Column by George Sibley
American politics – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
I GOT MAD at the local public radio station when the Iraq war had been going on for a few days; the management decided that it would replace The Prairie Home Companion on Saturday afternoon with two hours of war news. I wrote the station a letter in protest: “The president would be delighted to hear this. Knowing that Garrison Keillor usually has something critical to say about him, the president will be happy to know that instead you expect us to focus for a couple of hours on his war.”
I know some people will read that and immediately jump to the conclusion that I don’t “support our troops” over there. If just staying informed about the progress of the president’s war is actually doing anything to “support our troops,” then I do a lot, reading about it in the Denver Post and the New York Times Online, and some other online sources, not to mention all of the essays and articles I get and exchange electronically with friends.
But the fact is, I don’t feel like I am doing, or able to do, a damned thing right now, either to support our troops by keeping them out of unjust wars, or to support and stand for anything I believe in. I have never felt so — well, frightened. But I am not half as frightened of the probable terrorists in our midst as I am of the war against terrorism, and all that is being justified in its name.
I am — we are — faced with a president who tells us lies (like an Iraqi presence in the 9-11 attacks), and he gets away with it; a president who thumbs his nose at the agencies and agreements for international coöperation that we’ve been nurturing for more than half a century, and he gets away with it; a president who has launched a class war against the lower four quintiles of Americans and he gets away with it. A cowed and co-opted Congress lets him get away with it — hands him most of what he wants on a platter, in fact — and most of our allegedly “liberal media” act more and more like the Pravda of the reactionary right.
To write against President Bush and his thorough and efficient undermining of everything I thought America tried to stand for (not always successfully, to be sure) almost seems to add fuel to his fire. One realizes that, rather than hearing and responding to criticism, ideologues actually take a warped kind of justification from criticism: “They’re still pissed at me, so I must be doing something right.”
The processes of democracy are being replaced by the processes of demagoguery. These days, I often think of Germany in the 1930s. I have always wondered how it was that, in a mere decade or so, the Germans were transformed from one of the most civilized nations in the world into a militant, racist mass blindly following a demagogue into a horrible war against everyone. But then, immediately after the war, they seemed to be just ordinary civilized citizens again. “Who, me, a Nazi?”
Could this happen here ? Could it be happening here? I think of the frog soup analogy: if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will reflexively jump out of the pot the instant he hits the water (probably suffering second-degree burns, of course). But if you put the frog in cold water, then gradually raise the heat under the pot, the frog will not jump out of the pot and will eventually be (pretty disgusting) frog soup.
I am not trying to say that George Bush is “another Hitler.” It may turn out that he’s not that good at it, that effective; we’ll see. But with his little lies, his disregard for any position other than his own, his contempt for any international effort to truly confront global problems, and his propensity for placing blame everywhere else, he is certainly working within the spectrum of demagoguery that includes the two-bit guys like Saddam as well as the real masters like Hitler.
AND I WONDER how a television-dulled population — represented by a co-opted Congress that has already laid the military-industrial infrastructure that fascism builds upon, and informed by an increasingly propagandistic mass media owned and operated by and for that same infrastructure — can do anything. How can we frogs in the pot find the means or wherewithal to just say no? “Whoa! Enough! No more in our name!”
The only thing I’ve done since the war started that felt right was going up to Crested Butte for Flauschink, the end-of-winter festival, where we danced a lot — together. It just doesn’t feel right sitting alone in our living rooms watching the 24-7 coverage of our president’s war, but it’s better out there in our place working up a good sweat together.
Maybe that’s not doing much for the troops, but I am sure the president would rather have us sitting alone in our living rooms — the more alone and untogether the better — so we can give him and his war our undivided attention. In fact, demagogues eventually insist upon it.
Meanwhile, I might note that KBUT-FM has gone back to The Prairie Home Companion on Saturday afternoons. There are still little glimmers of sanity here and there.
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison.
