It Tattoos Everything

It’s pretty obvious that a decision has been made.

I don’t know exactly when, or where, or who participated; I don’t know what was said during what phone calls.  And I don’t exactly mean to suggest that a conspiracy was involved, other than the ordinary everyday sorts of conspiracies involved in Washington cloak-room negotiations, in gentlemen’s agreements made in the back seats of Manhattan taxicabs, and most of all, perhaps, in the ebb and flow of conversations on the balconies overlooking shorelines and forests behind million-dollar homes during dinner parties in Nantucket, Massachusetts and MacLean, Virginia.

But it’s pretty obvious that somewhere in the midst of all of that a new normal was decided upon by people who don’t care about you or me: the new normal of the 21st century.

Consider this article from The Cleveland Examiner, Sept. 24, 2007.  In fact, consider it very carefully.

“Look, I’d like to make as many hard decisions as I can make, and do a lot of the heavy lifting prior to whoever my successor is,” Bush said. “And then that person is going to have to come and look at the same data I’ve been looking at, and come to their own conclusion.”

As an example, Bush cited his detainee program, which allows him to keep enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay while they await adjudication. Bush is unmoved by endless criticism of the program because he says his successor will need it.

“I specifically talked about it so that a candidate and/or president wouldn’t have to deal with the issue,” he said. “The next person has got the opportunity to analyze the utility of the program and make his or her decision about whether or not it is necessary to protect the homeland. I suspect they’ll find that it is necessary. But my only point to you is that it was important for me to lay it out there, so that the politics wouldn’t enter into whether or not the program ought to survive beyond my period.”

The decision – and I don’t even mean to say, here, that I know what the grammar of the decision was, or what it means to those who made it, or even that it was ever exactly articulated – can be seen everywhere in the news.  To see it, you need only read recent news stories and keep one thing in mind: The Bush Administration only has one year left in office.

It’s visible here:

The Bush Administration is pushing to take control of the promotions of military lawyers, escalating a conflict over the independence of uniformed attorneys who have repeatedly raised objections to the White House’s policies toward prisoners in the war on terrorism. The administration has proposed a regulation requiring “coordination” with politically appointed Pentagon lawyers before any member of the Judge Advocate General corps-the military’s 4,000-member uniformed legal force-can be promoted.

And here:

For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

These are examples – and there are others – of moves that make no sense for an Administration on its way out the door, unless it expects those moves to matter, more than 13 months down the road.

Glenn Greenwald comments on the bipartisan nature of the push, among other things, to an aspect of the new normal, total surveillance:

Ultimately, what is most significant about all of this is how the most consequential steps our government takes — such as endless expansion of its domestic spying programs with literally no oversight and constraints of law — occur with virtually no public debate or awareness. By contrast, the pettiest of matters — every sneeze of a campaign aide and every trite, catty gossip item from our moronic travelling press corps — receives endless, mindless herd-like attention.

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful — precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values. As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin’s superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that — like so many others we’ve detained and tortured — he was guilty of nothing.

What I see between lines that, read straight, can cause only bewilderment, is the coming of a 21st century dominated by resource wars, limited arable land, limited wealth, and limited privilege.  I see, in the first place, a desire to keep what one has.  

In my more autumnal moments, I think about something an older, wiser friend of mine once said to me.  A fellow who’d seen it all and lived – he would say “more-or-less” I’m sure – to tell about it.  He told me that the period of general prosperity and hope from about 1950 to about 1975 had never happened before in the history of the world.  A time when you could graduate high school, move to a new town, get a job, work at it until you retired, if you wanted to, and then live on a pension.  

We weren’t sitting on the balcony of a million-dollar home in MacLean, Virginia, but on a porch in front of his apartment complex in West Virginia.  Down the street was a convenience store and above us an occasional fight between neighbors.  Next door over a man was dying of something.

“It never happened before and it will not happen again,” my friend told me.

That those with power want to keep it, does not require explanation.  But they have quite a job on their hands, holding on to that power while managing the downward spiral of expectations of three-hundred million people.  Might require a little surveillance, for example.

Bush: “The next [President] has got the opportunity to analyze the utility of the program and make his or her decision about whether or not it is necessary to protect the homeland. I suspect they’ll find that it is necessary.”

On the television, just this morning, I heard an example of those with power wanting to keep that power.  In the midst of the impending wreck of civilization, I heard a Presidential candidate and a resident of Nantucket, Massachusetts, have this meaningless exchange:

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me ask you about one of your supporters, a Dr. Bob Jones III.

GOV. ROMNEY:  Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT:  …an evangelical leader, and this is what he said about your faith.  He said it was a “cult,” an “erroneous religion.” How can you accept the support of someone who would trash your faith in that way?

GOV. ROMNEY:  Well, you know, religions are in a competitive battle.  They’re competing for souls and adherence.  And the good news is that Bob Jones may not agree with my faith–and obviously he does not–but he does believe that I’m the right person to be president of the United States, and that’s because he believes that a person of faith should lead the nation, an individual who’s pro-life, who’s adamantly in favor of traditional marriage, an individual who has the skills and background to get America back on track internationally and domestically.

That this decision was made does not require explanation.  That so many people are willing to take it, and take this meaningless white noise in place of an accounting for it, might.

I don’t know what to do but stand up and hunker down.  I don’t know what to do but speak up and look around.  I am not optimistic but I am here, like you.  There is a way to a decent 21st century; there has to be – though sometimes “the 21st century” seems to recede like the horizon from my vision.

At some point a decision was made, even if no one person actually made it; even if every individual member of Congress could place a hand on a stack of Bibles and say truthfully it was not his or her personal choice.  We are living with the consequences of that decision.  It tattoos everything.