An Audible Silence | 1, 2, 3, 4

OR DID THE DOORKEEPERS of the national news and entertainment media need to be reminded that dissent was bad for business as well as un-American and wrong. The romance of war boosts ratings and sells advertisements, and once caught up in the glories of a tale told by Tom Clancy or Rudyard Kipling, the editors of responsible newspapers remove contraband opinion from the typescripts of known polemicists, and the producers of network talk shows decorate the studio chairs with generals who can read the maps. On the bright new morning of America's war against "all the world's evildoers," one that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld guessed might last as long as forty years, Dan Rather enlisted for the duration, proud to inform the viewers of the CBS Evening News that "George Bush is the president. Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where." Vanity Fair quarantined the tone of irony, as did the publishers of Time, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. Ted Koppel introduced his Nightline audience to Arundhati Roy, an Indian novelist critical of American foreign policy, with a word of caution: "Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen. But if you do, you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange packages."

Similarly worried about possible misinterpretation and alarmed by reports of a pacifist protest assembling somewhere in the streets of Georgetown, Peter Beinart, editor at The New Republic, advised the magazine's readers to beware the sins of ambiguity and doubt. "The nation," he said, "is now at war. And in such an environment, domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides." Erik Sorenson, president of MSNBC, explained the absence of on-camera talking heads opposed to the policies of the Bush administration by saying that he couldn't find any credible experts willing to make patently stupid or seditious arguments; to a reporter from The New York Times he said that apart from the ravings of a few Hollywood celebrities, there wasn't enough dissent in the country "to warrant coverage." The regiment of right-wing radio talk-show hosts under the command of captain Rush Limbaugh meanwhile pressed home its attacks on the writings of Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, and when it came time in late October to send the army to Afghanistan, the Pentagon's heavily censored film footage was gratefully received by news executives eager to bring urgent bulletins, every hour on the hour, from the frontiers of dread. If the dispatches from the few reporters actually on the ground in Kabul or Mazar-i-Sharif tended to present the Taliban as ragged fugitives -- lightly armed, often barefoot, their cause lost without a fight -- the editors in Washington and New York reinforced the adjectives, airbrushed out the footage of dogs devouring dead bodies on the road to Kunduz, dressed up the headlines with "monsters" and "diabolical henchmen" overseeing "a web of hate."

President Bush had informed the members of the United Nations on November 10 that civilization's War Against Barbarism didn't afford the luxury of diplomatic hesitation ("either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"), and by the end of November the big-time news and entertainment media were papering the broadcast booths with swaths of geopolitical commentary that went well with the waving of flags. The viewing audience wasn't expected to know what the words meant; it was supposed to listen to them in the way that schoolchildren listen to a military band playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" on the Washington Mall, or to Ray Charles singing "God Bless America" in Yankee Stadium.

If by Christmas Day the voices of dissent couldn't make it past the security guards at the White House or CNN, they could be heard plainly in the distance beyond the ropelines of consensus -- in literary journals of modest circulation, in the letters to the editors of the Washington Post or the New York Times, among a scattering of guests on National Public Radio, in the farther reaches of C-SPAN and the Internet. Sufficiently numerous to suggest the presence of a formidable minority, they were loud enough to raise the possibility of a genuine political argument about the character of the American commonwealth, well enough grounded in the lessons of American history to know that dissent is not a synonym for anarchy. Most simply understood, dissent consists of nothing else except the right to say no, to volunteer a second or third opinion; defined as another word for liberty, it is the freedom to conceive of the future as an empty canvas or a blank page, no further away than the next sentence, the next best guess, the next sketch for the painting of a life portrait that might or might not become a masterpiece.

Although not obliged to sign petitions or march in protests, dissent recruited to a public cause expresses its allegiance to country as the search for a better question and a straighter answer, what Archibald MacLeish understood to be the difference between a safe yes and an unwelcome no, and what Teddy Roosevelt had in mind in 1918 when he disagreed with President Woodrow Wilson's theory of World War I: "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public." Henry Steele Commager, the Columbia University historian and one of the very few American authors willing to exercise his First Amendment right to free speech during the McCarthy era, believed that a democracy worthy of the name depends for its existence upon the capacity of its citizens for what he called "moral agitation." Vilified in the jingo press as a "Communist" and "a termite undermining the Constitution," Commager in 1947 published in Harper's Magazine an essay, "Who Is Loyal to America?," that still deserves an attentive reading:

It is easier to say what loyalty is not than what it is. It is not conformity. It is not passive acquiescence to the status quo. It is not preference for everything American over everything foreign. It is not an ostrich-like ignorance of the other countries and other institutions. It is not the indulgence in ceremony -- a flag salute, an oath of allegiance, a fervid verbal declaration. It is not a particular creed, a particular vision of history, a particular body of economic practices, a particular philosophy.

It is a tradition, an ideal, and a principle. It is a willingness to subordinate every private advantage for the larger good. It is an appreciation of the rich and diverse contributions that can come from the most varied sources. It is allegiance to the traditions that have guided our greatest statesmen and inspired our most eloquent poets -- the traditions of freedom, equality, democracy, tolerance, and the tradition of Higher Law, of experimentation, cooperation, and pluralism. It is the realization that America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation.

The country was founded by dissenters. The Protestant signatories to the Mayflower Compact (that is, protesters) arrived in Massachusetts Bay with little else except a cargo of contraband words. Possessed of what they believed to be truthful refutations of the lies told by God's enemies in Rome and London, they settled the New England wilderness as an act of intellectual opposition framed on the premise of what they called "the quarrel with Providence." Within the provinces of the religious spirit over the course of the last four centuries, the further flourishing of dissent gave rise to the amendment of the Protestant faith to fit the answers preferred by Quakers, Baptists, Mennonites, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, to the abolitionist and civil rights movements, to the cause of women's rights and the conscientious objections to every war in American history.

The abundance of Paine's writing flows from the spring of his optimism, and during the twenty years of his engagement in both the American and the French Revolutions, he counted himself a "friend of the world's happiness." No matter what question he takes up (the predicament of women, the practice of slavery, or the organization of governments), he approaches it with generous impulse and benevolent purpose. Opposed to all things "monarchical or aristocratical," invariably in favor of a new beginning and a better deal, Paine speaks to his hope for the rescue of mankind in a voice that hasn't been heard in American politics for the last thirty years.

When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive. . . when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, or by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

By comparison with the machine-made cant pushed forth by the government now in Washington, the old words bring with them the sound of water in a desert, and in December 2001, when I found myself rereading Paine's Age of Reason and Rights of Man (as an antidote to what was being said by Donald Rumsfeld and his fuglemen in both the parlor and the tabloid press), I thought that the well-publicized search for the meaning in the ashes of the World Trade Center conceivably might lead to candid debate about the future course of what Benjamin Franklin had recognized as the American political experiment. Why not? It wasn't as if large numbers of people didn't understand that by declaring "war on terrorism" the Bush administration had declared war on an unknown enemy and an abstract noun, that we might as well be sending the 101st Airborne Division to conquer lust, annihilate greed, imprison the sin of pride. Although Osama bin Laden was still nowhere to be found, the Taliban were gone from Afghanistan, no further terrorist attacks had come against any American target, and on the editorial pages of the national newspapers at least some of the contributors had begun to appreciate the damage done to the economic and political theory that over the last twenty years had achieved the standing of holy writ. Erected by the household sophists in the Reagan administration and strengthened by their successors in the Bush and Clinton administrations, the intellectual foundation for the country's wealth and happiness rested on four pillars of imperishable wisdom:

1. Global capitalism is the eighth wonder of the world, a light unto the nations, and the answer to everybody's prayers. Nothing must interfere with its sacred mysteries and omniscient judgment.
   
2. Big government is by inclination Marxist, by definition wasteful and incompetent, a conspiracy of fools indifferent to the welfare of the common man. The best government is no government.
   
3. The art of politics (embarrassingly human and therefore corrupt) is subordinate to the science of economics (reassuringly abstract and therefore perfect). What need of political principle or philosophy when it is the money markets that set policy, pay the troops, distribute alms? What need of statesmen, much less politicians, when it isn't really necessary to know their names or remember what they say?
   
4. History is at an end. The new world economic order vanquished the last of the skeptics by refuting the fallacy of Soviet communism. Having reached the final stopping place on the road to ideological perfection, mankind no longer need trouble itself with any new political ideas.
   

All four pillars of imperishable wisdom perished on the morning of September 11, reduced within an hour to the incoherence of the rubble in Liberty Street. By noon even the truest of true believers knew that they had been telling themselves a fairy tale. If not to big government, then where else did the friends of laissez-faire economics look for the rescue of their finances and the saving of their lives? If not the agencies of big government, who then brought the ambulances from as far away as Albany or sent the firemen into the doomed buildings with no promise of a finder's fee? It wasn't the free market that hijacked the airplanes and cross-promoted them into bombs, or Adam Smith's invisible hand that cut the throats of the pilots on what they thought was a flight to Los Angeles. History apparently was still a work in progress.

Together with the headlines blowing the bugles of imperial advance, the newspapers during the autumn of 2001 had been reporting daily proofs of courage and intelligence on the part of a citizenry formerly presumed decadent or deceased -- not only a show of flags but also people everywhere in the country giving their money and effort to whatever need was near at hand -- unpaid rescue workers clearing the wreckage in Lower Manhattan; $850 million in emergency funds contributed by individuals as well as corporations; generous upwellings of tolerance and compassion among people of different ages, races, colors, and sexual orientations, their regard for one another grounded in the recognition that the modifying adjectives -- "black," "gay," "white," "native," "Asian," "Hispanic" -- mattered less than the noun -- "American."

I didn't think it impossible that something of the same public-spiritedness might find a voice in Congress, or that the list of questions gathering on the Internet -- about the purpose of the country's foreign policy and the distributions of its domestic wealth -- might somehow come to the attention of Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings and so present an opportunity to ask what we mean by such phrases as "public service," "civic interest," and the "common good." Informed argument about why and how America had come to be perceived as a dissolute empire; instructive doubts cast on the supposed omniscience of the global capital markets; a distinction drawn between the ambitions of the American national security state and the collective well-being of the American citizenry. I could imagine the argument falling along the division between people who would continue Ben Franklin's experiment and those who think the experiment has gone far enough, and if I couldn't frame all the questions that might well be asked, I could think of at least a few:

How high a price do we set on the head of freedom? If we delete another few paragraphs from the Bill of Rights (for our own protection, of course, in the interests of peace, prosperity, and carefree summer vacations), what do we ask of the government in return for our silence in court? Do we wish to remain citizens of a republic, or do we prefer some form of autocracy in which a genial man on horseback assures us that repression is good for the soul? With what secular faith do we match the zeal of militant Islam and combat the enmity of the impoverished peoples of the earth to whom the choice between war and peace presents itself as a choice of no significance? How define the American democracy as a res publica for which we might willingly give up our lives -- our own lives, not the lives of hired mercenaries? And of what, if anything, does the res publica consist?

The questions remain unasked, the occasion for debate indefinitely postponed. If on New Year's Day 2002 I had hoped that the attacks on New York and Washington might give us pause for thought, by the first week in February I understood that we lack a national forum in which to hear the questions and that language degraded into propaganda doesn't lend itself to sustained argument or inspired eloquence. In his State of the Union address to Congress on January 29, President Bush pronounced the sentence of doom on Saddam Hussein ("America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security... I will not wait on events, while dangers gather"); five days later in New Orleans, the choreographers of the game and pregame entertainment at the Super Bowl set the words to music. Billed as "A Celebration of America" the six-hour hymn to victory deployed theme music from the soundtrack of Star Wars, film footage of America the Beautiful (Mount Rushmore, the White House, amber waves of grain), four ex-presidents reading from the speeches and letters of Abraham Lincoln, Paul McCartney playing the guitar and Mariah Carey singing "The Star-Spangled Banner," a reenactment of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, festive greetings from a Marine unit in far-off Afghanistan ("the most heavily armed Super Bowl party in the world"), a Budweiser beer commercial in which the brewer's trademark Clydesdale horses bring their wagon to New York and kneel in homage to the diminished skyline. The halftime show brought with it Bono and his band on a heart-shaped stage, singing "Where the Streets Have No Name" against the backdrop of a diaphanous scrim bearing the names of all those who had perished in the inferno of the World Trade Center -- the names of firemen, airline passengers, policemen, office workers, all rising, like the credits on a movie screen, into the strobe-lit heavens of the Superdome.

Next page | The hope of a national political awakening was smothered under the pillows of cant
1, 2, 3, 4