Jeff Koopersmith

Paving the Way for Monsters
George W. Bush and America's War Against Each Other
By Jeff Koopersmith

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

July 15, 2004 -- WASHINGTON (apj.us) -- Azar Nafisi writes in her brilliant brief, "Reading Lolita in Tehran":

>>> The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that
>>> they force their citizens, including their victims, to become
>>> complicit in their own crimes.

She is discussing Vladimir Nabokov's triumph, "Invitation to a Beheading," in which Cincinnatus dances with his prison guard and comments, "As long as he accepts the sham world the jailers impose upon him, Cincinnatus will remain their prisoner and will move within the circles of their creation."

The United States is not Iran, nor is it yet akin to the world Nabokov writes of in his tales of dreadfulness veiled in the salacious.

Yet we must caution ourselves that the Bush Administration has brought us ever so closer to moving within a sphere of his manufacture and making at least half of us complicit in his crimes.

Even the most ardent conservative, after looking here and there, might come to comprehend that America in 2004 is largely on the brink of totalatarianist notion -- just on the edge but perhaps slipping over the lip of the chalice and poised to cascade under this fresh threat of terrorism into near autocratic rule.

The reader might scoff at this observation. In spite of everything, I dread we are living in a nation more limitless than most where one can yet gain gratification from life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

However, the transom of liberty and happiness is now failing, growing higher, cracking, and more opaque -- even if slightly -- for non-white, non-Christian, non-union-member, "non-American" citizens.

Simply inventory the personal sovereignties that have been snipped since 1980 at the start of the Reagan Revolution.

It seems that everywhere we glance there is a new restriction, a new petty or gross misfeasance, a new bigotry, a new irrelevant grievance.

These seemingly insignificant insults to our American consciousness, it seems to me, are corrosive -- even perilous when one considers the rolling snowball.

And now the dominoes are falling in quick velocity spurred by the fear that the rest of the world is tiring of us, our global economy, and our lack of modesty.

When I write "us," I mean the public face of the United States, not the private face of her citizens.

Our public face is George W. Bush and his minions.

Our private face is your neighbor, the plumber, the teacher, the fireman, the cop.

In this world where we can count true allies on fingers and toes, it is not Americans who cultivate the hatred and resentment of other nationals -- it is our unthinking elected leadership that does this deed, and that includes many Democrats who refuse to rise and indict the transgressions of the new conservative, the new old-fashioned.

The list of diminutive atrocities against our own people is piling up into a huge massacre.

Tax policies are now simply a reward to the richer among us for somehow gifting us jobs, most at low pay and most without health or social insurance. Do not fail to appreciate that it is not the major corporations which have gained this gift of squat taxes; they have never paid taxes in ratios even close to the average family. Most pay none at all.

We are today, for some inane reason, pretending to examine the movement of our national election day for fear that some fanatic from Baghdad, North Korea, Yemen, Kabul or Tehran will blow something up in November. Yet when one ponders this putative and rumored lunacy one wonders how changing a date will remedy the possibility of terrorism; will we keep the up-to-the-minute date of our national elections a secret?

Congressional leaders are now considering other Bush-introduced silliness, such as amending the Constitution to prevent abortions.

Since George W. Bush decided that God selected him to be our "War President," further American tenets have fallen to the side in concurrence. We now hold prisoners in jails far away without benefit of defense counsel, family visits, habeas corpus; some of them Americans, some not. We warehouse American black and Hispanic drug users in new and bigger prisons in such numbers that the "dear family" Mr. Bush invokes non-stop has nearly ceased to exist in the ghetto.

We are becoming the jailbirds, waltzing and trapped within the conservative and neoconservative gangs of the appointed president, Mr. Bush (an aider and abettor); the fanatic neoconservative House Majority Leader, Mr. DeLay; the Speaker of the House, Mr. Hastert; and the Senate Majority Leader, Dr. Frist.

One of their latest ploys is a sham constitutional amendment proposed by the ugliest of the ugly -- banning gay marriages. The Senate this week rejected this trivial attempt to set us one against the other -- bigot against the enlightened -- rebuffing entreaties to approve the amendment from President Bush and fellow cranky conservatives.

The worst of course is that none of the neoconservatives believed this wished-for amendment to abridge yet another minority's pursuit of happiness had even a slight chance of passing. It was, criminally, only another stage play designed to polarize the audience -- the American voter -- and on the most odious of issues.

Shall we stop gay men and women from "destroying" the nuclear family -- supposedly our "greatest strength?"

I thought that secular justice and the rule of law were our greatest strengths.

Many of our best and most reliable journalists are terrified to tell the truth about Vice President Richard Cheney, about his personal avarice and his seemingly ill-gotten riches. They are, in reality, frightened to tell us that our government is deteriorating because of the actions of corporate puppeteers alone. They are, in fact, afraid to lose their jobs, their places, their lifestyles. They too are commercial marionettes. They ask questions, but never the follow-up probe to point out the absurdity of the answer.

By hook or by crook we are now meant to believe that churches and related religious groups are more competent to offer and produce government sponsored programs to the neediest of the poor. Yet history, both ancient and modern, demonstrates that many of the most villainous charitable organizations have been and are wrapped in the armor of God without being godly.

We are now a "faith-based" nation, we are told -- but in which faith? Or is it belief in Mr. Bush, whose personal visa to heaven is a spanking redemption from drunkenness and a "sporty" lifestyle?

The constitutional partition laid between church and state is not a prank. It is a mirror of certainty, and yet its violation is flaunted at every conceivable juncture by those that masquerade as pious for entirely political purposes -- to divide people of faith from people of reservation.

There is nothing untoward about believing in God, yet it is a corruption to marginalize those who might not believe in yours or in none.

George W. Bush and his associates may not be monsters, but they are myopic not to perceive how brainlessly they pave the way for ogres to follow.