Lights Out

August 26th, 2003

Psst. I am here to tell you what happens when the lights go out. You probably think this has something to do with the recent power outage that affected a mere 50 million people or sex. Wrong!

I sing not of electric power outages but of power outages at the very top of our society even more terrifying than grid failures or anything the "evil doers" are likely to do to us. Yes, dare I say it, the president of these United States has a power outage.

These days criticism of the president and his friends is not something lightly to be undertaken. The chances are pretty good that you may end up in jail incommunicado, with no access to an attorney. After all, what good is a Patriot Act if they don't use it? Then, again, if you have an attorney, he or she may end up in jail him or herself. So, if you don't see another one of these columns for a while, you'll know where I am. And if a criminal lawyer disappears, well . . .

And suppose you are not sent to jail. At the very least you are likely to be characterized as unpatriotic. After all, in war time, aren't we supposed to support our president? Of course, if he created the war, you may have an out, but most of the public still thinks of you as a traitor anyway. Support our troops! Support them while they get killed in Iraq because the president was too stupid to anticipate what would happen if we actually defeated the Iraqis. I think not. I support them by urging that they should be brought home as soon as possible.

It would be easy to think that our president is not stupid but some kind of evil genius. After all, one would assume it takes real intelligence to get us to attack Iraq by spreading word that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction without any evidence whatever. And it probably takes even greater intelligence to throw dust in the eyes of the American people to change the justification of the war from the threat of mass destruction to getting rid of a miserable dictator and bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. Alas, an evil genius is probably preferable to an idiot, but double alas, we have the latter.

Plainly a president with a modicum of intelligence would have worried about an exit strategy. Our exit strategy is either nonexistent or based on the notion that we will leave when the Iraqis achieve democracy. Since there are no democracies in the Arab Middle East, the chances of the Iraqis being first seems somewhere between slim and none.

Plainly a president with a modicum of intelligence might have figured out that an attack on a Muhammadan nation would not endear us to many Muhammadans and a rise, not a fall, in terrorism might be expected. Such a president might have also decided that it would be well to finish the job in Afghanistan before taking on another assignment.

But if you are a good old boy Texan, you wear your holster on your hip and exercise your macho instincts by telling the enemy to "bring it on" and stand well to the rear when the shooting starts.

Plainly a man who was barely able to get through a college to which he would not have been admitted but for his daddy's alumni status, who screwed his friends by failing in an oil business that any working grunt could have made a success, and whose knowledge of tax policy demonstrates that he has learned to subtract but not add, cannot make it to the evil genius category. Perhaps his only wisdom is to surround himself with evil geniuses such as Dick Chaney and Don Rumsfeld.

Obviously a man of such low intellect has a hard time distinguishing between the interests of his class and the interest of the people in general. Having grown up in a society where everyone had money and influence, it takes a little something to understand that the whole world is not like that. Thus it is no surprise that he initiates a tax-cut program which helps the kind of society he knows, while bankrupting the government and abetting a major recession. After all, his friends are not out of work. Many of them don't work in the first place, courtesy of dear old dad.

The truth is that intelligence at the top has sometimes not been a requirement of high political office. Witness Ronald Reagan who didn't seem to have the slightest idea of what was going on in his government, but certainly looked good on television. Witness Arnold Schwarzenegger whose chief ability seems to be to press a good deal of weight and utter lines like "Hasta la vista, baby" with a straight face. Witness Jessie Ventura who . . . oh well.

The problems that any president faces are immense, the responsibility awesome. To navigate a course that serves the country requires subtleties that can be barely imagined. Balancing social justice, diplomacy, the military, the economy and the environment is no easy task especially because they are all interconnected. Unfortunately, our president seems not to have a clue.

A saving grace might be if the president had some compassion. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a great deal of inherited wealth, but he never made the mistake of confusing his class with the rest of the world. His compassion for his fellow citizens saved this country from what well might have been a revolution that could have destroyed it. Even if we credit FDR with enlightened self-interest in saving his class we should admire his intelligence.

George W. has exhibited no compassion whatever. His seeming compassion is applauding the sacrifices of families who have lost loved ones. A compassionate man might have considered the thousands upon thousands of casualties the Iraqi war was likely to create and avoided it. As it turns out, our casualties are certainly smaller than those suffered by the Iraqis, but aren't all lives valued the same?

"Without vision, the people perish," (Proverbs 25:18). Woe unto us with W. at the helm. The way things are going we will be lucky to get out of the next ten years, never mind the century.

My friend, Andy, and I will sell our houses and move to a Caribbean island as soon as my school term is up.