate Son -- but the Unauthorized Biography of Cheney is another matter. One of the few hard looks I've seen on him was, coincidentally, just released July 11 by the non-partisan MoveOn Bulletin [http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/bulletin1.html].

Perhaps some are intimidated, but I'm on the record as going so far as to call Cheney evil ["The Evil Dick Cheney," June 21, 2002, http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed062102-1.shtml]. That column covered everything from Halliburton's illegal deals with Iraq, Libya, and other countries to Cheney's CIA connections, and included the telltale quote by Cheney on the video for disgraced accounting firm Arthur Andersen that has become so popular all of a sudden

After that writing appeared on America Held Hostile, Bush Watch, Online Journal, Democratic Underground, Buzzflash, FringeFolk, American Politics Journal, Smirking Chimp, Liberal Slant, and other sites, I received an outpouring of response. Joe Jackson even contacted me to be on his radio show in Utah.

Many said I didn't go far enough, as they linked Cheney to bizarre mind-control experiments and sex and drug parties [no, I can't confirm those]. Others pointed to more easily-verified sins, such as Cheney -- as Gerald Ford's chief of staff -- firing former CIA director William Colby in 1975 to install Bush Sr. at that position after Colby began to talk too much in public about CIA abuses. There's also Cheney not voting in 14 of 16 elections in the Dallas area -- including the March 2000 primary where he could have voted for his own ticket -- before November 2000 [hey, he's just representing the majority of Americans who don't vote, right, Rush Limbaugh?].

On the other side of the coin, some called me a communist and issued the usual lame-brained insults in defending the indefensible [for the record, I have never been a communist, but I've been a columnist, which to some right-wingers means about the same thing].

It was refreshing to see how upset some people were about Cheney's -- and thus Bush's -- misdeeds, and they weren't taking it, unlike the way many took the Republicans pilfering of the White House in 2000. They weren't resigned to it. Some even saw some hope that things could turn. And it was even more interesting to see that 95 percent of those responding to a CNN poll Wednesday on whether Cheney should answer questions about Halliburton's accounting fraud said yes.

Two days before July 9, I attended two religious services on Sunday -- don't ask me why, I'm not that religious. One was our regular Texas Methodist Sunday service, where instead of scripture readings and a sermon, I listened to patriotic tunes and messages that "freedom is not free." They even flashed a large photo of Bush, commander-in-thief, on the wall. My wife, who is pregnant with our second child, said she felt nauseous several times. I knew exactly how she felt, though the sick feeling in my stomach wasn't from a growing baby.

Later that evening, we attended a community celebration at another church, where our young son enjoyed a pony ride, fireworks show, and petting zoo. We had to sit through a fundamentalist revival, more patriotic songs reminding us of the greatness of America, and more messages that "freedom is not free." A preacher even prayed for Bush to gain intelligence. If that occurred, I really would start believing in miracles again. The sick feeling in my innards remained.

I'm sure this is how some felt as the wave of Hitler's Nazism grew in Germany in the 1930s. I'm sure some felt the same sickness, the hopelessness, as McCarthyism raged across our country in the 1950s, destroying lives and careers. Many more felt it the day they killed John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, John Lennon. Though I didn't vote for Carter in 1980 and thus helped Reagan gain power, I later felt it when Reagan brought us to the brink of a nuclear war with the former Soviet Union.

And now, instead of the Russians being our bogeyman to fuel the right-wing's power grabs and militaristic build-up, it's the Arabs.

And Arab-Americans. The Los Angeles Times reported on July 6 that courts and prosecutors have been deluged with hate crimes against Arab-Americans and people from Pakistan and other countries who are now American citizens [http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-backlash6jul06.story]. That concerns me not only because hate crimes are wrong, but because my wife is Arab-American, thus my son and child-on-the-way are part Arab-American. And I don't like the kind of country that Republican leaders like Bush-Cheney are developing.

For one thing, many Republicans act like we're the first country to undergo a tragedy. They conveniently forget that African-Americans and some other minorities have long had to endure terrorism in this country and not just of flying in airplanes or working in tall buildings or key government buildings. Many were taken from their homes in the middle of the night and lynched. Many were killed as they prayed in church. That's terrorism.

Europe has had to deal with the real threat of bombings at civilian sites for decades at the hands of the Irish Republican Army and other such groups. I walked through Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1985 under clouds of threats -- a bomb went off in a building close to where we stayed - as part of a courageous peace project, and it was literally a war zone. But most residents there weren't wringing their hands, acting like it was the end of the world. They were dealing with it, quietly and bravely. Some people there seemed to know as much about my country as I did. Many were interested in helping less developed nations move forward, even as tanks patrolled their streets.

Many Americans are like the spoiled rich kid who doesn't like the teacher saying he can't be class president without actually winning an election. In the eyes of most of the rest of the world, the U.S. is the spoiled rich kid who eats the whole cake, rather than leave any pieces for others. While many Americans work to erase that perception, many more remain selfish and unaware -- even uncaring -- of what's been going on around us for years. When Bush-Cheney pull us out of the Kyoto Treaty and the World Court, many of us applaud. Then we wonder why most Europeans don't support our planned invasion of Iraq -- which I sure as hell don't support - and other international initiatives.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have a time of patriotic outbursts to help us deal with what occurred last Sept. 11. Some of that is fine and understandable.

But we also should not forget there is a darker side to our country -- the other America - that we still have to fix. We can't just continue to go around repeating nationalistic "We're No. 1" slogans and ignore the problems, as Bush-Cheney would like us all to do. We have to do more to bridge our deep racial divide, to reverse the growing homelessness and poverty as the rich get richer, to count every vote. And we have to make a more sincere effort to work with other nations on international problems.

I will continue to drive by Cash-Cheney's empty mansion, the symbol of the emptier consciences of those who continue to ignore the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots. Even though I was among the more than 2 million Americans laid off from a job myself last year -- the most since 1982 - I will continue to give directly to the growing number of homeless I see. Let them spend the money how they want, even if they buy cheap liquor. They cannot afford the same prescribed medication that richer Americans use to anesthetize their existence.

I will not turn my head at the growing ranks of the poor -- after equaling a record low 11.3 percent in 2000 under Clinton-Gore, the poverty rate is believed to have grown under Bush-Cheney - then sing patriotic songs in church about supposed unity in America. I will not support an administration that is mostly about hypocrisy and cynicism, as it superficially labors to keep "one nation, under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and only deepens the actual social and environmental problems with its selfish, help-the-rich-get-richer policies.

For example, a study released last month by Citizens for Tax Justice and Children's Defense Fund said that 52 percent of the Bush-Cheney tax cuts will go to the wealthiest one percent of Americans by 2010, if that program is not changed. Meanwhile, Bush's budget included no new funding for Head Start or child care programs. As CDF President Marian Wright Edelman said, "The Bush administration's words say 'Leave no child behind.' The Bush administration's deeds say 'Leave no millionaires behind.'" That's a key aspect to note when dealing with Bush-Cheney; do not believe what they say, but look at what they do.

Let me say this as clearly as I can: We are not one nation, under God. We are two nations - even more than two nations if you count the haves, have-nots, and those teetering on the edge -- with a wide diversity of opinions on the interpretation of a higher power. We are multiple nations, multiple factions, trying to gain access to power, trying just to survive, watching those strange, fatalistic reality TV shows with horrific amusement.

I really believe that, down the road, it will be organizations like Democrats.com and Citizens for a Legitimate Government, Web sites such as Bush Watch, Buzzflash, America Held Hostile, Democratic Underground, FringeFolk, American Politics Journal, Smirking Chimp, Liberal Slant, Dean & Justin's Political Journal, Bartcop, and Online Journal, Internet groups like Not My President, the Fallout Shelter, and Citizens Against Bush, progressive media members like Robert Scheer, Molly Ivins, and Meria Heller, and courageous politicians like Cynthia McKinney, that will be seen as providing the most light through this tunnel of darkness we are passing through right now. There are times when we're working to expose the Bush-Cheney regime until 4 a.m., to the detriment of our health and family life. But something drives us onward.

Let us continue to speak out. Let us continue to light the way to higher ground, so we can gain some perspective on where we have to go to truly become one nation. Better yet, one world.

Jackson Thoreau is co-author of We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House. The 110,000-word electronic book can be downloaded at http://www.legitgov.org/we_will_not_get_over_it.html, http://www.cyberread.com/search_result.asp?PRODUCT_ID=CRIN:1881365514 or http://www.booklocker.com/bookpages/whitehouse.html. Thoreau can be emailed at jacksonthor@justice.com.

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