Three prominent experts in human rights and international law have contributed their thoughts to the debate on the proposed counter-terrorism laws drafted by the Howard Government.
At the request of the ACT Government, the Professor of International Law at the University of NSW, Andrew Byrnes, the Professor of International Law and Human Rights at the ANU, Hilary Charlesworth, and Gabrielle McKinnon, from the Regulatory Institutions Network at the ANU, examined the first draft of the laws to gauge the extent to which crucial human-rights guarantees made by the Prime Minister at last month's meeting of the Council of Australian Governments had been incorporated.
Mr Stanhope has thanked Professor Byrnes, Professor Charlesworth and Ms McKinnon for their contribution to the public analysis and scrutiny of the draft laws.
An electronic version of the analysis can be obtained from what's new at www.chiefminister.act.gov.au .
Human Rights Implications for the Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005 - [ Download - PDF, 68KB ]
Draft Anti-Terrorism Legislation - [ Download - PDF, 331KB ]
RT On Air
Thursday, 20 October 2005
Wednesday, 19 October 2005
9/11 Theologian Says Controlled Demolition of World Trade Center Is Now a Fact, Not a Theory
9/11 Theologian Says Controlled Demolition of World Trade Center Is Now a Fact, Not a Theory
October 21, 2005
In two speeches to overflow crowds in New York last weekend, notable theologian David Ray Griffin argued that recently revealed evidence seals the case that the Twin Towers and WTC-7 were destroyed by controlled demolition with explosives. Despite the many enduring mysteries of the 9/11 attacks, Dr. Griffin concluded, "It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government."
On Oct. 15th and 16th, New Yorkers filled two venues to hear the prominent theologian and author of two books on 9/11 give a presentation entitled "The Destruction of the Trade Towers: A Christian Theologian Speaks Out." Dr. Griffin has continued to blaze a trail of courage, leading where most media and elected officials have feared to tread. His presentation went straight to the core of one of the most powerful indictments of the official story, the collapse of the towers and WTC 7.
Dr. Griffin included excerpts from the firemen's tapes which were recently released as a result of a prolonged court battle led by victim's families represented by attorney Norman Siegel and reported in the NY Times. He also included statements by many witnesses. These sources gave ample testimony giving evidence of explosions going off in the buildings. A 12 minute film was shown for the audiences, who saw for themselves the undeniable evidence for controlled demolition.
Dr. Griffin listed ten characteristics of the collapses which all indicate that the buildings did not fall due to being struck by planes or the ensuing fires. He explained the buildings fell suddenly without any indication of collapse. They fell straight into their own footprint at free-fall speed, meeting virtually no resistance as they fell - a physical impossibility unless all vertical support was being progressively removed by explosives severing the core columns. The towers were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 and 160 mile per hour winds, and nothing about the plane crashes or ensuing fires gave any indication of causing the kind of damage that would be necessary to trigger even a partial or progressive collapse, much less the shredding of the buildings into dust and fragments that could drop at free-fall speed. The massive core columns - the most significant structural feature of the buildings, whose very existence is denied in the official 9/11 Commission Report - were severed into uniform 30 foot sections, just right for the 30-foot trucks used to remove them quickly before a real investigation could transpire. There was a volcanic-like dust cloud from the concrete being pulverized, and no physical mechanism other than explosives can begin to explain how so much of the buildings' concrete was rendered into extremely fine dust. The debris was ejected horizontally several hundred feet in huge fan shaped plumes stretching in all directions, with telltale "squibs" following the path of the explosives downward. These are all facts that have been avoided by mainstream and even most of the alternative media. Again, these are characteristics of the kind of controlled demolitions that news people and firefighters were describing on the morning of 9/11. Those multiple first- person descriptions of controlled demolition were hidden away for almost four years by the City of New York until a lawsuit finally forced the city to release them. Dr. Griffin's study of these accounts has led him beyond his earlier questioning of the official story of the collapses, to his above-quoted conclusion: The destruction of the three WTC buildings with explosives by US government terrorists is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact that has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
It?s important to note that Dr. Griffin is one of many prominent intellectuals--including the likes of Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Peter Dale Scott, Richard Falk, Paul Craig Roberts, Morgan Reynolds and Peter Phillips--who have seen through the major discrepancies of the official explanation of 9/11 and have risen to challenge it. These brave individuals represent the tip of an ever-growing iceberg of discreet 9/11 skeptics. Indeed, 9/11 skepticism appears to be almost universal among intellectuals who have examined the evidence, since there has not yet been a single serious attempt to refute the case developed by Dr. Griffin and such like-minded thinkers as Nafeez Ahmed and Mike Ruppert. As for the general public, polls have shown that a strong majority of Canadians (63%, Toronto Star, May '04) and half of New Yorkers (Zogby, August 2004) agree that top US leaders conspired to murder nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11/01.
How, then, can the mainstream US media continue to ignore the story of the century? Perhaps the best answer was given by Dr. Griffin himself in the conclusion of his talk, and is worth quoting at length:
"The evidence for this conclusion (that 9/11 was an inside job) has thus far been largely ignored by the mainstream press, perhaps under the guise of obeying President Bush's advice not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories." We have seen, however, that it is the Bush administration's conspiracy theory that is the outrageous one, because it is violently contradicted by numerous facts, including some basic laws of physics.
"There is, of course, another reason why the mainstream press has not pointed out these contradictions. As a recent letter to the Los Angeles Times said:
'The number of contradictions in the official version of...9/11 is so overwhelming that...it simply cannot be believed. Yet...the official version cannot be abandoned because the implication of rejecting it is far too disturbing: that we are subject to a government conspiracy of 'X-Files' proportions and insidiousness.'
"The implications are indeed disturbing. Many people who know or at least suspect the truth about 9/11 probably believe that revealing it would be so disturbing to the American psyche, the American form of government, and global stability that it is better to pretend to believe the official version. I would suggest, however, that any merit this argument may have had earlier has been overcome by more recent events and realizations. Far more devastating to the American psyche, the American form of government, and the world as a whole will be the continued rule of those who brought us 9/11, because the values reflected in that horrendous event have been reflected in the Bush administration?s lies to justify the attack on Iraq, its disregard for environmental science and the Bill of Rights, its criminal negligence both before and after Katrina, and now its apparent plan not only to weaponize space but also to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike.
"In light of this situation and the facts discussed in this lecture - as well as dozens of more problems in the official account of 9/11 discussed elsewhere - I call on the New York Times to take the lead in finally exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11. Taking the lead on such a story will, of course, involve enormous risks. But if there is any news organization with the power, the prestige, and the credibility to break this story, it is the Times. It performed yeoman service in getting the 9/11 oral histories released. But now the welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed. I am calling on the Times to rise to the occasion."
Dr. Griffin's speech given at the University of Wisconsin earlier this year, entitled "9/11 and the American Empire," was broadcast twice on C-SPAN. In late September Dr. Griffin was asked to give expert testimony at hearings sponsored by Cynthia McKinney and the Congressional Black Caucus investigating the 9/11 Commission Report. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Claremont at the Claremont School of Theology, California.
This weekend's events were sponsored by NY911truth.org, WBAI and the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth: http://mujca.com. Kevin Barrett Coordinator, MUJCA-NET: http://mujca.com
October 21, 2005
In two speeches to overflow crowds in New York last weekend, notable theologian David Ray Griffin argued that recently revealed evidence seals the case that the Twin Towers and WTC-7 were destroyed by controlled demolition with explosives. Despite the many enduring mysteries of the 9/11 attacks, Dr. Griffin concluded, "It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government."
On Oct. 15th and 16th, New Yorkers filled two venues to hear the prominent theologian and author of two books on 9/11 give a presentation entitled "The Destruction of the Trade Towers: A Christian Theologian Speaks Out." Dr. Griffin has continued to blaze a trail of courage, leading where most media and elected officials have feared to tread. His presentation went straight to the core of one of the most powerful indictments of the official story, the collapse of the towers and WTC 7.
Dr. Griffin included excerpts from the firemen's tapes which were recently released as a result of a prolonged court battle led by victim's families represented by attorney Norman Siegel and reported in the NY Times. He also included statements by many witnesses. These sources gave ample testimony giving evidence of explosions going off in the buildings. A 12 minute film was shown for the audiences, who saw for themselves the undeniable evidence for controlled demolition.
Dr. Griffin listed ten characteristics of the collapses which all indicate that the buildings did not fall due to being struck by planes or the ensuing fires. He explained the buildings fell suddenly without any indication of collapse. They fell straight into their own footprint at free-fall speed, meeting virtually no resistance as they fell - a physical impossibility unless all vertical support was being progressively removed by explosives severing the core columns. The towers were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 and 160 mile per hour winds, and nothing about the plane crashes or ensuing fires gave any indication of causing the kind of damage that would be necessary to trigger even a partial or progressive collapse, much less the shredding of the buildings into dust and fragments that could drop at free-fall speed. The massive core columns - the most significant structural feature of the buildings, whose very existence is denied in the official 9/11 Commission Report - were severed into uniform 30 foot sections, just right for the 30-foot trucks used to remove them quickly before a real investigation could transpire. There was a volcanic-like dust cloud from the concrete being pulverized, and no physical mechanism other than explosives can begin to explain how so much of the buildings' concrete was rendered into extremely fine dust. The debris was ejected horizontally several hundred feet in huge fan shaped plumes stretching in all directions, with telltale "squibs" following the path of the explosives downward. These are all facts that have been avoided by mainstream and even most of the alternative media. Again, these are characteristics of the kind of controlled demolitions that news people and firefighters were describing on the morning of 9/11. Those multiple first- person descriptions of controlled demolition were hidden away for almost four years by the City of New York until a lawsuit finally forced the city to release them. Dr. Griffin's study of these accounts has led him beyond his earlier questioning of the official story of the collapses, to his above-quoted conclusion: The destruction of the three WTC buildings with explosives by US government terrorists is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact that has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
It?s important to note that Dr. Griffin is one of many prominent intellectuals--including the likes of Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn, Peter Dale Scott, Richard Falk, Paul Craig Roberts, Morgan Reynolds and Peter Phillips--who have seen through the major discrepancies of the official explanation of 9/11 and have risen to challenge it. These brave individuals represent the tip of an ever-growing iceberg of discreet 9/11 skeptics. Indeed, 9/11 skepticism appears to be almost universal among intellectuals who have examined the evidence, since there has not yet been a single serious attempt to refute the case developed by Dr. Griffin and such like-minded thinkers as Nafeez Ahmed and Mike Ruppert. As for the general public, polls have shown that a strong majority of Canadians (63%, Toronto Star, May '04) and half of New Yorkers (Zogby, August 2004) agree that top US leaders conspired to murder nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11/01.
How, then, can the mainstream US media continue to ignore the story of the century? Perhaps the best answer was given by Dr. Griffin himself in the conclusion of his talk, and is worth quoting at length:
"The evidence for this conclusion (that 9/11 was an inside job) has thus far been largely ignored by the mainstream press, perhaps under the guise of obeying President Bush's advice not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories." We have seen, however, that it is the Bush administration's conspiracy theory that is the outrageous one, because it is violently contradicted by numerous facts, including some basic laws of physics.
"There is, of course, another reason why the mainstream press has not pointed out these contradictions. As a recent letter to the Los Angeles Times said:
'The number of contradictions in the official version of...9/11 is so overwhelming that...it simply cannot be believed. Yet...the official version cannot be abandoned because the implication of rejecting it is far too disturbing: that we are subject to a government conspiracy of 'X-Files' proportions and insidiousness.'
"The implications are indeed disturbing. Many people who know or at least suspect the truth about 9/11 probably believe that revealing it would be so disturbing to the American psyche, the American form of government, and global stability that it is better to pretend to believe the official version. I would suggest, however, that any merit this argument may have had earlier has been overcome by more recent events and realizations. Far more devastating to the American psyche, the American form of government, and the world as a whole will be the continued rule of those who brought us 9/11, because the values reflected in that horrendous event have been reflected in the Bush administration?s lies to justify the attack on Iraq, its disregard for environmental science and the Bill of Rights, its criminal negligence both before and after Katrina, and now its apparent plan not only to weaponize space but also to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in a preemptive strike.
"In light of this situation and the facts discussed in this lecture - as well as dozens of more problems in the official account of 9/11 discussed elsewhere - I call on the New York Times to take the lead in finally exposing to the American people and the world the truth about 9/11. Taking the lead on such a story will, of course, involve enormous risks. But if there is any news organization with the power, the prestige, and the credibility to break this story, it is the Times. It performed yeoman service in getting the 9/11 oral histories released. But now the welfare of our republic and perhaps even the survival of our civilization depend on getting the truth about 9/11 exposed. I am calling on the Times to rise to the occasion."
Dr. Griffin's speech given at the University of Wisconsin earlier this year, entitled "9/11 and the American Empire," was broadcast twice on C-SPAN. In late September Dr. Griffin was asked to give expert testimony at hearings sponsored by Cynthia McKinney and the Congressional Black Caucus investigating the 9/11 Commission Report. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Claremont at the Claremont School of Theology, California.
This weekend's events were sponsored by NY911truth.org, WBAI and the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth: http://mujca.com. Kevin Barrett Coordinator, MUJCA-NET: http://mujca.com
Tuesday, 18 October 2005
Make-believe Democracy - Lewis Lapham
Make-believe Democracy
Sunday 16 October 2005
Lewis Lapham is the long-time editor of Harper's Magazine in the United States, as well as being a writer of political and satirical essays. In this address, given in May this year for the opening of the Sydney Writers Festival, Lewis Lapham delivers a stinging and trenchant critique of contemporary America.
His country, he says, has become a make-believe democracy because political debate and dissent is stifled, the media is compliant, and the population under-educated. His fundamental concern is with the loss of the democratic liberty to disagree and to question.
Ramona Koval : On ABC Radio National, this is Big Ideas. Hello, Ramona Koval.
Throughout this month on Big Ideas, I?m bringing you a range of writers and their perspectives on contemporary world affairs, politics, and culture. Today, a critique of American democracy from Lewis Lapham. He's the Editor of Harper's Magazine and he was in Australia earlier this year to deliver the keynote address that opened the Sydney Writers Festival. It?s this address that we're hearing today.
Lewis Lapham was born in San Francisco in 1935. He began his career as a newspaper reporter for The San Francisco Examiner, and The New York Herald Tribune. He's been the Editor of Harper's Magazine for the past thirty years and as well he's written several books of essays, including Money and Class in America, Theatre of War, Thirty Satires, and Gag Rule: On the suppression of dissent and the stifling of democracy. So you'll get a sense from those titles of where he's coming from. His fundamental concern is with the loss of the democratic liberty to disagree.
Of course he's speaking about the United States of America, but plenty of what he's saying has resonances for democratic societies around the globe right now. So here's Lewis Lapham from the Sydney Writers Festival.
Lewis Lapham: Well I'm honoured and flattered and delighted to be here. I wish I was the bearer of glad tidings and good news. And I don't really know how to begin talking about the current situation in the United States, but I thought I'd read a few passages from senior High School and College examination papers and essays. Various Professors of History collect these remarks and send them to the magazine and every three or four years we publish a small anthology, and I have saved some of the ones that please me the most. These are a fair indication of the state of the American mind at the moment.
This is a history of civilisation as told in a collection of College and high level High School students:
Civilisation woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. Flooding was erotic.
David was a fictional character in the Bible who pleased the people with his many erections and saved them from a tax by the Philippines.
Religion was polyphonic. Featured were gods such as Herod, Mars and Juice.
The Greeks invented three kinds of columns: Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
Plato invented reality. Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle. Archimedes made the first steamboat and power drill.
Rome was founded sometime by Uncle Remus and Wolf.
Neoplatonists celebrated the joys of self-abuse.
A German soldier put Rome in a sack. During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.
Machiavelli who was often unemployed wrote The Prince to get a job with Richard Nixon.
Ivan the Terrible started life as a child, a fact that troubled his later personality.
The government of England was a limited mockery. When Queen Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, Hurrah! Then her Navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.
When the Davey Jones index crashed in 1929, many people were left to political incineration.
The USSR and the USA became global in power, but Europe remained incontinent.
We in all humidity are the people of current times. This concept grinds our critical seething minds to a halt.
That is a fairly accurate description of the Bush Administration's foreign policy. And I tend to bear the last remark about grinding to a seething halt when I contemplate the canvas of the American political theatre and a popular culture enchanted by the magic of celebrity. The delusional is no longer marginal, and in no particular order, we have the last two Presidential elections were probably stolen. The party in power, the Republican party, is determined on regime change, but regime change within the United States, not so much in Iraq or Afghanistan.
We live in a civilisation in the United States where the number of people who believe in the literal truth in the Book of Revelations, exceeds the number of people who live in all of mediaeval Christendom.
The American War against the Intellect, by which I mean the drug trade, television, the pornographic film industry and so on, is now worth anywhere between $500-billion and a trillion dollars a year. In other words, it's a more expensive undertaking than our military establishment. Our leading export at the moment is money. We borrow $4-billion a day in order to, well, the position is, that our global war on terror is being funded by the People?s Republic of China, and the war itself is to my mind, a futile enterprise. It would be like having a war on lust. It's a war against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.
Facts are not as important as the ways in which the facts are presented and perceived, and certainly that matter has been the lesson of the last three or four years with the weapons of mass destruction, among other fictions which under the foreign policy is conducted in the same way that some of our high-end financial frauds have been conducted over the last several years. And we have a make-believe democracy, and we have a make-believe military empire, I think. I'm here to tell you that the hegemon has feet of clay. And I'm going to make remarks under a number of headings.
One is the notion of democracy. I went to Washington for the opening of the 109th Congress in January this year and I was impressed by the sense of a military encampment on Capitol Hill. To approach the Capitol building is to approach an entrenched position. There were as many as fifty armed men in black uniforms standing around; helicopters overhead; barricades blocking every conceivable approach. And the impression was that of a mediaeval walled town, preoccupied with its own weakness and fear, and well before I reached the last fortified checkpoint, I knew that the notion of a government by the people, for the people, and of the people, wasn't the kind of things likely to meet with the approval of the metal detectors.
And then once inside the Senate Chamber, it's a vivid impression. The media like to talk about the nation's piebald character, the democracy made of jumbled together, wonderful diversity of colour, creed, cultural dispensation, and it's a swell story, but in the United States Senate it is not one that is visible to the naked eye. I was in the Press Gallery and it gives you an occasion to study from a distance of about twenty feet, the collection of faces, as if I were looking at portrait busts in the statuary hall, and even at that privileged distance, it was hard to imagine any of the members present finding the time to write his or her own speech, much less taking the trouble to read through the 3,000 pages of the Federal Budget that distributes an annual appropriation of $2-trillion.
These are people comfortably settled in their flesh, wearing expensive suits, all but a few of them white, of the executive class, the kind of people you expect to see on the Admissions Committee at a golf course. Nothing in their manner suggested a shred of difference in their preconceptions and modus operandi. Red steak, beefsteak, Old Testament, New Testament, popular assembly oligarchic junta, why argue the details as long as everybody knows how and when to count the money.
It has been an oppressive program that the majority Republican party has been pushing through the Congress over the last several years, and they make no secret of their intention to pass more laws limiting the freedom of individuals and fewer laws restraining the freedoms of property, and this is the premise that underlies the legislation that has to do with medical insurance, the environment, military budget, the reformulation of the tax code and the one belief despite occasional factional differences, that there is the sound and bedrock opinion that money is good for rich people and bad for poor people.
I came away feeling that we had already lost the war on terror. The fearfulness of the people in the Congress, the Democratic minority afraid to utter much more than a squeak of objection. The rules have been changed in the House of Representatives so that there is no floor debate permitted on a resolution brought by the Republican Caucus. Congressional requests for information from the Executive agencies of government, from the Pentagon about the cost of weapons, or about the $10-billion that the Halliburton companies somehow lost in the sand in Iraq, or the intentions of the Justice Department with regards to its policies on torture and the detention of enemy combatants, or on the heightened and ratcheted up degrees of surveillance permitted to the FBI which is now allowed to tap anybody's phone, read anybody's mail and as of about three weeks ago, to go through anybody's financial records. And unable to get even a piece of paper out of the Executive, the Congressional Democrats are forced to file lawsuits in order to discover how the government for which they're held responsible, conducts itself behind closed doors.
And the impression was again made more vivid to me because during that same week the Capitol was preparing for the inauguration of President Bush, and the fortifications around the Capitol were again mediaeval. On the day that the President was inaugurated there were 10,000 uniformed police or military on or around the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue. People that wished to protest or object were kept in cages, sometimes two or three blocks from the parade, so as to be invisible to the cameras.
So from my point of view, maybe it's still worth the trouble to wonder why or how or when the American democracy lost its footing in Hollywood or in Washington, but the historical fact is I think no more open to dispute than the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet or the disappearance of Sickles' brigade in the wheatfield at Gettysburg. And any doubts, any other further doubts on that score, I think you could have inferred from the election of 2004. There was every reason to believe that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had a chance because of the record that the Bush Administration had assembled in his first term, the botched liberation of Iraq, the paranoid devotion to the world wide war on terror, and a foreign war of course, is a lollipop that gets stuffed in the mouth of a possibly quarrelsome press, or restive electorate. It's under the guise of the war on terror we will subtract the civil liberties, we will constrict your freedoms and movements and so forth.
Kerry also could have talked about the mortgaging of the American future to foreign banks. In other words, there was every reason to believe that there would be a vigorous political argument over the course of the election campaign, possibly even a meaningful debate about the character of the American democracy in the shape of its respective future. The hope was short-lived. Kerry showed up in July at the Democratic nominee convention in Boston, stepped briskly on the stage, saluted the television cameras, and said that he was reporting for duty. And he then went on to present himself as an at heart, better Republican than George W. Bush. As well acquainted with the glory of money and the songs of Yale, but steadier in character, more temperate in disposition, more reasonable in judgment. A truer and more agreeable companion, better read, more widely travelled, a stronger fashion statement.
And it didn't work, and it deserved not to work because there was the sense from Kerry that he wished to be appointed to the office. Power is taken, not given. Kerry was a series of poses, on a surfboard, with schoolchildren, hunting ducks with a shotgun, but no difference in his policies towards the war in Iraq, towards the problem of medical insurance, towards the environment, towards education. No effort to align himself with organised labour, no call for a minimum wage, in other words, nothing in his campaign that would disturb the governors of the New York Stock Exchange.
And by early October, the campaign had resolved itself into a single question: which of the two candidates looked more heroic in the costume of a military action figure capable of defending the American fatherland against its mortal enemies? And President Bush proved to be a bigger hit in the role of Batman than did Senator Kerry in the role of Flash Gordon.
I come now to the question of the invincible American military empire. Bush in his second inaugural speech said (I quote) 'All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.' That is a serious misreading both of American history and the American character. Americans never have had much liking for what President John Quincy Adams in 1828 said 'Going abroad in search of monsters to destroy', and we've never had much liking for the heroics cherished by the ancient Romans and by the neo-conservative thinkers who surround the President.
Given a good or necessary reason to deploy the military virtues of courage and self-sacrifice, we can rise to the occasion of Bastione or Guadalcanal but as a general rule we don't poke around in the cannon's mouth for the Easter eggs of fame and fortune. And that given any choice in the matter, we prefer the civilian virtues, the fast shuffle, the smooth angle, the safe bet. The shortage of patriots during the Revolutionary war obliged the continental army to reward its seasonal help with a 160 acre gift of land. The troops who crossed the Delaware River with George Washington on Christmas Eve, 1776, completed their terms of service on New Year's Day, 1777. And they refused to march north to the battle of Princeton on January 3rd, until each of them had been paid $10, and $10 in gold. They were not accepting the scrip being passed around by the continental congress. $10 in gold before they would perform another six weeks of labour on the fields of honour.
President James Madison encountered similar difficulties in July, 1814, when a British Army arrived in Maryland, intent upon laying waste to the countryside. Madison issued a requisition for 93,500 militiamen from what were then eighteen American States. Approximately 6,000 volunteers showed up for the Battle of Bladensburg where they were promptly dispersed, in the words of a correspondent for a Philadelphia newspaper, 'like a flock of birds rising on the sound of a single gunshot.' In my own family I have some experience with this. My great-grandmother's grandfather was a man named Henry Dearborn and he was the Secretary of War in both Jefferson Administrations, and when Madison was elected President and became President in 1809, Dearborn was given the greatest gift in the patronage of a Federal government and he was made, at the age of sixty five, the Collector of Customs in the port of Boston, a truly magnificent opportunity for self-improvement, and he conducted his office from a tavern on Milk Street, one block from the docks at a round table. And in the centre of the round table there was an upturned top-hat. Top-hats were very much in fashion in the early part of the 19th century and he sat at the table in summer with a glass of madeira, in winter with a warming pot of rum. And arriving and departing ship captains placed in the top-hat, tokens of their appreciation and esteem. And this wonderful state of affairs lasted until an awful day in June of 1812 when a letter arrived from Madison and paragraph one appointed Dearborn Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army and paragraph two instructed him to move north and take Canada by September 10th.
There was no United States Army in 1812, there were various State militia. Although he had been a very fine middle-ranking officer in the Revolutionary war, Dearborn had no particular skill as a General, and in the long list of incompetent American Generals, Dearborn's name stands well near the top of the list. He lost, or failed to appear at every skirmish throughout the Fall, and finally managed to get to the southern shore of the St Lawrence River in February of 1813 in command of 2,000 New York militiamen. And he drew his sword and pointed north and gave the order to steer for victory and Montreal. Nobody moved. And after an awkward silence, a Captain stepped forward and said, ?General, I wish to make four points that perhaps you have overlooked. One: It is very cold and a bad day for boating. Two: The people on the other side of the river are our friends; it is they upon whom we depend for our livelihood and trade, and beside that, they have guns. Three: We are members of the New York State Militia, not the United States Army which as you know, General, does not exist, and therefore Four: In a word, we are not going. But you, Sir, are welcome to do so, you may cross at your leisure and if you do, goodbye, good luck and God speed.'
And Dearborn who was not by any means a born imperialist, saw the wisdom in each of these four points and turned sharply around, pointed his sword at Boston, resigned his commission and went back to the table, the top-hat and the warming pot of rum.
That is the American attitude, and it was true in the Civil War. The Sons of Liberty were as wary of the Civil War as they had been careful to avoid enlistment in the Revolutionary war and in the war of 1812. Once it was understood that the march on Richmond wasn't the holiday jaunt anticipated by the orators north of the Potomac, the Federal government was hard-pressed to find soldiers willing to trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath were stored. Between July, 1863 and April, 1865, the Lincoln Administration sent draft notices to a total of 776,000 men. 161,000 failed to report; 86,000 paid commutation fees, which is hiring a substitute which in today's money would have been about $3700; 73,000 provided substitutes, and 315,000 were examined and ruled exempt. And only 46,000 were herded into uniform.
The notion of a citizen army enthusiastically assembled under the flags of honour, duty, country emerged from the circumstances of the Second World War. America had been attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbour and by Germany in the Atlantic Ocean. Peace was not an option and the American people didn't need to be reminded by a clucking of newspaper columns that our enemies possessed weapons of mass destruction. They understood that the objectives were murderous, and the sense of a common purpose and a national identity bound together in a nucleus of war sustained the government's demand for 10-million conscripts in the years 1941-1945. But this forced structure collapsed under the weight of the lies told to the American people by three American Presidents trying to find a decent reason for the expedition to Vietnam. Our victory was declared inoperative in April 1975 and for the next quarter of a century when mustering the role of the all-volunteer army the recruiting officers took pains to liken it to a reality television show. Not the kind of outfit that takes casualties, a vocational school, a summer camp, a means of self-improvement for young men and women lacking the advantages of a decent education and health care, and foreign travel.
It had come to be understood that the Pentagon was in the advertising business projecting images of supreme power in sufficiently heavy calibres to shock a French intellectual and awe an American President. Nobody on the production staff was supposed to get hurt. That was a stated policy that is the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. And that recent events in Iraq have wrecked the sales pitch, which is why the Bush Administration is having a great deal of trouble finding recruits for the American supremacy. I have somewhere here a piece of paper that will say what we are now doing is offering prospective, boots-on-the-ground bonuses of $90,000 over three years, $20,000 in cash, $70,000 in supplemental benefits. Also the forgiveness of college loans, the promise of citizenship to foreign nationals, who now comprise 3% of the American army, the acceptance of older recruits, now eligible to the age of 39, a general lowering of the intellectual and physical requirements, wavers granted for poor test scores for chronic illness, in some instances for the disability of a criminal record; the chance of a generous pension and an opportunity to study the art of restaurant management. And yet despite the inducements and the Army?s annual $300,000 appropriation for a seductive advertising campaign, the ranks continue to dwindle and thin; the general speak of exhausted, degenerating, broken force levels, and recruiting officers give way to unmanly bouts of depression when they fail to enlist more than one soldier for every 120 prospects to whom they show the promotional brochures. And we now have a desertion rate that stands at 31% or 3.1% of the active inductions and of the new recruits coming into camp, 30% depart within six months of their arrival.
The point of going through that is to explain is a gloss on the Bush second and inaugural remark 'All the living tyranny and hopelessness can know' and so on, that the United States will. But the United States will, with what? It is a question that the Administration simply passes over in silence.
As to the religious superstition and the numbers of people who believe in the liberal truth of the Book of Revelations, at a press conference briefing in Washington last March, the National Association of Evangelicals declared its intent to lend a hand in the making of an American politics faithful to the will and abundant wisdom of God.
The pastors handed around a twelve-page manifesto for a Bible-based public policy entitled An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. And the first few sentences of their joint statements stand as fair indicators of the tone in which they describe the rest of the program. As follows:
We engage in public life because God created our first parents in his image and gave them dominion over the earth. We also engage in public life because Jesus is lord over every area of life. To restrict our stewardship to the private sphere would be to deny an important part of this dominion, and to functionally abandon it to the evil one. To restrict our political concerns to matters that touch only on the private and domestic spheres is to deny the all-encompassing lordship of Jesus.
And that is the kind of thinking that we have in Washington. I don't know where I mentioned this already but Bush is a born-again Christian, so is Tom De Lay, the majority leader in the House of Representatives, so is Condoleezza Rice, so are one hundred and thirty members of the House of Representatives. And by and large they take the point of view that we are all, or they are all on God's side, as is the United States of America, and the guarantee of terrible punishment for God's enemies combined with the assurance and the ending both happy and profitable for God's business associates provides the plaque for the left behind series of neo-Christian fables, thirteen volumes, sixty-two-million copies sold that have risen in popularity over the last ten years in concert with the spread of fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the resurrection of the militant Christ. The co-authors of the books, Tim La Hay, and Jerry P. Jenkins, tell the story of the rapture on that marvellous and forthcoming day when the sage shall be lifted suddenly to heaven and the damned shall writhe in pain. Like most of the prophets who have preceded them, they express their love of God by rejoicing in their hatred of man. Just as the Old Testament devotes many finely wrought phrases to the extermination of the Midionite, also to the butchering of all the people and fatted calves in Moab, La Hay and Jenkins give upward of eighty pages to the wholesale slaughter of apostates in Boston and Los Angeles. And you read the book and these are gays, blacks, secular humanists, liberals, New York newspaper columnists and so forth. And the twelfth book in the series delights in the spectacle of divine retribution at the battle of Armageddon and I quote: 'Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.'
So we have people, quite a few people, wandering around the United States with those notions in mind and the faith-based initiative descends upon the multitude in the glorious cloud of unknowing that over the last twenty years has engulfed vast tracts of the American mind in the fogs of superstition. It isn't only the fundamentalist crowd, it's also the challenges and the teaching of evolution mounted in forty three States, attested to by the ? Bush himself is reserving judgment as to whether evolution is a sound theory. There was a report actually by the Committee of Concerned Scientists last year about this time; it's sixty people, very eminent men and women in the United States of all scientific disciplines, physics, biology, medicine, the environment and so on, and the twenty Nobel Prizewinners among the signatories, and what they were saying was that when they were called to Washington to testify before a Congressional Committee or agency of government on scientific questions: environment, stem-cell research, climate change, the possibility of developing a miraculous cruise missile that can intercept incoming missiles in outer space, which is an entire fantasy, and on which we've already spent $150-billion; it doesn't work and it can't work, but it is a faith-based initiative. But when they come to testify, and if their testimony doesn't meet the ideological expectation on the other side of the microphone, they are dismissed. The Bush Administration doesn't really want to hear it. We have another condition which refers back to the sentences I read at the beginning of this talk about the history of Western Civilisations told in American schools is a general dumbing down of the American citizenry, and this is not an accident, and it is not a mistake. It's most of what passes for education in the United States deadens the desire for learning, the miserable results accurately reflects the miserable intent. And Woodrow Wilson was very clear on this in 1909; he was then the President of Princeton University, and he gave the annual speech in Trenton, to a Federation of High School teachers, and he says that what we want is one class of persons deserving of a liberal education, and a much larger class of persons fit to perform specific manual tasks. That was the intention in 1909 and that is still the practice. I mean the attempt is to bring into being a contented labour force that will not ask impertinent questions and will not learn how to think, because if you learn how to think and ask impertinent questions, then what would happen to the consumer market, what would happen to the political discourse, and ignorance is viewed as a natural resource, far more valuable to the prosperity of America than oil or timber.
Finally we have the media, and the media is content to tell fairytales. It considers itself ? I'm talking about the large mainstream media, and it looks upon itself as a function or servant of the government. There's less and less of a distinction between news and entertainment. Media doesn?t see how it serves any purpose to vilify President Bush as an ignorant lout forwarding freight for a rapacious oligarchy, when, if you think carefully, it's just as easy to see in him almost the entire catalogue of virtue, listed in the Boy Scout law: helpful, cheerful, courteous, friendly, obedient and clean.
I mean where is the profit in vain regret? And where is the joy to be gained by selling America short? This is the attitude. Somewhere the sun is shining and only a blind man doesn't look for the silver lining when clouds appear in skies of blue.
A month ago, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that among the anti-terrorism devices it acquired at a cost of $4.5-billion since September 11, few have proved effective. The radiation monitors of ship terminals can't differentiate between radiation emitted by a nuclear bomb and radiation seeping out of cat litter, ceramic tile, or a crate of bananas. The metal detectors at airports can't be trusted to notice a hand gun. Now when this news story comes out, the media does not indulge in the vice of sarcasm, simply nods wisely, says the country is in a moment of great peril and we must give the Homeland Security another $4.5-billion and hope that next time they'll get it right. It's our glory as a people to prefer the word to the deed, and the image of the thing in place of the thing itself. and we had a very fine example of that again within the last month, in the pages of Newsweek. On May 9th the magazine had published a brief bulletin anonymously sourced but government-sponsored, to the effect that the interrogators in the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed down the toilet a copy of the Qu'ran. The report provoked riots in Pakistan, Afghanistan and killed at least seventeen people. And by May 18th Newsweek was accepting the blame for any damage that might have been done to America's good name and reputation in the world.
Now this is to me an instance of great timidity on the part of the press, because the item had been given to Newsweek by the government, and then Newsweek is so nervous that it's only two sentences, they typed up the two sentences and then carried it back to the Pentagon and showed the Pentagon what they had written, and the Pentagon made no objection. That this kind of thing goes on has been known for over a year. I mean Harper's Magazine four months ago had a story coming out of London to the same effect. That here was suddenly a government official was responsible for the news, and the government changed its mind after seeing what happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And so did the editors stand on their right to free expression, did they observe that it was the American military occupation in Iraq, not Newsweek that was stirring up trouble among the Arabs? No. Never in life, the editors followed orders, fell on the grenade and took one for the team, which is the proper way to behave in a make-believe democracy: show the flag, blow the bugle, learn to see what isn?t there. Thank you.
Ramona Koval : Lewis Lapham, speaking at the opening event of the Sydney Writers' Festival at the Sydney Theatre in May this year.
There were also questions from the audience, and on Big Ideas here on ABC Radio National, we?ve got time for just a couple of them. The first was about what Lewis Lapham thought it would take to reinvigorate debate and dissent and political consciousness in the USA.
Lewis Lapham: For the last thirty-odd years we've had the belief that all the important decisions are made by the market, and your freedom comes to you from the market and from money. And the truth is that freedom is made by men, and it's made with politics. And we have been largely politically demobilised, I think, since the Reagan Administration.
If there is another terrorist attack on the United States, if we have another ? if somebody poisons a reservoir or sets off a bomb, or shoots down an airplane or assassinates a foreign politician, then I am afraid that the opposite would happen and would have an even more frightened, more punitive, less discussion. So I hope something happens first that will energise the store political consciousness in large numbers of people, but it's very, very hard to do with the electronic media, the bread and circuses that we are now amusing ourselves to death with.
Questioner: Referring to something which Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Saturday Evening Post a long time ago, at the end of 1929 in an essay: he was talking in terms of the Americas and Europe and he made the observation that while France was a land, England was a people, but he said of the United States it was harder to utter because it was an idea. Is America still an idea?
Lewis Lapham: I think it's losing that, I think Fitzgerald's right, but I think under the pressures of the last, say, fifty-odd years, which is when we begin to build the National Security State after the victory of World War II, we become more and more like our enemy, the Russians. People get more afraid to speak their minds, to laugh out loud, to laugh at themselves, the humour, if you read back through Harper's Magazine, which is one hundred and fifty years old and occasionally we do anthologies, where I read back through the writing of past years and you can see that there's a sense of humour that shows up in the '20s and in the '30s, even in the '40s, begins to change. And the voice becomes more frightened, not as willing to laugh at itself, not as generous. The jokes used to be the have-nots making the jokes about the haves, and now the jokes are the haves making fun of the have-nots as a paltry form of satire I think. And the idea also requires education. I mean where do you find the idea, part of it you find in the study of American history and the teaching of American history as a creed, or as an idea, as a very courageous story, they don?t teach it that way any more.
The other problem of course is television, because television tends to isolate people within their own niche of sensibility. You can sit there with your magic wand of a remote and only look at people just like yourself. So there's a loss of social capital.
Ramona Koval: As well as having been the Editor of Harper's Magazine for the past 30 years, Lewis Lapham has published numerous books of his essays; the most recent are Thirty Satires and Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy.
Guests on this program:
Lewis Lapham
Political and satirical writer; editor, US Harper's Magazine.
Publications:
Thirty Satires
Author: Lewis Lapham
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1565849868
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
Author: Lewis Lapham
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 1594200173
Sunday 16 October 2005
Lewis Lapham is the long-time editor of Harper's Magazine in the United States, as well as being a writer of political and satirical essays. In this address, given in May this year for the opening of the Sydney Writers Festival, Lewis Lapham delivers a stinging and trenchant critique of contemporary America.
His country, he says, has become a make-believe democracy because political debate and dissent is stifled, the media is compliant, and the population under-educated. His fundamental concern is with the loss of the democratic liberty to disagree and to question.
Ramona Koval : On ABC Radio National, this is Big Ideas. Hello, Ramona Koval.
Throughout this month on Big Ideas, I?m bringing you a range of writers and their perspectives on contemporary world affairs, politics, and culture. Today, a critique of American democracy from Lewis Lapham. He's the Editor of Harper's Magazine and he was in Australia earlier this year to deliver the keynote address that opened the Sydney Writers Festival. It?s this address that we're hearing today.
Lewis Lapham was born in San Francisco in 1935. He began his career as a newspaper reporter for The San Francisco Examiner, and The New York Herald Tribune. He's been the Editor of Harper's Magazine for the past thirty years and as well he's written several books of essays, including Money and Class in America, Theatre of War, Thirty Satires, and Gag Rule: On the suppression of dissent and the stifling of democracy. So you'll get a sense from those titles of where he's coming from. His fundamental concern is with the loss of the democratic liberty to disagree.
Of course he's speaking about the United States of America, but plenty of what he's saying has resonances for democratic societies around the globe right now. So here's Lewis Lapham from the Sydney Writers Festival.
Lewis Lapham: Well I'm honoured and flattered and delighted to be here. I wish I was the bearer of glad tidings and good news. And I don't really know how to begin talking about the current situation in the United States, but I thought I'd read a few passages from senior High School and College examination papers and essays. Various Professors of History collect these remarks and send them to the magazine and every three or four years we publish a small anthology, and I have saved some of the ones that please me the most. These are a fair indication of the state of the American mind at the moment.
This is a history of civilisation as told in a collection of College and high level High School students:
Civilisation woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago. Flooding was erotic.
David was a fictional character in the Bible who pleased the people with his many erections and saved them from a tax by the Philippines.
Religion was polyphonic. Featured were gods such as Herod, Mars and Juice.
The Greeks invented three kinds of columns: Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
Plato invented reality. Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle. Archimedes made the first steamboat and power drill.
Rome was founded sometime by Uncle Remus and Wolf.
Neoplatonists celebrated the joys of self-abuse.
A German soldier put Rome in a sack. During the Dark Ages it was mostly dark.
Machiavelli who was often unemployed wrote The Prince to get a job with Richard Nixon.
Ivan the Terrible started life as a child, a fact that troubled his later personality.
The government of England was a limited mockery. When Queen Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted, Hurrah! Then her Navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.
When the Davey Jones index crashed in 1929, many people were left to political incineration.
The USSR and the USA became global in power, but Europe remained incontinent.
We in all humidity are the people of current times. This concept grinds our critical seething minds to a halt.
That is a fairly accurate description of the Bush Administration's foreign policy. And I tend to bear the last remark about grinding to a seething halt when I contemplate the canvas of the American political theatre and a popular culture enchanted by the magic of celebrity. The delusional is no longer marginal, and in no particular order, we have the last two Presidential elections were probably stolen. The party in power, the Republican party, is determined on regime change, but regime change within the United States, not so much in Iraq or Afghanistan.
We live in a civilisation in the United States where the number of people who believe in the literal truth in the Book of Revelations, exceeds the number of people who live in all of mediaeval Christendom.
The American War against the Intellect, by which I mean the drug trade, television, the pornographic film industry and so on, is now worth anywhere between $500-billion and a trillion dollars a year. In other words, it's a more expensive undertaking than our military establishment. Our leading export at the moment is money. We borrow $4-billion a day in order to, well, the position is, that our global war on terror is being funded by the People?s Republic of China, and the war itself is to my mind, a futile enterprise. It would be like having a war on lust. It's a war against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.
Facts are not as important as the ways in which the facts are presented and perceived, and certainly that matter has been the lesson of the last three or four years with the weapons of mass destruction, among other fictions which under the foreign policy is conducted in the same way that some of our high-end financial frauds have been conducted over the last several years. And we have a make-believe democracy, and we have a make-believe military empire, I think. I'm here to tell you that the hegemon has feet of clay. And I'm going to make remarks under a number of headings.
One is the notion of democracy. I went to Washington for the opening of the 109th Congress in January this year and I was impressed by the sense of a military encampment on Capitol Hill. To approach the Capitol building is to approach an entrenched position. There were as many as fifty armed men in black uniforms standing around; helicopters overhead; barricades blocking every conceivable approach. And the impression was that of a mediaeval walled town, preoccupied with its own weakness and fear, and well before I reached the last fortified checkpoint, I knew that the notion of a government by the people, for the people, and of the people, wasn't the kind of things likely to meet with the approval of the metal detectors.
And then once inside the Senate Chamber, it's a vivid impression. The media like to talk about the nation's piebald character, the democracy made of jumbled together, wonderful diversity of colour, creed, cultural dispensation, and it's a swell story, but in the United States Senate it is not one that is visible to the naked eye. I was in the Press Gallery and it gives you an occasion to study from a distance of about twenty feet, the collection of faces, as if I were looking at portrait busts in the statuary hall, and even at that privileged distance, it was hard to imagine any of the members present finding the time to write his or her own speech, much less taking the trouble to read through the 3,000 pages of the Federal Budget that distributes an annual appropriation of $2-trillion.
These are people comfortably settled in their flesh, wearing expensive suits, all but a few of them white, of the executive class, the kind of people you expect to see on the Admissions Committee at a golf course. Nothing in their manner suggested a shred of difference in their preconceptions and modus operandi. Red steak, beefsteak, Old Testament, New Testament, popular assembly oligarchic junta, why argue the details as long as everybody knows how and when to count the money.
It has been an oppressive program that the majority Republican party has been pushing through the Congress over the last several years, and they make no secret of their intention to pass more laws limiting the freedom of individuals and fewer laws restraining the freedoms of property, and this is the premise that underlies the legislation that has to do with medical insurance, the environment, military budget, the reformulation of the tax code and the one belief despite occasional factional differences, that there is the sound and bedrock opinion that money is good for rich people and bad for poor people.
I came away feeling that we had already lost the war on terror. The fearfulness of the people in the Congress, the Democratic minority afraid to utter much more than a squeak of objection. The rules have been changed in the House of Representatives so that there is no floor debate permitted on a resolution brought by the Republican Caucus. Congressional requests for information from the Executive agencies of government, from the Pentagon about the cost of weapons, or about the $10-billion that the Halliburton companies somehow lost in the sand in Iraq, or the intentions of the Justice Department with regards to its policies on torture and the detention of enemy combatants, or on the heightened and ratcheted up degrees of surveillance permitted to the FBI which is now allowed to tap anybody's phone, read anybody's mail and as of about three weeks ago, to go through anybody's financial records. And unable to get even a piece of paper out of the Executive, the Congressional Democrats are forced to file lawsuits in order to discover how the government for which they're held responsible, conducts itself behind closed doors.
And the impression was again made more vivid to me because during that same week the Capitol was preparing for the inauguration of President Bush, and the fortifications around the Capitol were again mediaeval. On the day that the President was inaugurated there were 10,000 uniformed police or military on or around the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue. People that wished to protest or object were kept in cages, sometimes two or three blocks from the parade, so as to be invisible to the cameras.
So from my point of view, maybe it's still worth the trouble to wonder why or how or when the American democracy lost its footing in Hollywood or in Washington, but the historical fact is I think no more open to dispute than the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet or the disappearance of Sickles' brigade in the wheatfield at Gettysburg. And any doubts, any other further doubts on that score, I think you could have inferred from the election of 2004. There was every reason to believe that the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, had a chance because of the record that the Bush Administration had assembled in his first term, the botched liberation of Iraq, the paranoid devotion to the world wide war on terror, and a foreign war of course, is a lollipop that gets stuffed in the mouth of a possibly quarrelsome press, or restive electorate. It's under the guise of the war on terror we will subtract the civil liberties, we will constrict your freedoms and movements and so forth.
Kerry also could have talked about the mortgaging of the American future to foreign banks. In other words, there was every reason to believe that there would be a vigorous political argument over the course of the election campaign, possibly even a meaningful debate about the character of the American democracy in the shape of its respective future. The hope was short-lived. Kerry showed up in July at the Democratic nominee convention in Boston, stepped briskly on the stage, saluted the television cameras, and said that he was reporting for duty. And he then went on to present himself as an at heart, better Republican than George W. Bush. As well acquainted with the glory of money and the songs of Yale, but steadier in character, more temperate in disposition, more reasonable in judgment. A truer and more agreeable companion, better read, more widely travelled, a stronger fashion statement.
And it didn't work, and it deserved not to work because there was the sense from Kerry that he wished to be appointed to the office. Power is taken, not given. Kerry was a series of poses, on a surfboard, with schoolchildren, hunting ducks with a shotgun, but no difference in his policies towards the war in Iraq, towards the problem of medical insurance, towards the environment, towards education. No effort to align himself with organised labour, no call for a minimum wage, in other words, nothing in his campaign that would disturb the governors of the New York Stock Exchange.
And by early October, the campaign had resolved itself into a single question: which of the two candidates looked more heroic in the costume of a military action figure capable of defending the American fatherland against its mortal enemies? And President Bush proved to be a bigger hit in the role of Batman than did Senator Kerry in the role of Flash Gordon.
I come now to the question of the invincible American military empire. Bush in his second inaugural speech said (I quote) 'All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.' That is a serious misreading both of American history and the American character. Americans never have had much liking for what President John Quincy Adams in 1828 said 'Going abroad in search of monsters to destroy', and we've never had much liking for the heroics cherished by the ancient Romans and by the neo-conservative thinkers who surround the President.
Given a good or necessary reason to deploy the military virtues of courage and self-sacrifice, we can rise to the occasion of Bastione or Guadalcanal but as a general rule we don't poke around in the cannon's mouth for the Easter eggs of fame and fortune. And that given any choice in the matter, we prefer the civilian virtues, the fast shuffle, the smooth angle, the safe bet. The shortage of patriots during the Revolutionary war obliged the continental army to reward its seasonal help with a 160 acre gift of land. The troops who crossed the Delaware River with George Washington on Christmas Eve, 1776, completed their terms of service on New Year's Day, 1777. And they refused to march north to the battle of Princeton on January 3rd, until each of them had been paid $10, and $10 in gold. They were not accepting the scrip being passed around by the continental congress. $10 in gold before they would perform another six weeks of labour on the fields of honour.
President James Madison encountered similar difficulties in July, 1814, when a British Army arrived in Maryland, intent upon laying waste to the countryside. Madison issued a requisition for 93,500 militiamen from what were then eighteen American States. Approximately 6,000 volunteers showed up for the Battle of Bladensburg where they were promptly dispersed, in the words of a correspondent for a Philadelphia newspaper, 'like a flock of birds rising on the sound of a single gunshot.' In my own family I have some experience with this. My great-grandmother's grandfather was a man named Henry Dearborn and he was the Secretary of War in both Jefferson Administrations, and when Madison was elected President and became President in 1809, Dearborn was given the greatest gift in the patronage of a Federal government and he was made, at the age of sixty five, the Collector of Customs in the port of Boston, a truly magnificent opportunity for self-improvement, and he conducted his office from a tavern on Milk Street, one block from the docks at a round table. And in the centre of the round table there was an upturned top-hat. Top-hats were very much in fashion in the early part of the 19th century and he sat at the table in summer with a glass of madeira, in winter with a warming pot of rum. And arriving and departing ship captains placed in the top-hat, tokens of their appreciation and esteem. And this wonderful state of affairs lasted until an awful day in June of 1812 when a letter arrived from Madison and paragraph one appointed Dearborn Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army and paragraph two instructed him to move north and take Canada by September 10th.
There was no United States Army in 1812, there were various State militia. Although he had been a very fine middle-ranking officer in the Revolutionary war, Dearborn had no particular skill as a General, and in the long list of incompetent American Generals, Dearborn's name stands well near the top of the list. He lost, or failed to appear at every skirmish throughout the Fall, and finally managed to get to the southern shore of the St Lawrence River in February of 1813 in command of 2,000 New York militiamen. And he drew his sword and pointed north and gave the order to steer for victory and Montreal. Nobody moved. And after an awkward silence, a Captain stepped forward and said, ?General, I wish to make four points that perhaps you have overlooked. One: It is very cold and a bad day for boating. Two: The people on the other side of the river are our friends; it is they upon whom we depend for our livelihood and trade, and beside that, they have guns. Three: We are members of the New York State Militia, not the United States Army which as you know, General, does not exist, and therefore Four: In a word, we are not going. But you, Sir, are welcome to do so, you may cross at your leisure and if you do, goodbye, good luck and God speed.'
And Dearborn who was not by any means a born imperialist, saw the wisdom in each of these four points and turned sharply around, pointed his sword at Boston, resigned his commission and went back to the table, the top-hat and the warming pot of rum.
That is the American attitude, and it was true in the Civil War. The Sons of Liberty were as wary of the Civil War as they had been careful to avoid enlistment in the Revolutionary war and in the war of 1812. Once it was understood that the march on Richmond wasn't the holiday jaunt anticipated by the orators north of the Potomac, the Federal government was hard-pressed to find soldiers willing to trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath were stored. Between July, 1863 and April, 1865, the Lincoln Administration sent draft notices to a total of 776,000 men. 161,000 failed to report; 86,000 paid commutation fees, which is hiring a substitute which in today's money would have been about $3700; 73,000 provided substitutes, and 315,000 were examined and ruled exempt. And only 46,000 were herded into uniform.
The notion of a citizen army enthusiastically assembled under the flags of honour, duty, country emerged from the circumstances of the Second World War. America had been attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbour and by Germany in the Atlantic Ocean. Peace was not an option and the American people didn't need to be reminded by a clucking of newspaper columns that our enemies possessed weapons of mass destruction. They understood that the objectives were murderous, and the sense of a common purpose and a national identity bound together in a nucleus of war sustained the government's demand for 10-million conscripts in the years 1941-1945. But this forced structure collapsed under the weight of the lies told to the American people by three American Presidents trying to find a decent reason for the expedition to Vietnam. Our victory was declared inoperative in April 1975 and for the next quarter of a century when mustering the role of the all-volunteer army the recruiting officers took pains to liken it to a reality television show. Not the kind of outfit that takes casualties, a vocational school, a summer camp, a means of self-improvement for young men and women lacking the advantages of a decent education and health care, and foreign travel.
It had come to be understood that the Pentagon was in the advertising business projecting images of supreme power in sufficiently heavy calibres to shock a French intellectual and awe an American President. Nobody on the production staff was supposed to get hurt. That was a stated policy that is the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. And that recent events in Iraq have wrecked the sales pitch, which is why the Bush Administration is having a great deal of trouble finding recruits for the American supremacy. I have somewhere here a piece of paper that will say what we are now doing is offering prospective, boots-on-the-ground bonuses of $90,000 over three years, $20,000 in cash, $70,000 in supplemental benefits. Also the forgiveness of college loans, the promise of citizenship to foreign nationals, who now comprise 3% of the American army, the acceptance of older recruits, now eligible to the age of 39, a general lowering of the intellectual and physical requirements, wavers granted for poor test scores for chronic illness, in some instances for the disability of a criminal record; the chance of a generous pension and an opportunity to study the art of restaurant management. And yet despite the inducements and the Army?s annual $300,000 appropriation for a seductive advertising campaign, the ranks continue to dwindle and thin; the general speak of exhausted, degenerating, broken force levels, and recruiting officers give way to unmanly bouts of depression when they fail to enlist more than one soldier for every 120 prospects to whom they show the promotional brochures. And we now have a desertion rate that stands at 31% or 3.1% of the active inductions and of the new recruits coming into camp, 30% depart within six months of their arrival.
The point of going through that is to explain is a gloss on the Bush second and inaugural remark 'All the living tyranny and hopelessness can know' and so on, that the United States will. But the United States will, with what? It is a question that the Administration simply passes over in silence.
As to the religious superstition and the numbers of people who believe in the liberal truth of the Book of Revelations, at a press conference briefing in Washington last March, the National Association of Evangelicals declared its intent to lend a hand in the making of an American politics faithful to the will and abundant wisdom of God.
The pastors handed around a twelve-page manifesto for a Bible-based public policy entitled An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. And the first few sentences of their joint statements stand as fair indicators of the tone in which they describe the rest of the program. As follows:
We engage in public life because God created our first parents in his image and gave them dominion over the earth. We also engage in public life because Jesus is lord over every area of life. To restrict our stewardship to the private sphere would be to deny an important part of this dominion, and to functionally abandon it to the evil one. To restrict our political concerns to matters that touch only on the private and domestic spheres is to deny the all-encompassing lordship of Jesus.
And that is the kind of thinking that we have in Washington. I don't know where I mentioned this already but Bush is a born-again Christian, so is Tom De Lay, the majority leader in the House of Representatives, so is Condoleezza Rice, so are one hundred and thirty members of the House of Representatives. And by and large they take the point of view that we are all, or they are all on God's side, as is the United States of America, and the guarantee of terrible punishment for God's enemies combined with the assurance and the ending both happy and profitable for God's business associates provides the plaque for the left behind series of neo-Christian fables, thirteen volumes, sixty-two-million copies sold that have risen in popularity over the last ten years in concert with the spread of fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the resurrection of the militant Christ. The co-authors of the books, Tim La Hay, and Jerry P. Jenkins, tell the story of the rapture on that marvellous and forthcoming day when the sage shall be lifted suddenly to heaven and the damned shall writhe in pain. Like most of the prophets who have preceded them, they express their love of God by rejoicing in their hatred of man. Just as the Old Testament devotes many finely wrought phrases to the extermination of the Midionite, also to the butchering of all the people and fatted calves in Moab, La Hay and Jenkins give upward of eighty pages to the wholesale slaughter of apostates in Boston and Los Angeles. And you read the book and these are gays, blacks, secular humanists, liberals, New York newspaper columnists and so forth. And the twelfth book in the series delights in the spectacle of divine retribution at the battle of Armageddon and I quote: 'Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.'
So we have people, quite a few people, wandering around the United States with those notions in mind and the faith-based initiative descends upon the multitude in the glorious cloud of unknowing that over the last twenty years has engulfed vast tracts of the American mind in the fogs of superstition. It isn't only the fundamentalist crowd, it's also the challenges and the teaching of evolution mounted in forty three States, attested to by the ? Bush himself is reserving judgment as to whether evolution is a sound theory. There was a report actually by the Committee of Concerned Scientists last year about this time; it's sixty people, very eminent men and women in the United States of all scientific disciplines, physics, biology, medicine, the environment and so on, and the twenty Nobel Prizewinners among the signatories, and what they were saying was that when they were called to Washington to testify before a Congressional Committee or agency of government on scientific questions: environment, stem-cell research, climate change, the possibility of developing a miraculous cruise missile that can intercept incoming missiles in outer space, which is an entire fantasy, and on which we've already spent $150-billion; it doesn't work and it can't work, but it is a faith-based initiative. But when they come to testify, and if their testimony doesn't meet the ideological expectation on the other side of the microphone, they are dismissed. The Bush Administration doesn't really want to hear it. We have another condition which refers back to the sentences I read at the beginning of this talk about the history of Western Civilisations told in American schools is a general dumbing down of the American citizenry, and this is not an accident, and it is not a mistake. It's most of what passes for education in the United States deadens the desire for learning, the miserable results accurately reflects the miserable intent. And Woodrow Wilson was very clear on this in 1909; he was then the President of Princeton University, and he gave the annual speech in Trenton, to a Federation of High School teachers, and he says that what we want is one class of persons deserving of a liberal education, and a much larger class of persons fit to perform specific manual tasks. That was the intention in 1909 and that is still the practice. I mean the attempt is to bring into being a contented labour force that will not ask impertinent questions and will not learn how to think, because if you learn how to think and ask impertinent questions, then what would happen to the consumer market, what would happen to the political discourse, and ignorance is viewed as a natural resource, far more valuable to the prosperity of America than oil or timber.
Finally we have the media, and the media is content to tell fairytales. It considers itself ? I'm talking about the large mainstream media, and it looks upon itself as a function or servant of the government. There's less and less of a distinction between news and entertainment. Media doesn?t see how it serves any purpose to vilify President Bush as an ignorant lout forwarding freight for a rapacious oligarchy, when, if you think carefully, it's just as easy to see in him almost the entire catalogue of virtue, listed in the Boy Scout law: helpful, cheerful, courteous, friendly, obedient and clean.
I mean where is the profit in vain regret? And where is the joy to be gained by selling America short? This is the attitude. Somewhere the sun is shining and only a blind man doesn't look for the silver lining when clouds appear in skies of blue.
A month ago, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that among the anti-terrorism devices it acquired at a cost of $4.5-billion since September 11, few have proved effective. The radiation monitors of ship terminals can't differentiate between radiation emitted by a nuclear bomb and radiation seeping out of cat litter, ceramic tile, or a crate of bananas. The metal detectors at airports can't be trusted to notice a hand gun. Now when this news story comes out, the media does not indulge in the vice of sarcasm, simply nods wisely, says the country is in a moment of great peril and we must give the Homeland Security another $4.5-billion and hope that next time they'll get it right. It's our glory as a people to prefer the word to the deed, and the image of the thing in place of the thing itself. and we had a very fine example of that again within the last month, in the pages of Newsweek. On May 9th the magazine had published a brief bulletin anonymously sourced but government-sponsored, to the effect that the interrogators in the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed down the toilet a copy of the Qu'ran. The report provoked riots in Pakistan, Afghanistan and killed at least seventeen people. And by May 18th Newsweek was accepting the blame for any damage that might have been done to America's good name and reputation in the world.
Now this is to me an instance of great timidity on the part of the press, because the item had been given to Newsweek by the government, and then Newsweek is so nervous that it's only two sentences, they typed up the two sentences and then carried it back to the Pentagon and showed the Pentagon what they had written, and the Pentagon made no objection. That this kind of thing goes on has been known for over a year. I mean Harper's Magazine four months ago had a story coming out of London to the same effect. That here was suddenly a government official was responsible for the news, and the government changed its mind after seeing what happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And so did the editors stand on their right to free expression, did they observe that it was the American military occupation in Iraq, not Newsweek that was stirring up trouble among the Arabs? No. Never in life, the editors followed orders, fell on the grenade and took one for the team, which is the proper way to behave in a make-believe democracy: show the flag, blow the bugle, learn to see what isn?t there. Thank you.
Ramona Koval : Lewis Lapham, speaking at the opening event of the Sydney Writers' Festival at the Sydney Theatre in May this year.
There were also questions from the audience, and on Big Ideas here on ABC Radio National, we?ve got time for just a couple of them. The first was about what Lewis Lapham thought it would take to reinvigorate debate and dissent and political consciousness in the USA.
Lewis Lapham: For the last thirty-odd years we've had the belief that all the important decisions are made by the market, and your freedom comes to you from the market and from money. And the truth is that freedom is made by men, and it's made with politics. And we have been largely politically demobilised, I think, since the Reagan Administration.
If there is another terrorist attack on the United States, if we have another ? if somebody poisons a reservoir or sets off a bomb, or shoots down an airplane or assassinates a foreign politician, then I am afraid that the opposite would happen and would have an even more frightened, more punitive, less discussion. So I hope something happens first that will energise the store political consciousness in large numbers of people, but it's very, very hard to do with the electronic media, the bread and circuses that we are now amusing ourselves to death with.
Questioner: Referring to something which Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Saturday Evening Post a long time ago, at the end of 1929 in an essay: he was talking in terms of the Americas and Europe and he made the observation that while France was a land, England was a people, but he said of the United States it was harder to utter because it was an idea. Is America still an idea?
Lewis Lapham: I think it's losing that, I think Fitzgerald's right, but I think under the pressures of the last, say, fifty-odd years, which is when we begin to build the National Security State after the victory of World War II, we become more and more like our enemy, the Russians. People get more afraid to speak their minds, to laugh out loud, to laugh at themselves, the humour, if you read back through Harper's Magazine, which is one hundred and fifty years old and occasionally we do anthologies, where I read back through the writing of past years and you can see that there's a sense of humour that shows up in the '20s and in the '30s, even in the '40s, begins to change. And the voice becomes more frightened, not as willing to laugh at itself, not as generous. The jokes used to be the have-nots making the jokes about the haves, and now the jokes are the haves making fun of the have-nots as a paltry form of satire I think. And the idea also requires education. I mean where do you find the idea, part of it you find in the study of American history and the teaching of American history as a creed, or as an idea, as a very courageous story, they don?t teach it that way any more.
The other problem of course is television, because television tends to isolate people within their own niche of sensibility. You can sit there with your magic wand of a remote and only look at people just like yourself. So there's a loss of social capital.
Ramona Koval: As well as having been the Editor of Harper's Magazine for the past 30 years, Lewis Lapham has published numerous books of his essays; the most recent are Thirty Satires and Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy.
Guests on this program:
Lewis Lapham
Political and satirical writer; editor, US Harper's Magazine.
Publications:
Thirty Satires
Author: Lewis Lapham
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1565849868
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy
Author: Lewis Lapham
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 1594200173
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