Suppressed rage
Eight miserable years full of reckless American leadership decisions have nearly passed and the only widely-consumed contrarian views came from network TV: sputterings of miserably incoherent, self-righteous, closed-minded sycophants. Sadly, the most coherent commentary presented has been ironic humor at the current administration’s expense. It’s funny and entertaining, but by no means a catalyst for action. The rest of the opposition to our leaders, as far as I can tell, is composed of scattered bumper sticker sales. So, I ask the same question asked by those who lived through the Vietnam War: where is the outrage? At this point, about the best we can get is this New York Times piece about Bush by Bob Herbert entitled “Add Up the Damage”:
This is the man who gave us the war in Iraq and Guantánamo and torture and rendition; who turned the Clinton economy and the budget surplus into fool’s gold; who dithered while New Orleans drowned; who trampled our civil liberties at home and ruined our reputation abroad; who let Dick Cheney run hog wild and thought Brownie was doing a heckuva job.
The Bush administration specialized in deceit. How else could you get the public (and a feckless Congress) to go along with an invasion of Iraq as an absolutely essential response to the Sept. 11 attacks, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks? Exploiting the public’s understandable fears, Mr. Bush made it sound as if Iraq was about to nuke us: “We cannot wait,” he said, “for the final proof — the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
The piece is an angry enumeration of the mistakes of the past eight years of American leadership; it derives most of its force from the multitude of offenses it lists. Mr. Herbert calls for angry crowds in the street, protests, a public unified behind unanimous disgust with a leadership task horribly mangled. Unfortunately, one of the pieces of propaganda of the publicity machine that brought Bush to power follows: protest has been marketed as an “unamerican” activity. The smear campaign against social activism was so successful that protesting is now universally viewed as the domain of crackpots and extremists. I’m looking forward to a time in the future (who knows how far in the future), when people full of common sense, justified rage, and a commitment to change can march to get their ideas heard.
And yes, I saw Colin Powell’s 2003 address to the United Nations Security Council about Iraq before the war. I believed it. Yet, everything in it was false. I was duped, and I didn’t do anything when I found out. I’m guilty of inaction, too.