by Bill Moyers
Let’s hear it.
EGO-TRIPPING (THERE MAY BE A REASON WHY)
I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad
I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman
I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat’s meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can’t catch me
For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother’s day
My strength flows ever on
My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save
I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
the earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was
laid across three continents
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission
I mean ... I ... can fly
like a bird in the sky ...
I wrote this for little girls, Bill, but the joy of my life was watching a couple of little kindergarten boys recite it for me once. I realized it was a good poem because the boys didn’t feel excluded from it. When you can do something like that and little boys say, “I was born in the congo”—whoa, wait a minute, we might have something here.
What was the turning point in your life? What was the hinge?
I think maybe it’s still ten years down the pike. I haven’t hinged yet. I haven’t thought about it like that.
No, but you start out as this passionate, incendiary, controversial activist. “The Princess of Black Poetry,” it was said.
Yeah. That was nice. I’m still passionate. I just don’t try to censor myself as I go through things. I was never an ideologue.
What were you?
I was just a woman looking at the world, trying to find a way to be happy and to be safe and to make a contribution. And in order to do that, a lot of bush had to be cut down. I don’t think I cut down any trees. I’m a big fan of trees. But there were a lot of weeds out there. And racism, poverty, just basic prejudice against women. Prejudice against any number of things. And so you go through one field after another, and you say to yourself: “I have got to knock some of these weeds down.” That’s all I was trying to do. I was just trying to be me.
ANDREW BACEVICH
Our finest warriors are often our most reluctant warmongers. They have seen firsthand the toll war exacts. They know better than anyone that force can be like a lobster trap that closes with each stage of descent, making escape impossible. So it was when the liberal consensus lured America into Vietnam during the ’60s, and again after 9/11, when neoconservatives clamored for the invasion of Iraq. With the notorious ferocity of the noncombatant, the neocons banged their tin drums and brayed for blood, as long as it was not their own that would be spilled.
One old warrior looked on sadly, his understanding of combat’s reality tempered by twenty-three years in uniform, including service in Vietnam. A graduate of West Point, Andrew Bacevich retired from the military to become a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, a public thinker who has been able to find an audience across the political spectrum, fromThe Nation to The American Conservative magazines. In several acclaimed books, including The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, and his bestselling The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who’s in power, which may be why he reaches both the left and the right.
We spoke in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, just as The Limits of Power was published. Bacevich supported Barack Obama’s candidacy but believes that Obama’s commitment of more troops to Afghanistan was a deadly mistake.
—Bill Moyers
You began The Limits of Power with a quote from the Bible, the book of Second Kings, chapter 20, verse 1: “Set thine house in order.” Why that admonition?
I’ve been troubled by the course of U.S. foreign policy for a long, long time. I wrote the book in order to sort out my own thinking about where our basic problems lay. And I reached the conclusion that our biggest problems are within.
I think there’s a tendency on the part of policy makers and probably a tendency on the part of many Americans to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders. And that if we can fix those problems, then we’ll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think that’s fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are at home. You begin healing yourself by looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing yourself as you really are.
You write: “The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence—on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people,” you write, “is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part through the distribution of largesse here at home (with Congress taking a leading role) and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.”
In other words, you’re saying that our foreign policy is the result of a dependence on consumer goods and credit.
Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people in Washington, D.C., and then imposed on us. Our foreign policy may be concocted in Washington, D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we the people want. And what we want, by and large, is to sustain the flow of very cheap consumer goods. We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the books balance at the end of the month or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want an unending line of credit.
You write that what will not go away is “a yawning disparity between what Americans expect and what they are willing or able to pay.”
One of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to maintain this dysfunctional system, or set of arrangements, that have evolved over the last thirty or forty years.
But it’s not the American people who are deploying around the world. It is a very specific subset of our people, this professional army. We like to call it an all-volunteer force, but the truth is, it’s a professional army, and when we think about the tasks we assign that army, it’s really an imperial army. We need to step back a little bit and ask ourselves, how did it come
to be that places like Iraq and Afghanistan should have come to seem critical to the well-being of the United States of America?
There was a time, seventy, eighty, a hundred years ago, when we Americans sat here in the Western Hemisphere and puzzled over why British imperialists sent their troops to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We viewed that sort of adventurism with disdain. Today this has become part of what we do.
How is Iraq a clear manifestation, as you say, of this “yawning disparity between what Americans expect and what they are willing or able to pay”?
Let’s think about World War II, a war that President Roosevelt told us was essential to U.S. national security, and was. President Roosevelt said, because this is an important enterprise, the American people would be called upon to make sacrifices. And indeed, the people of the United States went off to fight that war in large numbers. On the home front, people learned to get by with less. It was a national effort.
None of that’s been true with regard to Iraq. I mean, one of the most striking things about the way the Bush administration has managed the global war on terror, which President Bush has compared to World War II, is that there was no effort made to mobilize the country, there was actually no effort even made to expand the size of the armed forces. Just two weeks or so after 9/11 the president said, “Go to Disney World. Go shopping.” There’s something out of whack here. The global war on terror, and Iraq as a subset of the global war on terror, is said to be critically important, on the one hand. Yet on the other hand, the country basically goes about its business, as if, really, there were no war on terror, and no war in Iraq ongoing at all.
So it is, you write, “seven years into its confrontation with radical Islam, the United States finds itself with too much war for too few warriors—and with no prospect of producing the additional soldiers needed to close the gap.”
We’re having a very difficult time managing two wars that, in a twentiethcentury context, are actually relatively small.
You also say: “U.S. troops in battle dress and body armor, whom Americans profess to admire and support, pay the price for the nation’s collective refusal to confront our domestic dysfunction.” What are we not confronting?
The most obvious, blindingly obvious, question is energy. It’s oil. I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the early 1970s, came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, compromised our freedom of action, and then did next to nothing about it. Every president from Richard Nixon down to the present has declared, “We’re going to fix this problem.” And none of them did. The reason we are in Iraq today is because the Persian Gulf is at the center of the world’s oil reserves. I don’t mean that we invaded Iraq on behalf of big oil, but the Persian Gulf region would have zero strategic significance were it not for the fact that that’s where the oil is.
Back in 1980, President Carter promulgated the Carter Doctrine. He said the Persian Gulf had enormous strategic significance to the United States. We were not going to permit any other country to control that region of the world. That set in motion a set of actions that militarized U.S. policy and led to ever deeper U.S. military involvement in the region. The result has been to postpone the day of reckoning. Americans are dodging the imperative of having a serious energy policy.
And this is connected to what you call “the crisis of profligacy.”
Well, we don’t live within our means. The individual savings rate in this country is below zero. As a nation, we assume the availability of an endless line of credit. But as individuals, the line of credit is not endless; that’s one of the reasons why we’re having this current problem with the housing crisis, and so on. And my view would be that the nation’s assumption that its line of credit is endless is also going to be shown to be false. And when that day occurs it’s going to be a black day indeed.
You call us an empire of consumption.
I didn’t create that phrase. It’s a phrase drawn from a book by a wonderful historian at Harvard University, Charles Maier. The point he makes in his very important book is that when American power was at its apex after World War II, through the Eisenhower years, into the Kennedy years, we made what the world wanted. They wanted our cars. We exported our television sets, our refrigerators—we were the world’s manufacturing base. He called it an “empire of production.”
Sometime around the 1960s there was a tipping point when the “empire of production” began to become the “empire of consumption.” When the cars started to be produced elsewhere, and the television sets, and the socks, and everything else. And what we ended up with was the American people functioning primarily as consumers rather than producers.
And you say this has produced a condition of profound dependency, to the extent that, and I’m quoting you, “Americans are no longer masters of their own fate.”
Well, they’re not. I mean, the current debt to the Chinese government grows day by day. Why? Because of the negative trade balance. Our negative trade balance with the world is something on the order of $800 billion per year. That’s $800 billion of stuff that we buy, so that we can consume, that is $800 billion more than the stuff that we sell to them. That’s a big number, even relative to the size of our economy.
You use a metaphor that is intriguing. American policy makers “have been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme intended to extend indefinitely the American line of credit.” What’s going on that resembles a Ponzi scheme?
This continuing tendency to borrow and to assume that the bills are never going to come due. I testified before a House committee on the future of U.S. grand strategy. I was struck by the questions coming from members that showed an awareness, a sensitivity, and a deep concern about some of the issues that I tried to raise in the book.
How are we going to pay the bills? How are we going to pay for the entitlements that are going to increase year by year for the next couple of decades, especially as baby boomers retire? Nobody has answers to those questions. So I was pleased that these members of Congress understood the problem. I was absolutely taken aback when they said, “Professor, what can we do about this?” I took this as a candid admission that they didn’t have any answers, that they were perplexed, that this problem of learning to live within our means seemed to have no politically plausible solution.
You say that the tipping point between wanting more than we were willing to pay for began in the Johnson administration. “We can fix the tipping point with precision,” you write. “It occurred between 1965, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam, and 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon finally ended direct U.S. involvement in that war.” Why do you see that period as so crucial?
When President Johnson became president, our trade balance was in the black. By the time we get to the Nixon era, it’s in the red. And it stays in the red down to the present. As a matter of fact, the trade imbalance essentially becomes larger year by year.
So I think that it is the ’60s generally—the Vietnam period—that was the moment when we began to lose control of our economic fate. And most disturbingly, we’re still really in denial.
You describe another fateful period between July 1979 and March 1983. You describe it, in fact, as a pivot of con tempo rary American history. That includes Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, right?
Well, I would be one of the first to confess that I think that we have misunderstood and underestimated President Carter. He was the one president of our time who recognized, I think, the challenges awaiting us if we refused to get our house in order.
Talk about his speech on July 15, 1979. Why does that speech resonate so strongly?
This is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word malaise in the text. It’s a very powerful speech, because President Carter acknowledges that our dependence on oil poses a looming threat to the coun
try. If we act now, he says, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don’t act now, we’re headed down a path along which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. The president was urging us to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom that is anchored in truth, he argued, and the way to manifest that choice was by addressing our energy problem. Carter had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post-Vietnam period. And, of course, he was completely derided and disregarded.
And he lost the election.
Exactly.
This speech killed any chance he had of winning reelection. Why? Because the American people didn’t want to settle for less?
They absolutely did not. And indeed, the election of 1980 was the great expression of that, because in 1980, we have a candidate, perhaps the most skillful politician of our time, Ronald Reagan, who says, “Doomsayers, gloomsayers, don’t listen to them. The country’s best days are ahead of us.”
“Morning in America.”
It’s “Morning in America.” You don’t have to sacrifice; you can have more of everything. All we need to do is get government out of the way and drill more holes for oil. The president led us to believe the supply of oil right here in North America was infinite.