DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 6/11/04

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REMEMBERING RON

The maudlin spasm that has gripped our country since Ronald Reagan's death is a natural and appropriate requiem for the man who perfected sentimentality as an instrument of power. The first step in such a program is to privilege feeling, which flows more or less automatically when the right stimulus is applied, over thought, which is slow and taxing and likely to raise awkward questions. Reagan understood from his own experience the power of the emotional reflex: he is said to have wept at his own campaign commercials, and he knew that a few simple images (say, a sunstruck cornfield with stars and stripes dissolving in), if coupled with the right music (Stephen Foster? Sousa?) and the right slogan ("It's morning in America"), could evoke a swelling in the throat that would cut off blood to the brain before it thought to ask about the decline in real wages or the wisdom of subverting democratic regimes in Central America.

One of the missions of sentimentality is to make us feel better, a palatable alternative to actually becoming better or having to face unpleasant reality. According to Reagan's daughter Patti Davis (Boston Globe, 6/7), her father addressed the children's grief over a dead bird by "explaining that birds continue to fly in heaven after death." Though we must grant a man the right to lay such dubious treacle on his own family, fairy tales of this sort have no place in political discourse. But Reagan's paternalism observed no boundaries, and the public remained, for the most part, as credulous as a five-year-old. When people worried about the lack of nutrition in school lunches, Reagan "explained" that ketchup was a vegetable. When people worried about the smoke from factories and power plants, he "explained" that trees were the real cause of pollution. When people worried about the enormous arms buildup, he "explained" that he would develop a missile defense system to keep them safe. (No doubt a battalion of dead eagles, trained as interceptors and commanded by God himself, would be dispatched at the critical moment.)

Much ink has been spilled in the past week over whether George W. Bush is Reagan's spiritual heir. To me, the case seems open and shut. Who but Reagan, by unleashing a U.S. armada against a pathetic Caribbean microdot, taught Bush the political value of an unnecessary war on a pushover enemy? Who but Reagan, with his denigration of government and his rambling fables about welfare queens, laid the groundwork for Bush's tax-cutting rhetoric and its callous subtext? Who but Reagan, in meticulously scripted formal appearances such as the D-Day speech and in equally staged "informal" ones out at the ranch, showed that image trumps everything and thus paved the way for the carrier landing and similar Rovian phantasmagoria? If we now have government by son-et-lumiere, we are much indebted to Ronald Reagan for the show; and if we are led by people who display contempt for the truth every time they open their mouths, we can thank the Gipper for setting the trend.

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One of America's most cherished myths about itself is that its excursions abroad are invariably disinterested and benign. When we go, we go not to dominate and exploit but to bring, as missionaries of democracy, the gift of our own goodness to backward parts. Even as he lobbied for the annexation of the Philippines, Teddy Roosevelt insisted that there was not an imperialist to be found among us. The Filipinos were skeptical, and some 200,000 resistance fighters laid down their lives, taking 4234 American soldiers with them, before U.S. rule was firmly established in 1903. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire (Henry Holt, 2004), the spectators most impressed by our "liberation" of the Philippines--and by the ideas of racial superiority and manifest destiny that we used to rationalize it--were the Japanese, who learned their lesson so well that they began applying it throughout East Asia three decades later.

Chalmers Johnson will never become president of the United States: he is not optimistic enough. Unlike the upbeat warriors Reagan and Bush, he declines to believe that scattering cluster bombs and installing puppet governments in faraway lands will have a happy ending. In Blowback (written before 9/11 and reviewed in Dead Parrot #19), he parsed American foreign policy in light of the maxim that one reaps what one sows. The new book takes the same inescapable premise and develops it in greater scope and depth, incorporating the richly depressing material that the past three years have provided.

The key to Johnson's argument is that empire in the American mode is in fact different from empires past. It is an empire not of colonies but of military bases--725 of them, by the Pentagon's own reckoning, outside of the territorial United States. These bases are both a projection of and a self-perpetuating justification for U.S. militarism. While they assert our power on every continent, their insatiable need for men and equipment creates a suction that deeply deforms our society and its economy; and the provocation that they present to those who resent our presence foments the troubles that in turn provide the rationale for more bases, more men, and more materiel. Pretty as it would be to believe that we are garrisoning bastions of freedom, the fact is that we are delighted to cut basing deals with the most corrupt and tyrannous dictators. Our cultivation of Saddam Hussein in the 1980's and subsequent disenchantment with him have taught us nothing; for the sake of an air base at Khanabad, President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, whose human rights record rivals Saddam's, is entertained at the White House. With his reputation for boiling dissidents alive, Karimov can promise a quiet environment. Perhaps our ideal base, however, is Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, which has no local population to raise a ruckus: the British deported all of them prior to turning the island over to us.

One of Johnson's strongest chapters is his examination of the war in Iraq. One by one, he considers both the administration's own talking points and critics' interpretations of the actual motives. Conceding that several missions--to secure oil supplies, to appease Israel, and to turn war fever to domestic political advantage--were important, Johnson argues that the fundamental impetus was systemic momentum--"the inexorable pressures of imperialism and militarism." To underline the point, he quotes a prescient column by Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled? Because we won't be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East..."

That empire is a sorrowful business for the subject peoples hardly needs to be demonstrated. The point toward which Johnson drives his book is that it will ultimately prove a misery for the imperial power. In his final chapter, he lists four "sorrows" that he considers likely to end our country's history as a constitutional republic: 1) a state of perpetual war, fueled by fear, grievance, revenge, and profit-taking; 2) an erosion of democracy and constitutional rights; 3) a poisoning of public discourse by propaganda, disinformation, and jingoism; 4) the impoverishment of our way of life as military spending drags us toward fiscal collapse. Johnson provides detailed illustration of all these trends, and newspapers bring fresh tidings every day. What will the optimists do when they awake one morning to find their famous half-full glass lying shattered on the floor?