A Pilgrim’s Digression

http://nytimes.com/2004/1…0safire.html?hp

In today’s op-ed for the New York Times, William Safire proposes a “sequel” to Phillip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America. Safire’s projection of “what if” turns on the question of what would of happened if President Bush had listened to Colin Powell and other “appeasers” and not chosen to invade Iraq.

Strictly on the level of Safire’s understanding of Roth’s novel, Safire gets a couple of things incorrect. He calls Roth’s novel a “satire,” which it decidedly is not; and he describes Charles A. Lindbergh with the harmless adjective “appeasing.” Roth’s character, President Lindbergh, was a good deal more than that; and the real Charles A. Lindbergh was somewhat more than “Nazi-appeasing” as well. After traveling to Germany and witnessing the might of Hitler’s military machine (and after being awarded the Iron Cross by Hermann Goerring himself), Lindbergh returned to the United States and said he believed in the good intentions of Adolf Hitler. Furthermore, he was so convinced of German military strength that he counselled the United States to stay out of war or face destruction.

And Lindbergh never did throw away that Nazi military decoration, even after Germany declared war on us.

That’s the real Charles Lindbergh. The fictional one is even more nefarious, all the while projecting his facade of down-home, Mid-West Americanism to fool the rubes in Topeka.

Details aside, Safire’s dystopian rewrite of history projects that had President Bush listened to Powell and the other peaceniks of the time, he would have been defeated in November by a Democrat promising to fight a tougher war on terror under the slogan “Send our boys abroad.”

OK. Let me get this straight. Roth projects an America in which the people elect a Nazi-sympathizing, Anti-Semitic, racist President who begins the process of slowly eroding freedom and democracy in this country. Safire’s grim, dystopian future is one in which a Democrat defeats President Bush in 2004.

I am indeed aghast at the prospect.

The unintended impication of Safire’s article is that 1200 Americans and over ten thousand Iraqis have died since spring 2003 in order to reassure the election of George Bush. It may be true. However, that is hardly a message that redounds to the benefit of George Bush’s “legacy.”

But it does prompt me to wonder whether Bush was reelected because of, or in spite of, the Iraq war. I can see both sides. On the one hand, Safire’s point (perhaps unintentional) is that without Iraq, George Bush could never have sustained the war on terror long enough to be elected. There has not been a terrorist attack on American soil since September of 2001. How does one inspire fear of an enemy who does not attack but once every three to five years? Well, one takes the fight to the enemy, even if the enemy (in this case Iraq) wasn’t responsible for the 9/11 attacks that inspired this “war” to begin with.

On the other hand, in every poll I’ve seen, Americans seem to have reelected Bush despite the Iraq war. Americans have serious misgivings about the war, but apparently they have this cockeyed optimism which suggests that in time of peril, sticking with the devil we know is better than throwing the bum out. Who knows, maybe we’ll turn yet another corner after the January elections.

In some ways, writing against the Iraq war, and against the President generally, is like beating one’s head against a brick wall. It does no good. No one wants to listen. It won’t influence a single upcoming election that matters. Yet still I feel this compulsion to speak out. I am even considering participating in a demonstration against the President during his inauguration. There is a movement called Turn your back on Bush which, on inauguration day, proposes that people lining the parade route turn their backs on the President as a means of protest. It’s simple and pointed. Is it effective? Probably not.

I’ve never before been inspired to engage in protest. In fact, in the past, I’ve usually complained pretty vociferously about the protests I’ve witnessed at the Supreme Court and Capitol. Protestors always leave tons of garbage behind for the AOC people to come along and collect. This has always seemed to me to dilute and degrade any message the protesters hoped to deliver.

However, turning my back to the President is an action I can participate in and feel good about, even though it will result in nothing.

I sometimes feels like converting to liberalism in this day and age is little better than a futile protest against the sea of change that is about to overwhelm this country. It’s kind of like converting to Islam on the day of Christ’s second coming. I keep trying to tell myself things won’t be so bad, Bush is a good man at heart, Republicans have the best interests of our country at heart, same as Democrats. Things will go on same as they always have, that is, badly (as the Donkey said in Animal Farm). It’s an attitude that I think a lot of good, liberal Americans hold to; and I always did sympathize with that poor Donkey in that novel. I think he was eventually turned into glue.

No one wants to be thought overly paranoid, or worse, ignorant about how history is cyclical and balanced so that the pendulum that swings one way inevitably swings back. However, I am just no longer sure that Republicans really do have the nation’s best interests in heart. They think they do. But their goal is same as it always has been: widespread, systemic change in favor of a laissez faire economy while simultaneously instituting greater social control. If you think this agenda is harmless, consider just one aspect of it, the anti-gay agenda of the Republican party. Their obsession with homosexuality borders on the pathological and, I’m sorry, but there is only one comparison to be made: Anti-Semitism in pre-Nazi, early twentieth-century Germany. When Jerry Falwell blames the 9/11 attacks on “sodomites,” you should not consider him just an aberration. The mistake is not taking him and those who believe like him seriously.

I recently read that our President has met five times with Gerald Allen. Allen is the Alabama legislator who suggested that for books that have homosexual characters or themes, we should “dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them.” I’m sure these meetings were totally innocuous (Allen says he has never talked with the President about “moral” issues). And in Bush’s favor, it’s not as if he has met with Allen after he proposed his book-burying legislation. Yet is someone like Allen really so far out of the mainstream of Republican thinking? For him to have met with the President five times suggests he is quite welcome in the Republican party. I can’t even think of a liberal equivalent of a President meeting five times with someone who believes there ought to be a law regulating books on homosexual themes and prescribing burial for such offending books. Who would Bill Clinton have had to have met with to equal this kind of travesty?

Gays are the persecuted Jews of the American 21st century. The threat to them may seem insignificant. It may seem impossible to imagine. Most people just shrug, saying, “It doesn’t affect me.” Others may hear people like Falwell and Allen and quietly say to themselves and their closest friends and family, “Good. They deserve it.” However, I like to recall a quote I read at the Holocaust Museum, spoken by a Christian pastor who routinely preached against Hitler and Naziism, until he was sent to a concentration camp.

“First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.” (Pastor Niemöller).

And so I speak, which is all I can do, in the hopes that should the very worst of my paranoid fears come true, someone may speak for me.