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Chronicles of Ozymandias

America to the World: Get Used to the Dog Leash

By Peter Pappas

This is the first in an occasional series.

…Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Well, America, you asked for it. You wanted four more years, and you got them. The problem is, so did everybody else.

Whatever else this election is, and whatever else it hides behind its ugly validations, it is clearly a declaration of war—obviously, the most pointed one since 1860. Even in 1860, however, Lincoln could not manage a majority; indeed, he failed to fully gather in 40 percent of the electorate behind him. Still, 144 years ago, we at least had the fundamental decency to declare war on ourselves—and in the name of finally eradicating the most egregious perversion of our constitutional purpose.

Ghostwriting America’s declaration of itself to the world, Jefferson famously stated that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” compels every nation not only to defend its actions but to explain its very existence. Of course, that was then and this is now, and one of the sorrows of empire has historically been the inevitable decadence of succeeding generations of imperial leadership. Ironically, it was also Jefferson who, in a letter to Madison, notoriously described the future of this country as an “empire for liberty.” More ominously, he added, “no Constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.” Extensive empire and self-government? Even if, for the moment, we ignore the Hamiltonian contradictions at the heart of that constitutional “calculation,” it begs the question of electors and elected, and of representatives and their representations—specifically, of the empire’s emperors and how they got there.

The descent from Jefferson to George W. Bush is, of course, an object lesson in historical entropy and constitutional degradation—a paradigm not so much of loss as of dissolution. The United States is the only Western nation that has wittingly decided to exchange the Enlightenment (which engendered it as a society) for an obscurantism that is as willful as it is unforgiving, and from which its founders would have recoiled in genuine revulsion. Empire is bad enough on any definition, but to go from an “empire for liberty” (whatever that might possibly mean) to an empire of fear is a radical corrosion.

Under the circumstances—I don’t know how else to say this but honestly and plainly—although I’m an American (because I’m an American?), I don’t care any more about America itself, since America has put the world as a whole in peril. In the event, I think it’s my obligation, and the only way for me to salvage any dignity I might have left as a citizen of this country, to oppose it in the world since, through the combination of policy and—to use the DOD’s own self-consciously menacing term—lethality, the United States has manifestly made itself the most dangerous nation on the face of the planet and, quite literally, the mother of all rogue states.

Since I cannot love it, therefore, publicly or privately (and the latter inability is, by far, the more psychologically crippling)—in fact, since I now often despise everything it does and stands for—the only option is to leave it, if only because no one can remain sane living in an environment that feeds and reinforces and, in the end, imposes schizophrenia. My wife and I have made our choice (we made it long before the election, actually, fearing precisely the outcome that transpired), but the fact is that we have advantages—primarily a foreign passport—that most Americans don’t. We also don’t have children. We also have lived abroad before. You get the idea.

As for the accusation of “running away,” I made a point of remaining in New York after September 11. Indeed, I have stubbornly insisted on living in this city through almost four decades that included Harlem burning, virtual race war in the public schools, suburban flight, bankruptcy and financial control boards, friends and colleagues moving on to Berkeley or Princeton (or London, Paris, or Berlin) for graduate school, and worst of all, gentrification, real-estate-and-restaurant-worship, and the invasion of the body-snatching Euro-, Asian-Pacific, Latin American, African, and red-white-and-blue-state trash that became the new (and definitive) demographic of the New York Times.

At the end of it all, I’ve finally realized that what my wife has been trying to tell me for years is painfully true: Manhattan is not an imagined community but a state of delusion. In fact, it is what it itself has always said it was: the very definition of the “empire state,” the island at the center of a world dominion that, in the vision of Alexander Hamilton, would provide the capital and connivance to level continents. Today, it provides the (most shameless) camouflage for a remorseless imperial force whose only strategic logic is…itself, and, therefore, the global imposition of self-justifying and unending havoc. Running away? The truth is that the country has run away; it is indeed—clearly, indisputably, and finally, for all the world to see—out of control. And the most dangerous—and, for dissenting Americans, most dreadful—truth is that it can only be out of control for one of two reasons.

Strangely enough, the less damning one is that the majority of Americans simply don’t care any more about their own country, and merely view elections as just another reality show in which one votes for a favorite (Survivor: The White House, say, or The Amazing Race: Global Domination). Of course, most anti-democratic theorists, from Plato to the neocon’s favorite Platonist, Leo Strauss, have always railed against democratic stupidity. There is truth to the charge, and to the danger. The elitist answer to the question of what’s wrong with Kansas is always…Kansas.

Unfortunately, I think that’s the incorrect answer—or, rather, that the implication is false. The only other explanation for the election result is, by far, more pernicious and terrifying: namely, that the majority of Americans actually approves of and concurs with the policies heretofore or to be followed by George W. Bush and his minions. Assuming that democratic stupidity is not so much an intellectual failing as a moral one, then we’ve hit upon precisely those “moral values” that have catalyzed Mr. Bush’s electoral legions.

greekworks.com’s editorial right before the elections was titled, “It’s the Country, Stupid!” Well, yes, it is. Which means that the jig is finally up, and that—after 1968 and 1972, and 1980 and 1984, as well as 1976, and 1992 and 1996, and, last but far from least, 2000—the lay of the land, and the vista to the future, is clear to all but the blind.

Still, as I zapped from C-SPAN to PBS to ABC to CNN to MSNBC, and read through the newspaper of recorded announcements, in the immediate aftermath of the elections, I was struck by how the last thing the liberal mediacracy wanted to do was actually try to understand and (anything but that!) contend with the devastation wrought by the result—which, by the way and very distressingly, is far from final. When the history is written some day—as it will be—of this four-decades-long reactionary march through the institutions (and, more to the point, heartland) of this country, and the consequent unending retreat through these same institutions (and heartland) by America’s ever-optimistic, and blissfully unconscious, “progressives,” it will resemble Old Europe from 1918 to 1939 more than the United States from 1933 to 1968.

And lest I be accused of fear-mongering (a particularly inapt accusation under the present circumstances in the United States), or—more intelligently—ahistoricity, I would hasten to add that Robert O. Paxton, the distinguished historian of European (and especially French) fascism and Mellon professor emeritus at Columbia, warns in his recent work, The Anatomy of Fascism, against trying to deduce an “essence of fascism” and thus misanalyzing the phenomena that point to fascism in a particular political (and social) culture. Indeed, in an essay (“The Five Stages of Fascism,” March 1998) published in The Journal of Modern History before both George W. Bush’s initial “election” and, therefore, September 11, 2001, Paxton presciently wrote that:

…[E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy…not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms….

Paxton also stressed that democratic experience is, paradoxically, central to fascism, and that “…[f]ascism can appear wherever democracy is sufficiently implanted to have aroused disillusion.” That suggests, Paxton continued, that fascism has “spatial and temporal limits,” namely, “no authentic fascism before [my stress] the emergence of a massively enfranchised and politically active citizenry.” He concluded that, “In order to give birth to fascism, a society must have known political liberty—for better or for worse.”

“For better or for worse” is a particularly poignant way of summarizing our current democratic condition. “For better or for worse,” the time has come to wipe the scales from our eyes, and consign the myths of public life in America to the trash bin of our own self-deceptions and bitter disappointments. And we should also stop killing the messengers who bring us the news of our own incapacities and failures. It’s not John Kerry’s “fault,” in other words, for losing this election, just as it wasn’t Al Gore’s—let alone Ralph Nader’s—fault for losing the last one. Since 1964, the broad, social-democratic left (you will pardon me the Europeanism, but it is an infinitely more accurate term than the purposely mystifying American notion of “liberalism”) has been engaged in continual flight from the field of ideological and social battle, interspersed only by occasional holding actions and Pyrrhic tactical evasions—most notoriously under that brilliant evader himself, William Jefferson Clinton. The current expectation by the bedraggled and blood-soaked survivors of the latest Republican onslaught that Mr. Clinton’s spouse will be the Joan of Arc who will regroup and reinspire the shocked and awed troops of the Democratic party (if not quite the democracy itself) must make Karl Rove feel as if he is truly the Sword of God, and should make the rest of us tremble at the thought of the final, Biblical disaster that awaits.

On election night, I became physically incapable of continuing to watch the returns; the next day, I was, like so many people, depressed to the point of numbness; by Thursday, I can honestly say that I was functioning in what can only be described as an intellectual fog. On Friday, November 5, I turned to the op-ed page of the New York Times and read, from top left to bottom right: “Why They Won” by Thomas Frank; “Why We Lost” by Andrei Cherney; “O.K., Folks: Back To Work” by Bob Herbert; and, last but far from least, “No Surrender” by Paul Krugman. It was only then that I finally realized, that I understood, that that was that: there was no balm in Gilead. Quite the opposite, and to continue the ancient judgment, “in vain shalt thou use many medicines; [for] thou shalt not be cured.”

Suffice it to say here that the notions of “genuine economic populism” (Frank), “speak[ing] to Americans’ moral and spiritual yearnings” (Cherney), “help[ing] in political campaigns” and “vot[ing], vot[ing], vot[ing]” (Herbert), and “mobilizing their [the Democrats’] own base” (Krugman) are all analgesics (or even placebos) for symptomatic conditions. They are not, in any sense of the term, the massive treatment needed to eradicate the epidemic social pathology that has been spreading in this country with a particular virulence since 1980.

Between the time I began writing this article and the time I finished it, Alberto R. Gonzales was nominated to become attorney-general of the United States and a Marine in Fallujah shot to death a wounded prisoner in a mosque. Mr. Gonzales, of course, was the man who, as counselor to the POTUS, drafted what even the organically complicit New York Times referred to as that “ignoble memo” of January 25, 2002, which stated, among other things, that “this new paradigm”—i.e., George W. Bush’s war against the world—“renders quaint” some (in fact, most) of the provisions of the Geneva conventions. As for the execution (if I can call the thing by its real name) of that Iraqi prisoner in Fallujah, certain things, as they say, follow as night does day—or, rather, as midnight follows the setting of the sun. The time has truly come for us all to wake up and smell the corpses.