Don’t Vote

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Do the possessors of money wield too much influence at the polls? They do at the mall, doubtless likewise in voting booths. Yet the telecommunications industry, comprising some of America’s richest corporations, is constantly pestered by government regulatory agencies while agriculture, making up 2.3 percent of the GDP, is lavishly subsidized. Government is so inefficient that it can’t even get bribe-taking right.

  What is the alternative to private financing of political campaigns? Only one alternative exists. Under a system of public financing of political campaigns, people trying to change the government would have to go to the government to get the money to try to change the government. Something a little East German about that?

  We should ignore who gives what to whom and vote for candidates on the basis of their ideas and actions. Like that would help. The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t policies carried out at the behest of malefactors of great wealth. These ideas and actions had the support of ordinary voters—the individual, small-donor, John Q. Public members of the electorate whose will is supposed to be upheld and protected by campaign finance reform.

  10

  Terrorism

  The law and the jury are a free country’s Eucharist, the body and blood of liberty. By attempting to put “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on criminal trial with civilian jurors, the Obama administration is using communion wafers as Kleenex and giving an enema with the sacramental wine.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan in 2003. Pakistan is not exactly a free country, but it likes to make a show of freedom’s outward forms such as laws and judges. But, fond as Pakistan is of legal formalities, these were obviously ridiculous in the case of Khalid who was handed over to the CIA.

  Khalid had been a known enemy of the global commonwealth years before the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. He’d been indicted on terrorism charges in U.S. federal court in 1996, as a result of a failed conspiracy to explode twelve commercial airlines over the Pacific. Khalid had been in the Philippines, plotting this carnage with his nephew Ramzi Yousef, who had directed the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Khalid fled to Qatar. America requested his arrest. Khalid “eluded” Qatari authorities despite working for Qatar’s Ministry of Electricity and Water in a country with exactly two airports and a population smaller than Tulsa, Oklahoma’s. Khalid moved to Afghanistan where he palled around with fellow immigrant newcomer Osama bin Laden.

  Khalid confessed to planning the 9/11 attacks and to any number of other things including assisting Ramzi Yousef in 1993; sending shoe bomber Richard Reid on his bootless mission; organizing the suicide bombings of a nightclub in Bali and a hotel in Mombasa; making plans to blow up the Panama Canal, Heathrow Airport, Big Ben, NATO headquarters, the New York Stock Exchange, U.S. embassies in Indonesia, Japan, and Australia, and Israeli embassies in Austria, India, the Philippines, and Azerbaijan; devising a way to destroy the Sears Tower in Chicago with flaming fuel trucks; sketching out a post–9/11 “second wave” of attacks on U.S. landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Sears Tower again; plotting to assassinate Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, Bill Clinton, Pope John Paul II, and Jimmy Carter; and contriving an assault on a Sumatran oil company “owned”—the Pentagon quoted Khalid as saying—”by the Jewish former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.”

  Khalid also confessed to murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. According to the Pentagon, he said, “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.” A simple “I did it” would have sufficed.

  A January 29, 2010, article on the New York Times Web site states, “The decision on how to prosecute Mr. Mohammed has been particularly difficult because his defense lawyers are expected to argue that he was illegally tortured by the Central Intelligence Agency during his confinement, tainting any evidence gathered from his interrogations. Documents have shown that the CIA used waterboarding—a controlled drowning technique—against Mr. Mohammed 183 times in March 2009.”

  The problem with this line of defense is how the hell would it occur to a CIA agent, no matter how bored he was with dipping Khalid’s head in the sink, to ask anybody to confess to an assassination attempt on Jimmy Carter? I wasn’t even certain that Carter was still alive. In fact, during the Winter Olympics, I misunderstood a news broadcaster saying, “a Georgian luger has died” and was sure it was Carter. Plus I’ll bet the CIA didn’t even know that Israel had an embassy in Azerbaijan (and probably needed to have Khalid spell Azerbaijan for them). Furthermore I’m having trouble picturing Henry Kissinger as a wildcatter in Sumatra.

  My father-in-law is a retired FBI agent. He has a lot of friends from the Bureau who’ve been involved in plenty of interrogations. I asked one of these former agents about waterboarding.

  “Heck, yes!” he said. “Waterboard him six ways from Sunday! Waterboard the dickens out of him!”

  “But,” I said, “is waterboarding a good way to get information out of somebody?”

  “Information?” said the former agent. “Oh, no. The way you get information out of somebody is you pretend to be his friend. But I say waterboard him till his feet leak!”

  So my suggestion to the government attorneys suffering from indecision about how to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is to sidle up and get tight and discover whether he’s really an evil mastermind, and, if he’s just bragging, really throw the book at him.

  It’s tempting to claim that terrorists are the result of the idealistic rationalism that has been the creeping nemesis of politics for three hundred years. And terrorism is indeed the product of trying to make politics an idea-driven process. Ideas become so important that you kill people for them. The historian A. J. P. Taylor was a great left-wing baloney monger of the rationalist school, but he did have his moments of sense. In the introduction to a book of laudatory essays on the European revolutions of 1848, he said, “Reason formulates universal principles and is therefore intolerant... Decisions between rival reasons can be made only by force.”46

  Terrorism happens when someone gets to be so overformulated with his universal principles that he uses force on people who never had an idea in their lives. Here is the reasoning, as explained by Richard E. Rubenstein in Alchemists of Revolution: Terrorism in the Modern World47: “To sow terror among the clique of power, which would expose its weakness, provoke brutal over-reaction, and inspire mass support of radical change.” (Whether waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times is brutal overreaction or whether giving him a presumption of innocence and a public defender is an exposure of weakness, I leave to the reader.)

  And here are the conclusions reached with the terrorist’s reasoning, as put forth in the 1849 essay “Murder”48 written by one of the first modern theorists of terror, German radical Karl Heinzen.

  The greatest benefactor of mankind will be he who makes it possible for a few men to wipe out thousands... underground rooms full of fulminating silver [that] can blow whole towns into the air, complete with their 100,000 murderous slaves... To have a conscience with regard to the murdering of reactionaries is to be totally unprincipled... The man who would not joyfully give up his own life for the satisfaction of putting a million barbarians into their coffins carries no Republican heart within his breast.

  Heinzen ran off to the United States when the European revolutions of 1848 came a cropper. He lived in Boston (the Berkeley of its day), which he called “the only civilized place in America,” and he caused no further trouble. (There are probably men bankrolled by Al-Qaeda who’ve been sent to the United States with similar results.)

  As indicated by the “Republican heart” that Heinzen mentioned, terrorism is not, however, just a product of left-wing politics and its offshoot fascism. Terrorists, like killjoys (but literally)
, can be found among conservatives. The earliest terrorists that we know of49 were the Jewish Zealots, a zealously conservative bunch. The Romans were the secular humanist progressives of 73 AD, and the Romans were as baffled by the events at Masada as we are by the events in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

  The Assassins, who terrorized the Islamic world for two centuries at the beginning of the previous millennium, were a Shi’ite sect determined to return the rule of Islam to the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. They were legitimists, like the devotees of nineteenth-century French Bourbonism, except not silly.

  Niccolò Machiavelli was a Bill Clinton in his politics, with no principles right or left. Given the clear-sighted political instincts that such morality purblind people have, Machiavelli, in The Discourses, offered both radical and conservative briefs for terrorism. New political leaders, full of new ideas, should frighten everybody: “Make the rich poor and the poor rich... as well as to build new cities, to destroy those already built, and to move the inhabitants from one place to another far distant from it; in short, to leave nothing... intact.”50 Meanwhile, political leaders who wish to keep everything perfect, the way it was in the good old days, should do the same: “In regard to this, those who governed the state of Florence from 1434 to 1494 used to say that it was necessary to reconstitute the government every five years; otherwise it was difficult to maintain it; where by ‘reconstituting the government’ they meant instilling men with that terror and that fear with which they had instilled them when instituting it.”51

  No matter if the hyperidealist wants to go forward, backward, or stay in one place, terror works for him. Sergey Nechayev was a Russian nihilist or anarchist or some damn thing, author of Catechism of a Revolutionary,52 one of those excretions of the czarist era that reemerges periodically among political heathens, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nechayev’s only action of note was to have a young student, whom he considered to be a traitor to his revolutionist “society,” killed and to thereby provide the plot for Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed. But Nechayev, in common with most provokers of civic horror, was a deep thinker.

  Our society has only one aim... the total emancipation and happiness of the people... But, convinced that their emancipation and the achievement of this happiness can be realized only by means of an all-destroying popular revolution, our society will employ all its power and all its resources in order to promote an intensification and an increase in those calamities and evils which must finally exhaust the patience of the people and drive them to a popular uprising.53

  The patience of the people is exhausted. The uprising should consist of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed climbing thirteen steps to a scaffold and putting his head into (Khalid has a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and will know what this means) a “short control loop.”

  11

  Foreign Policy

  I had expected the current administration to be wrong about foreign policy. I hadn’t expected it to be pathetic. This administration seems to be made up of whiney, wavering scolds; insecure, self-righteous bumblers; and pious frauds lecturing humanity on morals while possessing no whit of moral understanding themselves. Their approach to international relations is vain, testy, inconsistent, and meddlesome, by turns too skeptical and too credulous, too permissive and too controlling, too understanding and too obtuse. In its conduct of foreign policy this administration is acting like ... me.

  I behave exactly the same way with my family. The problem is, we’re talking about a much larger family here. I am the head of the O’Rourkes. America is the head of the family of nations.

  “The Family of Nations” is something I suspect that most members of President Obama’s foreign policy team believe in. It’s a fatuous idea, and hackneyed—unless we hate our family. And we should. The Family of Nations is a terrible kinship group. As the eldest semisolvent unincarcerated O’Rourke male in his right mind, I know of what I speak. Not that I hate my family, of course. But none of my family has atomic bombs.

  The Family of Nations is a wrongheaded notion but not without its value as an analytical tool if the countries of the world are considered as members of a large, raucous, conniving, belligerent Irish clan, some of them inebriated with fanaticism, others just inebriated, and all of them asking each other—as the O’Rourke motto goes—”Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?”

  I suppose the more idealistic among our foreign policy elite imagine that someday there will be a stirring display of clan loyalty with factious elders of the tribe uniting everyone in the face of a common foe, such as global warming. The Family of Nations will coalesce to battle a mutual adversary, and the earth will be invaded by flying monkeys from Neptune. Until the winged apes with ray guns arrive, arrangements such as the UN, the WTO, the World Bank, and the Copenhagen Treaty on Climate Change will end up like a wedding reception at the Friends of Hibernia Hall or a wake at the Shamrock & Pig. (Pin your hopes on the wake, one less bloody nose.)

  So how is America doing as patriarch in the household of humankind? One way to gauge our standing with the relatives is: Do they all go to us asking for money? We’re good on this count. We’ve displayed an open hand to all who come our way, and we’ve dropped hints that we’ll even travel to them to provide largesse, be they as far away as Tehran or Pyongyang. We’re the soul of generosity, as have been all Americans who’ve come before us since Woodrow Wilson (except for Calvin Coolidge, the piker). Never mind that the money belongs to our rich, nervous, high-strung aunt, the American economy. Auntie Con has been suffering from a bit of a breakdown lately. We’ve gotten our hands on her power of attorney and we’re frittering away her wealth.

  I hope we’re not expecting our distant relations to be grateful. A hundred years ago when foreign aid was unthought of (except as tribute or bribe) we were a respected and admired country. After a century of philanthropy everyone hates our guts.

  This should tell us something about spoiling the kids. That red-haired stepson Hamas, for example. We don’t “bring him to the table” with some invitation to come home for the holidays (especially if the holiday is the anniversary of 9/11). We tell the little jerk to quit playing with his rocket launcher toys and get a job.

  And why, by the way, are we so down on smart, hardworking nephew Izzy? Are we jealous because he’s successful in real estate? All those settlements on the West Bank—his housing market investments are doing a lot better than ours.

  Or is there something in us that can’t resist a quarrel with our nearest and dearest. Plenty of other states and territories have been that way, historically. Look at the Yugoslav clan. We’re always hardest on our own. I mean, it wasn’t very nice the way we treated that gal who’s married to America’s ex, Bill. Sure, nobody likes her. But first we give Hillary a big secretary of state job in the family firm. And then we send her lothario of a husband, instead of her, to rescue the hot newscaster chicks in North Korea. That was just mean.

  We should spend more time dealing with the threats to a quiet life at home. There’s our troubled boy Iraq. Are we going to make sure he gets the help he needs? Or are we going to go all “tough love” and to hell with him?

  Then there’s Afghanistan, upon whom we once so doted, standing on our doorstep holding in her arms a tiny illegitimate democracy wrapped in a hijab. Will we send her away? Will we tell her to go see the social workers over at Taliban?

  What about crazy cousin Pakistan? She’s been on suicide watch since 1947. She was a mess long before she started fighting with her live-in boyfriend Al Qaeda, a convicted felon.

  Estranged foster child Iran is off his medications again. How long before this bipolar psychopath pulls a Columbine among our slow-learner kin in the special education class that is Europe?

  Speaking of Europe, Russia’s out on parole, drunk, unemployed, and likely to kill some folks next door again soon.

  Doddering grandma Great Britain still manages on her own. Bu
t are we going to help her with her shopping for antiterror commitment and her cleaning up of lefty defeatists? Are we going to keep this special relationship special? Or are we going to stick Gram into EU assisted living?

  And all those work-shy layabouts on the Continent, don’t we understand that they’re good-for-nothings? But we want that branch of the family tree’s approval so badly that our president wears his Nobel Peace Prize medal to bed at night.

  Meanwhile our cousins down south are total screw-ups. The Honduras marriage is on the rocks—we’re talking “burning bed syndrome.” And all we do is suggest they seek counseling.

  We know we should call the cops on Venezuela but we don’t have the nerve. And we think a little flattery and a gift basket will convince Cuba not to strap her children in the infant seats of Marxism and roll the minivan of dictatorship into the Caribbean Sea.

  Yes, as we can see, the Family of Nations concept is useful. One wishes one could say the same for the rest of the family.

  Maybe we should tell the Family of Nations that America’s getting a divorce. Mutual incompatibility will serve as grounds, or we can make a case that the world is guilty of abuse and neglect. There’s incontrovertible evidence. The property settlement is a simple matter. America keeps everything she brought to the matrimonial union, leaving the respondent party with zilch. Visitation rights will be determined by a mediation panel—the army, the navy, the air force, and the marines. As for support payments, we have retained, as counsel for the plaintiff, Helen Wait. If alimony is desired, go to Helen Wait.

  Let’s give up on the Family of Nations notion and content ourselves merely with living in the “Neighborhood of Nations”—the bad neighborhood of nations, the slum of nations. Think of America as growing up on the toughest block of the roughest ward of an international Hell’s Kitchen. Repeat after me, President Obama, “It’s a hard street. And it gets harder as it goes along. And I live in the last house.” You do. The White House.