Over the past six years, we've grown accustomed to buck-passing and excuse-making as standard operating procedure inside the beltway. "Nobody could have predicted" that terrorists would turn hijacked passenger airplanes into missiles, "nobody could have predicted" that removing Saddam Hussein would lead to sectarian civil war, "nobody could have predicted" that a major hurricane might hit New Orleans, "nobody could have predicted" that the levees might be breached, . . . and we're all bracing, of course, for "nobody could have predicted" that when a nation starves its infrastructure budget, levies will fail and bridges will fall.
And for the most part, the reaction (and rightly so) on the part of educated and intelligent Americans is disgust at the obvious lies belching forth from the mouths of Bush Administration officials. But after the flip, and with the help of one of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera, I'd like to consider a slightly different view -- that by focusing on the issue of mendacity, we might be missing the bigger point:
For those who don't know, Milan Kundera is a Czech writer and Cold War-era dissident intellectual, author of (among other highly-regarded works) the novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." (And in my mind, if you've only seen the movie, which is nonetheless good, you've missed out on 90 percent of what makes the novel so worthy.)
Kundera himself lived in his native country until 1975 (when he fled to exile in Paris), and he lived through and participated in the brief but premature flowering of reform that was 1968's Prague Spring (ultimately crushed by Soviet tanks in late summer). "Unbearable Lightness" is itself set largely in 1968 Prague, and the novel includes Kundera's meditations on, among other issues, the moral, ethical, and philosophical implications of Cold War-era life behind the Iron Curtain.
The story of Oedipus is well known: Abandoned as an infant, he was taken to King Polybus, who raised him. One day, when he had grown into a youth, he came upon a dignitary riding along a mountain path. A quarrel arose, and Oedipus killed the dignitary. Later he became the husband of Queen Jocasta and ruler of Thebes. Little did he know that the man he had killed in the mountains was his father and the woman with whom he slept his mother. In the meantime, fate visited a plague on his subjects and tortured them with great pestilences. When Oedipus realized that he himself was the cause of their suffering, he put out his own eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.
Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.
Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You're the ones responsible for our country's misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders!
And the accused responded: We didn't know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!
In our own time and place, this "we didn't know" takes many different forms -- first and foremost, of course, from the protestations of Bush Administration officials ("nobody could have predicted" the long laundry list of f*ck-ups).
But we see it even from those we so desperately want to believe in, from those who we supported and continue to support in the hopes that they can save the system from within and return our current political system to some semblance of post-Enlightenment liberal representative democracy (and before anyone accuses me of running afoul of the FAQ here by daring to question the competence and/or honesty of the Democratic Leadership -- I'm a lifelong Democrat and will not abandon either the party or its core principles; I just wish those inside the Beltway shared my allegiance to those same principles):
- "nobody could have predicted" that when George Bush said "I want to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power," that he actually meant "I want to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power" -- we thought he was just posturing to improve our negotiating position (you know, because he's such a savvy and subtle negotiator);
- "nobody could have predicted" that if we overlook occasions when the Bush Administration has sanctioned the torture and indefinite incommunicado detention of non-U.S. citizens (and, in at least one case, of a U.S. citizen), that they would -- you know -- actually torture and indefinitely detain people incommunicado.
- "nobody could have predicted" that a lifelong ideological doctrinaire conservative, if approved as Chief Justice of the United States, would -- you know -- take the Supreme Court in an ideological doctrinaire conservative direction;
- and even as we speak, the Democratic Leadership is engaged in the long, slow, tedious process of "not predicting" that if Congress fails to assert its power to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its numerous crimes, it will continue to behave criminally -- of "not predicting" that when high-level sources have been telling us for years that Dick Cheney and others in the administration want to attack Iran, even perhaps with nuclear weapons, that they may just get their way (oooh, I know, I'm offending the delicate sensibilities of some Kossacks by raising the specter of war with Iran -- run for the smelling salts and wrestle me down to take away my tinfoil hat!) -- of "not predicting" that maybe it’s a bad idea to give Alberto Gonzales even more power to spy on U.S. citizens -- of "not predicting" that if we don't take the most basic steps to ensure the integrity of our voting system, that we run the very real risk of massive voter fraud.
And so, if Republicans are guilty (and they clearly are) of the many transgressions outlined up above, isn't the Democratic Leadership at least partly guilty (which does not relieve Republicans of one iota of their own moral culpability -- there's no "law of conservation of moral guilt" that I'm aware of) for enabling the Bushies and allowing them to continue to behave this way even after the Democrats have earned -- from a trusting and hopeful population -- the power to bring it to an end? And can we possibly believe them anymore when they protest that they were "hoodwinked" by Bush?
But in any case, Kundera (through his philandering hero Tomas) tries to shift what he believes is a misplaced focus on the truth or falsity of these assertions of innocence:
In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?
Tomas followed the dispute closely (as did his ten million fellow Czechs) and was of the opinion that while there had definitely been Communists who were not completely unaware of the atrocities (they could not have been ignorant of the horrors that had been perpetrated and were still being perpetrated in postrevolutionary Russia), it was probable that the majority of the Communists had not in fact known of them.
But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?
Let us concede that a Czech public prosecutor in the early fifties who called for the death of an innocent man was deceived by the Russian secret police and the government of his own country. But now that we all know the accusations to have been absurd and the executed to have been innocent, how can that selfsame public prosecutor defend his purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, My conscience is clear! I didn't know! I was a believer! Isn't his I didn't know! I was a believer! at the very root of his irreparable guilt?
It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus: Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by not knowing, he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.
When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your not knowing, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you've done? How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!
I couldn't have put it better myself. Worth repeating, in fact:
As a result of your not knowing, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you've done? How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see?
I'm not an "everything is hopeless so why bother" kind of person, but today, waking up to the news of the completely avoidable tragedy in my original hometown Twin Cities, followed by watching the Senate Democrats talk tough without taking any real action in response to yet another blatant case of contempt in Rove's failure to appear in response to an SJC subpoena, and watching the Dem Leadership appear willing to sign on to a "compromise" giving even more power to the whitehouse to spy without real oversight, ready (Russ's breath of fresh sanity notwithstanding) I'm just frustrated and exhausted. I'm sure I'll feel better tomorrow.
But in the meantime, thanks for listening.
(cross-posted at Progressive Historians)