There were no recording devices in the 13th century, but I can imagine that the aggrieved tone of King John before Runnymede was similar to what I hear in George Bush's voice as he complains about his parliament and its presumptions.
That is the final paragraph of The imperial overreach and op ed in today's Boston Globe by HDS Greenway. It is one of two terrific op eds in the today;s Globe to which I wish to call your attention, the other being The disappearance of war-broken soldiers by James Carroll. I see a connection between the two, so I will explore both pieces, describe the connection I see, and offer a few thoughts of my own.
Greenway makes clear his direction in his opening paragraph
LISTENING TO President Bush's petulant tones lambasting Congress for questioning his war, I had a feeling that what we are seeing in Washington has been going on for close to a thousand years in the political tradition in which America was formed. Rulers reach for more and more power until their parliaments and barons think things have gone far enough and begin clipping regal wings
and two paragraphs later he explicitly offers the setup:
One couldn't help but think of the peevishness of King John in 13th-century England, beset with troubles at home and mismanaged wars abroad, desperately unpopular, a king who suffered in comparison to both his father, Henry II, and his brother, Richard I. John also had a strong and much admired mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine .
Making the comparison with the baronial resentment of an unpopular war across the channel, he makes a not-so-tongue-in cheek comparison:
In short, the rebellious barons grew sick of the king's abuse of power and decided to do something about it. Harry of Nevada and Nancy of San Francisco had their counterparts in the 13th-century earls of England.
He goes further, looking also at the assertions of the first 17th century monarch and his successors, describing James the First as "CHeney-like" and noting
As would Bush 400 years later, James believed he drew his authority from God.
He reminds us how much of our own system of government is dervied from people of British descent who wanted to limit the power of rulers, even as he reminds us of Cheney's desires to "restore" an unfettered presidency - an imperial presidency - such as that to which Nixon was moving before the powers of the presidency were restricted by Watergate. Greenway concludes with the paragraph with which I began, and which I offer again:
There were no recording devices in the 13th century, but I can imagine that the aggrieved tone of King John before Runnymede was similar to what I hear in George Bush's voice as he complains about his parliament and its presumptions.
Carroll was a military brat, his father Daniel having been a very important figure Air Force General. He begins his column by telling about his earliest trip to the doctor that he can remember, where he was treated well, which was at Walter Reed. That was a beginning of a period of time in which he believed US military medicine was the best in the world, especially in Washington, and talks about treatment his parents received late in life to reinforce that belief. He then offers the following:
The recent revelations of shoddy care offered to soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan at Walter Reed were doubly shocking to me. Last week, a special commission reported that those failures were the result of bureaucratic mismanagement, but I wondered -- was something else at work in the way those soldiers were treated?
He begins to answer his own question by exploring the tragic history of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who was confined to Bethesday Naval hospital because of a psychotic background, and who killed himself by jumping out of a window in an unsupervised SIP suite on the 16th floor. He then sets the conditions for his argument using the Forrestal case:
No one at the Navy hospital wished Forrestal ill, but keeping his condition secret was more important than keeping him safe. So-called national security trumped patient health, which resulted in unacknowledged pressures on diagnosis and treatment. "Operational fatigue" was the condition which Navy doctors ascribed to Forrestal, establishing appearances that all he needed was a little rest. This concern for public perception led directly to tragedy. In the culture of neglect at today's Walter Reed, the commitment may be defined as a contrary one , since the object of public perception is not appearances, but disappearances. War-broken soldiers must disappear.
He connects that with the policies of the current Pentagon, which he hammers home in the very next paragraph, his penultimate offering:
For reasons of national security -- namely, to shore up popular support for war policy -- the Defense Department has longed underplayed the tragic consequences of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Returning corpses (soon to number 4,000) are shrouded in secrecy. The suffering of the wounded (more than 26,000) is kept out of the nation's awareness. It is not that the medical professionals at Walter Reed are callous or uncaring. It is that the entire system is geared to making the men and women who carry visible signs of the war's cost slide back into the general population unnoticed. An inhospitable hospital serves that purpose. Mold infested walls of the Walter Reed housing units are the functional equivalent of unbarred windows at Bethesda.
In his final paragraph Carroll bluntly tells us that the administration lies, that the most egregrious of its lies is that it supports the troops. After concluding that this egregious lie holds, Carroll tells us
In its name, Bush vetoed the war appropriations bill last week, as if the welfare of young and vulnerable soldiers is his chief concern. American soldiers are pawns in the game the president is playing with history. No longer capable of pretending that national security requires American presence in Iraq, Bush is simply refusing to acknowledge that what he did was wrong. He's like a child insisting that his arm is broken, when it isn't. In Bush's case, the fake dressing for which he longs are human lives.
I was immediately struck by the phrase "pawns in the game the president is playing." Carroll is but a few years older than am I, and I am sure he was making the reference that I drew, to the Bob Dylan song Only a Pawn in Their Game for which the refrain at the end of each verse is He's only a pawn in their game. In the song Dylan views the killer of Medgar Evers and other civil rights figures as pawns in the games played by politicians.
And I also thought of another Dylan song, perhaps thinking back to the Greenway piece, entitled With God on our side, which begins like this:
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.
, goes through a lot of history using the refrain of God on our side to conclude each glimpse of history, and then ends like this:
In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.
So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.
I entitled this diary "the arrogance of power - American style?" You will note that I did not entitle it "Bush style" and ended my title with a question mark. The two pieces, and the two Dylan songs, may perhaps help you understand why.
Most of us want to do the right thing. And we often seek to find justification for actions to which we are drawn, rather than attempting to ascertain whether are being drawn to them is in fact a form of self-aggrandisement, whether in fact that which we propose to do might not be detrimental, to ourselves or to others. It is easiest to find ustification in divine selection or divine will, to claim that we are acting on behalf of God. This is arrogance, and I would argue that American exceptionalism is a particularly pernicious form of this kind of arrogance. The Dylan song tells us how the Indians died, but that was okay because we had God on our side, thereby skewering the concept of manifest destiny that was used to justify our westward expansion regardless of the previous occupants of those lands, whether the were Native American, Hispanic, or a mix of both - we ignored their presence. Presidents beginning at least with Jefferson have displayed this kind of arrogance, our "right" to dominate this continent. That we have extended that attitude to a right to dominant carbon-based energy resources around the world is a difference only of degree, not of kind.
George Bush and Dick Cheney do not believe the power of the president as commander in chief in wartime can be limited by the Congress. That is arrogant. They nod in the direction of the power of the purse as they must - after all, George Mason insisted that the power of the purse and the sword must not be in the same hands. But the leaders of the administration insist that unless they are given unrestricted use of whatever funds they deem appropriate Congress is "micromanaging" and will therefore be responsible for any deaths of or failure by American military personnel. Excuse me? Where is the oversight? Where is the concept of checks and balances? Where is there any pretense at limited government? If the administration can posit that it needs no courts to approve warrants for wiretapping, that it can determine on its own who is a terrorist suspect who can be denied habeas (even though the Constitution limits the ability of Congress to restrict habeas to situations of insurrection and invasion, and the Supreme Court ruled in Ex Parte Milligan that civilians could not be tried by military tribunals when civilian courts were open, and did so during the insurrection known as the Civil War), that it arrogantly asserts that it can determine what if any restrictions it will allow itself to be bound by.
And if it is afraid, as this administration clearly is, that were the true cost of the war known that its assertions of power would be rejected - and effectively so - by the American people and their representatives in the Congress, it chooses to hide those costs, whether through not putting the appropriations on budget to hide the exploding debt is causing (because that might led to overturning of its cherished tax cuts for the wealthy) or through not allowing the visual images of the bodies of those who have died in the vain (in the sense of on behalf of the pride and image of the administration) exercise of military power (the idea that we are the world's only superpower, and that therefore that justifies any action we choose to take), then we see the depths of destruction and depravity and despair to which the heights of this kind of arrogance are pushing this nation.
Perhaps we can find something salutary in all of this. Perhaps the arrogance of power that is so American may finally be shattered, and we as a nation can assume a more humble role as one of the community of nations that are inextricably interconnected. Perhaps we will not have to plan for ever more war memorials, be they listings of names of those who have died in conflicts that need not have been fought, or the abandoned and decaying infrastructure that we could not maintain because we expended our treasure and our manpower on a war of choice that could not be "won" except by flattening another nation and occupying it indefinitely.
This morning I read two op eds in a major regional newspaper. Neither has the kind of national syndication of many voices on the right. Both are by men whose perspicacity has been demonstrated time and again. Taken together, the two pieces have the potential to motivate us to the next logical step.
If the actions of our administration demonstrate a recapitulation of those parts of English history that led to our independence and to our assertions of a different kind of government ...
if the human costs of a conflict are such that the only way we can continue that conflict is to lie about the costs, to hide them from the American people, to treat those who suffer on our behalf as disposable, as pawns in some larger game ..
then it is time to speak out, to take action, to say NO MORE. We have to assert the principles of our government, to reclaim our powers as "We the people of the United States" and to bring our out of control administration to heel.
Will those now in control of the Congress make the case, or will we have to lead them to the water which they must, on our behalf, drink?
I look forward to your responses.