|
Can't
Buy Me Love
March
17, 2004
By The Plaid Adder
 During
my vacation last week I happened to turn on CNN long enough
to catch a bit of the flap over Kerry's supposedly-off-the-record
comment about Republican operatives being "crooked." Predictably,
the response from the right was that this was language "unworthy"
of a future president. Personally, I think it is exactly
the kind of language we need from our future president. We
cannot get ourselves out of the hole we're in until we confront
the fact that Kerry's aside acknowledged. Yes, the Bush administration
is crooked. It's worse than crooked. It's corrupt to the core;
and we have got to get that under control, because - as the
news from Madrid emphasized this week - corruption is killing
us.
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I first read a 1968
novel by Ayi Kwei Armah called The Beautyful Ones Are Not
Yet Born. It's set in postindependence Ghana, after the
high of the revolution has worn off and disillusionment has
set in. At the opening of the novel, the protagonist passes
a mound of filth that is rotting out in the street. On closer
inspection he realizes that somewhere buried inside this mountain
of stinking refuse there is a municipal waste basket. He remembers
the government-organized PR blitz that launched the new sanitation
system:
Like others before it, this campaign had been
extremely impressive, and admiring rumors indicated that
it had cost a great lot of money. Certainly the papers had
been full of words informing their readers that dirt was
undesirable and must be eliminated. On successive days a
series of big shots had appealed to everybody to be clean.
The radio had run a program featuring a doctor, a Presbyterian
priest, and a senior lecturer brought down from the University
of Legon. The three had seemed to be in agreement about
the evil effects of uncleanliness. People were impressed.
However, most of the government money originally dedicated
to this scheme disappeared into the pockets of various government
employees. The culture of bribery that has infested every
aspect of Ghana's new government siphoned off so much that
there was not enough left to put out an adequate number of
waste baskets - or, more importantly, to pay people to empty
them. Consequently, the anti-litter campaign has only made
the problem worse. People are dutifully putting their trash
in the baskets - or as close to the baskets as they can get
it--and the government is leaving it all to fester in the
open air.
That image has stuck with me over ten years and many changes
of life, and it's because it taught me a simple but powerful
lesson. The problem with government corruption is not simply
that it demoralizes and degrades the entire country, although
that is certainly one of its main side effects. The real problem
is that corrupt governments do not function. The more government
money ends up lining everyone's pockets, the less there is
for basic services; and in the end, a corrupt government has
neither the will nor the means to fulfill any of its responsibilities,
even something as basic as taking out the trash. Corruption
at the top leaves the people at the bottom where Armah's protagonist
begins: drowning in everyone else's shit.
To tell you the truth, as cynical as I have been for a long
time about American politics I never thought I would see that
kind of corruption in my own government. We are used to the
idea that politics is a dirty business, that a lot of money
changes hands and that our representatives will be, as the
phrase goes, "beholden to special interests." What we are
now seeing is on a different scale altogether. We are watching
the end results - domestically and abroad - of an administration
made up of people who have no ethical or even emotional investment
in the institutions they control. This kind of mess is what
inevitably happens when the people running the joint are devoted
first, foremost and only to their own profit. After seeing
the Bush team show no hesitation about perverting the democratic
process and indeed the Supreme Court in order to get themselves
into power, we should hardly be surprised that once there,
they did not ask what they could do for their country, but
rather what their country could do for them.
Slice into Bush's domestic agenda at any point and you come
up with the same thing: a policy whose primary purpose is
simply to channel more money toward a particular industry.
Cheney's energy 'policy' is perhaps the most noxious example,
but by no means the only one; consider the Bush team's approach
to environmental protection, for instance. It's precisely
because none of these policies contain even a vestigial trace
of any sincere desire to improve the lot of American citizens
that they have to ramp up the PR campaigns and come up with
bizarrely Orwellian names like the Healthy Forests Initiative,
which opens up national forests to logging, and the Clear
Skies initiative, which allows companies to boost their pollution
emissions. Then there are the tax cuts, which are doing nothing
for the economy or for the government but plenty for people
in the top 1% of the population. I could go on, but it all
tends toward the same point: when this gang formulates a 'policy,'
the absolute last question anyone on their team is
asking is whether it is actually going to be good for the
country.
One of the most-repeated lines from Suskind and O'Neill's
The Price of Loyalty is Cheney's snap that "Reagan
proved deficits don't matter." That statement makes no sense
- especially coming from the party of fiscal responsibility
- if the overall health of the economy is something that "matters."
On the other hand, if all that "matters" is the continued
power and prosperity of the Bush administration and its corporate
sponsors, then Cheney's absolutely right: deficits are not
going to affect that. After all, they'll be long gone before
the bills come due.
And that's the logic driving everything this administration
does, from its policies to its PR. Rove has gotten this crowd
this far by sticking to the principle that image is everything
and substance is nothing. Control perception, and reality
can go to hell; in fact, it must, because any time that you
spent trying to actually improve the state of the country
is time taken away from the much more important project of
securing your own re-election. Of course Bush has more time
to go to the rodeo than he does to sit before the 9/11 commission.
Going to the rodeo will help him; testifying before the 9/11
commission would only help the country understand what created
the worst disaster in recent history and figure out how to
prevent the next one. Naturally they want him at the rodeo.
From Rove's perspective, that's a no-brainer.
The same attitude has produced the administration's increasingly
dangerous failures in Iraq and the 'war on terrorism.' Why
did we respond to an attack by a mobile, decentralized, highly
flexible and adaptable international terrorist organization
by waging conventional wars against two nation-states, one
of which had no connection whatsoever to said organization?
Because actually stopping Al-Qaeda was never the Bush administration's
top priority. If they were really motivated by a sincere desire
to dismantle the organization that pulled off the worst attack
on American soil since Pearl Harbor two and a half years ago
and is now merrily exporting violence, terror, and grief to
all corners of the globe, why in the name of sanity would
they have decided to devote our army and our money to toppling
a regime that was actually using its evil powers to suppress
Islamic fundamentalism within its borders? And why would they
have toppled said regime so incompetently that instead of
replacing it with a new one, they have merely turned the country
into a swamp of anarchy which is breeding new acts of terrorism
daily?
No, there's only one way to make the Iraq war make any sense,
and that is to finally realize that the Bush administration
cares far, far more about making money than it will ever care
about the welfare of Iraqis, Americans, coalition partners,
or anyone else. What does it matter that the reconstruction
of Iraq is not getting done, so long as Halliburton is being
paid for it? What does it matter that our soldiers are given
inadequate meals and equipment, as long as Kellogg, Brown
& Root is raking in the dough? Actually doing the jobs they
are assigned would only require these corporations to spend
some of that government dough instead of keeping it; and they
know that as long as they keep paying into the Bush team's
campaign coffers, they will never be held accountable for
what they do. Why do the job right when you can make more
money doing it wrong?
The rot that has set in under the Bush administration is
not simple incompetence - although there appears to be plenty
of that, too. It is the unavoidable corollary of corruption.
With no sincere commitment to the welfare of the country or
its citizens, and with a campaign strategy that assumes at
the outset that Bush's actual job performance will be utterly
irrelevant to the outcome of the next election, there is no
reason in the world that the Bush administration would ever
bother to do anything right. And so the unavoidable conclusion
is that until they are dislodged, our government will never
really function again.
What we need, more than a change of policy or ideology,
is a change to an administration made up of people who actually
give a shit. We need people who, whatever their faults or
weaknesses might be, still basically believe that the purpose
of the government is to serve its citizens, and still respect
the institutions charged with performing that mission. I have
given up waiting for Prince Charming to sweep in on a milk-white
steed, his noble carriage displaying a superb contempt for
backroom deals and campaign contributions, the blade of integrity
flashing with righteous anger as he cuts down the thicket
of influence and cronyism that girds the walls of the Capitol
and the White House so thickly that you can hardly see the
marble. But surely it is not too much to hope that we can
elect a politician whose venality is not quite bone-deep,
whose cynicism about the process has not entirely strangled
the faith in America and its possibility that drove him to
do this job in the first place.
In the end, that matters more than any differences of policy
or ideology. The Bush administration is out there now attacking
Kerry's plan for dealing with the war on terror. No matter
what Kerry's plan is, if it is driven by an actual desire
to alleviate the real problem, then it is bound to be more
successful than Bush's was. Because in that case, even if
things go wrong at first, the Kerry administration will take
the trouble to find out why, and correct the mistakes.
Bush's administration could never be bothered to do that.
I hear the Bush administration is closing in on Osama Bin
Laden, finally. That's nice. I'm sure it will give him a good
bounce in the polls if they can bring him in next October.
It might even get him another four years in office, though
frankly I doubt at this point if anything short of an endorsement
by Christ himself in person would win him the popular vote.
It'll be way too late to do any good for the people who just
lost their loved ones in Spain; but then why should Bush care.
They're not going to be at the polls in Ohio and Florida next
November.
The Plaid Adder's demented ravings have been delighting
an equally demented online audience since 1996. This week
she would like to thank jpgray, Jack Rabbit, and the rest
of her fellow DUers for pointing her to documentation of Bush's
specific perfidies. More Plaidderian rantings can be found
at the Adder's Lair at http://www.plaidder.com.
View
the Adder's Archive
|
