The Wish For Kings

In his "Notebook" column in this month's Harper's Lewis Lapham points to an Umberto Eco essay on the common ideological points of all species of fascism:

"The truth is revealed once and only once.
"Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten because it doesn't represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader.
"Doctrine outpoints reason, and science is always suspect.
"Critical thought is the province of degenerate intellectuals, who betray the culture and subvert traditional values.
"The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies.
"Argument is tantamount to treason.
"Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear.
"Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of 'the people' in the grand opera that is the state."

This reads like a checklist of the reasons why the U.S. is in so much trouble now. For me, it's always gone beyond Bush. He's simply one of the nastier symptoms of the underlying disease. I'm afraid that a large percentage of Americans have simply lost the habits of mind necessary to sustain a democracy. They have lost faith in their ability to reason and to learn something new, and prefer the assurances of those who claim to hear the voices of gods. The government of capable but flawed human beings seems to them less attractive than rule by the decree of a leader whose heart is always pure (because he says it is) and whose guts are always right (because his wise counselors always praise them). Given the right ad campaign and a little more social conditioning, the House of Bush could probably have itself installed as an official dynasty, with James Dobson as their Archbishop and Dick Cheney as the Lord High Executioner.

According to Lapham's satirical riff, America won't change very much under fascism. Our overlords needn't burn books--only a few people read them, and they're easily caricatured by their choice of pricey caffienated beverage. Also, although a playwright could become president of the Czech republic and a poet might as recently as ten years ago become President of Russia, writers are so deeply in the margins of American society that, however rudely they might treat Laura Bush at a book fair, nobody outside a few coffeehouses has heard of most of them. Besides, most writers are so busy chasing after a spot in the Oprah Book Club that they have little time for planning assaults on the palaces of the mighty.*

Further, our overlords needn't destroy the radio stations. Their allies own most of them, and given the way they've written the rules, they should be able to buy the rest without any ugly resort to bloodshed. Most of our labor unions have already been broken up, and once Wal Mart gets into other lines of business, they should be able to clear out the rest. Besides, the corporations promise that if you work hard and ruthlessly and avoid the trap of friendship, you can rise high enough in the corporate structure to eventually become Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. (They'll probably rename it C.E.O. of the U.S. Treasury, to avoid unnecessary confusion in titles.) So there's no real reason to comb the middle classes for signs of incipient rebellion. (Making it possible to include promoting unrest as a reason to lower credit scores or raise health insurance rates out to take care of most troublemakers. Much more civilized than a concentration camp, you have to admit.)

Reading Lapham's essay helps me understand why I feel so little joy at Bush's 37% approval rating. We had to lose an entire city to get it down there, and under the circumstances 37% seems awfully high, doesn't it? If the President launched a nuclear missile at the San Andreas fault and sank the West Coast into the sea, we might get it down to 30%. (Though it might pop back up once Pat Robertson points out that Bush destroyed the unholy sewers of both Hollywood and the Castro District in one quick strike. I'm sure that Bush's handlers could work out the spin for that. They're clever people.) And even if we should rid ourselves of Bush, can we say we've cured ourselves of the affliction that brought him to us? Or will we just turn to another would be Duce and nod our heads at his crackpot notions of how the world works? What do we have to do to cure both the symptom of Bush and the underlying illness? No less than restore to Americans the idea that we are citizens, with a responsibility to continue learning and questioning not only our governments, but also our bosses and our clergymen. We have to drum it into our own heads that any problems that we have will need to be solved by other citizens who are both as intelligent and as ignorant as we are; and that no citizen should be able to claim sole possession of the unerrant truth without the rest of us laughing him out of the building.

That's a hard thing to fix, and I fear it's already too late to start. Sad. Sad. Sad.

*Just in case Oprah is reading this, I don't mean to imply that the Oprah Book Club is a bad thing. I'm glad you started picking living writers for it again, and even though your first choice, James Frey, seems like an uninspired one, I have every confidence that it'll get better and every hope that you'll (please-oh-please-oh-please) include my own work in it someday. Listen, it'll be great, Oprah! Me and you! Wait, where are you going? PLEASE! I'M SO BROKE!