by Mark Slouka
What we require most in America today, is seems to me, are bad soldiers: stubborn, independent-minded men and women, reluctant to give orders and loath to receive them, loyal not to authority, nor to any specific company or team, but to the ideals of open debate, equality, honesty, and fairness.
Democracy, of course, is not an absolute but a relative value: “We’re not perfect,” the cry will sound, “but show us who is.” I’ll take a pass on perfection, but I’ll say this: when it comes to the egalitarian attitudes democracy presupposes, the Brits, for all their wigged getups and parliamentary histrionics, have it all over us.
I think I realized this fully a few years back when I happened to see a BBC program featuring an “interview” with a member of the House of Lords who had voted in favor of supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Though the member’s name escapes me, I can still recall the breathtaking frankness of the “conversation,” the utter lack of deference on the part of the interviewer, her willingness to insist on a satisfying answer and to mercilessly track down every attempt at evasion. So bare-knuckled was this exchange that I’m ashamed to say that my first reaction (this is how far I’d fallen) was discomfort. This was a major political figure, after all, and he was being treated like a truant with some explaining to do. More uncomfortable still, he himself seemed to accept that this grilling was the price one paid for public service, and that he’d better answer up and be quick about it.
My initial discomfort did not last long; by the time the man had been deemed sufficiently humiliated and sent packing, I was enchanted. It was as though I’d been permitted a glimpse of the world envisioned by the Founding Fathers, a world of educated, independent-minded citizens cognizant of the fact that theirs was the position of power, and, on the other side, representatives prepared to accept the fact that they were the hired help, laboring in a government—forgive me—of the people, by the people, for the people. And though the larger historical irony of the British showing us how to “do democracy” was not lost on me, I could not help but marvel, and envy, and wince at the unavoidable comparison.
But it’s not just the formal, procedural differences between the two political cultures (the mandated brevity of the British election season, or the government’s strictures on how much money a candidate can spend) that cast us in a sad and diminished light; it’s the difference in spirit that lies behind, and informs, these distinctions.
In general, the Brits act as though the government is their business and they have every right to meddle in it. Americans, by and large, display no such self-assurance (unless they’re throwing bricks at Washington, which underscores my point). To the contrary, we seem to believe, deep in our hearts, that the business of government is beyond our provenance. What accounts for this difference in attitude? My wife, whose family hails in part from England, has a theory: unlike us, the Brits don’t confuse their royalty with their civil servants because they have both, clearly labeled. Acknowledging the apparently universal desire to defer, they channel that desire, wisely, into the place where it can do the least harm, a kind of political sump. Americans, on the other hand, lacking the royal catch basin, are squeezed between pretense and practice. Though we continue to pay lip service to the myth of the independent American, we understand it as a fiction—nice for a Friday night with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s but about as relevant to today’s world as a butter churn.
On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Brits have become what we were once supposed to be. Consider the unavoidable (if largely symbolic) fact that our president lives ensconced in a palace, while 10 Downing Street is a row house. From there, consider the regal arrogance of the president and the president’s men: their refusal to justify or explain policy, or abide by the constitution, or respond to the concerns of Congress. Next, consider the spectacle presented by the president’s “meetings with the people,” when he deigns to have them. Consider the extent to which he is scripted, buffered, coddled; the extent to which his audiences are screened to assure that they consist of cheerleaders whose “questions” are nothing more than praise couched in the shape of a question, or who don’t even bother with the interrogative form and, like one woman at a Bush “rally,” walk up to the microphone and say things like “My heroes have always been cowboys,” then sit down to thunderous applause.
More? Recall an average press conference: President Bush striding to the podium, his slightly irritated, patronizing manner. Recall the press corps’ sycophantic chuckling at every half-assed quip, its willingness to accept the most insulting answers, its downright Prufrockian (“and how should we presume”) inability to challenge an obvious untruth. Consider the fundamental inequality implicit in the fact that the president is always addressed as “Mr. President,” while septuagenarian journalists are invariably “Tom” or “Judy.” Survey the whole, sad spectacle, soup to nuts, then dare to consider what the alternative might look like.
To indulge this fantasy, look up one of the question-and-answer programs on the BBC, and watch a prime minister sweat while answering questions from an audience specially selected, according to the New York Times, to assure that its members are “tough, and knowledgeable.” Or take in one of the many lengthy press conferences, noting in particular how seriously the PMs take the process, or how, on being told that they haven’t answered the question precisely, they apologize (apologize!) and try again. But why stop there? Make it hurt. Look up the session in which Prime Minister Tony Blair appears in front of a live audience whose indignant members demand an apology from him for going to war, and respond to his answers, as one woman did, with “That’s rubbish, Tony.”
Now recall that steel tycoon who, upon accidentally addressing the president as “Mr. Truman” rather than “Mr. President,” was never able to forgive himself for the breach of etiquette. Which one is the citizen, and which the subject?
The real problem we face is not the Bush administration’s imperial pretensions, its quasi-cultish stress on loyalty, or its instinctive suspicion of debate and dissent, but the extent to which the administration’s modus operandi is representative of a society increasingly conversant with the protocols of subservience. In the long term, it is this tilt toward deference, this willingness to hold our tongues and sit on our principles, that truly threatens us, even more than the manifold abuses of this particular administration, because it makes them possible.
Over a century and a half after its publication, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has calcified into a reference work, a Bartlett’s Quotations for journalists in a hurry. To those who still bother to read it, however, it offers something invaluable—a chance to plot our position on the road from, or to, despotism. Like any map, Tocqueville’s doesn’t presume to suggest where we will arrive, or when; it simply charts the terrain between two points—call them freedom and tyranny. Which direction we happen to be traveling, and how quickly, is up to us to determine, which “goal” we are currently approaching, the question at hand.
It’s not a difficult question to answer. On the contrary, unless one has been in a deep sleep for the past seven years, the answer is glaringly obvious. Tyranny isn’t something up ahead; it’s right here. It’s in the soil, in the very air we breathe. It’s the other climate change, and no less real. The old tyranny, from which we emerged as a nation, has been transformed by the wonder-working ways of time and advertising into a powdered wig, a tricorn hat, and the God-given freedom to burn hot dogs; the new tyranny, meanwhile—infinitely more dangerous, Made in America—looms just ahead, so large as to be very nearly invisible.
Why haven’t we noticed? Perhaps we’re too busy, or historically ignorant, to recognize the political beast when it stands before us, slavering in the road. Perhaps we’re so confused by the rope-a-dope tactics of our would-be dictators—just look at them, falling back into winking buffoonery one moment, attacking the enemies of righteousness the next—that we don’t quite know what to think.
There’s another possibility, of cou
rse—not a pretty one. Maybe we’re not out on the street protesting this administration’s abuses of power because we’re no longer the people we once were, because we’ve been effectively bred for docility, trained to defer to our leaders even though they reveal themselves, over and again, to be dishonorable, incompetent men, even though they rob us of what is rightfully ours, then present us with the bill for the removal of our legacy.
Equality, Tocqueville pointed out, “insinuates deep into the heart and mind of every man some vague notion and some instinctive inclination toward political freedom.” But what about inequality? Might it not, by precisely the same calculus, insinuate “some instinctive inclination” toward political tyranny? Of course it might. Once the idea of inequality is allowed to take root, a veritable forest of ritualized gestures and phrases springs up to reinforce it. The notion that some bow and others are bowed to comes to seem natural; the cool touch of the floor against our forehead begins to feel right: from classroom to corporate cubicle to the halls of Congress, deferential way leads on to deferential way, and at the end of the road, as Tocqueville foresaw, stands a baaa-ing polity “reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Lincoln had it right: “If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” We’re off to a fine start.
1. The primary goal, after all, is not power per se, but a higher profit margin (achieved through a friction-free workplace), a motivation amply shared, in today’s America, by those in the “business” of governing. I am assuming, of course, that there is still some useful distinction to be made between the public and the private sectors, between the Bush administration’s CEOs and their brothers in industry, between the increasingly authoritarian behavior of our “elected” representatives and the generally authoritarian climate of the American workplace—which seems unlikely.
2. Though even here I hesitate, stalled by my lack of faith in the judgment of the general-bosses, in the purity of their motivations, as well as by the record of criminal incompetence and outright folly stretching from Gettysburg to Gallipoli and on, and on.
3. It’s only fair to add, however, that even though Powell’s crime was dramatically smaller, so was the possible penalty for insubordination: not a bullet or a train ticket to Bergen-Belsen, but an endowed chair at the think tank or university of his choice.
Coda
A Quibble
2009
We have every reason to be pleased with ourselves. Bucking all recent precedent, we seem to have put a self-possessed, intelligent man in the White House who, if he manages to avoid being bronzed before his first hundred days are up, may actually succeed in correcting the course of empire. The bubble is rushing back to plumb; excitement is in the air. It would be churlish to quibble.
Still, let’s. Although the guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has indisputably changed, although the new boss is not the same as the old boss, I’m less certain about us. I’d like to believe that we’re a different people now; that we’re more educated, more skeptical, more tough-minded than we were when we gave the outgoing gang of criminals enough votes to steal the presidential election, twice, but it’s hard work; actual human beings keep getting in the way.
My neighbor, a high school teacher living about an hour outside New York City, wants to torture a terrorist. He’s worried because he believes that Osama—excuse me, Obama—cares more about them than he does about us. He’s never heard of the Spanish Inquisition. Another neighbor—an actual plumber, actually named Joe—wants Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tossed out of the high school library. Joe came by recently. Did I want my kids learning how to curse and kill dogs and commit adultery? he asked. I said that my kids already knew how to curse, and that I hadn’t realized that killing dogs and committing adultery was something you had to learn. He showed me the book. He and his wife had gone through it with a blue highlighter and highlighted the words crap, shit and damn every time they appeared, on every page. They’d written to Laura Bush about it, and received a supportive letter in return, signed by the first lady. “You’re a teacher,” he said. “Don’t tell me you support this kind of filth.” I asked him if he’d read it. Well, no, he said, but he knew what it was about. He didn’t really go in for reading, himself, he said.
I like a party as much as the next man, and I still have moments when I realize that the bastards are really, truly out and think that maybe, this time, it really is morning in America, but a voice from outside the ether cone keeps whispering that we haven’t changed at all, that we’re as dangerous to ourselves as we’ve ever been and that the relative closeness of the popular vote in this last election (given the almost embarrassing superiority of the winning ticket and the parade of catastrophes visited on the nation by the outgoing party) proves it. Go ahead and bask, this voice says, but that rumble you hear above the drums and the partymakers is real, and it’s coming our way.
What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame—no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We’re deeply loyal to it. Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.
Seen from a sufficient distance (a decade abroad, for example), or viewed through a protective filter, like film, or alcohol, there can be something almost endearing about it. It can appear quaint, part of our foolish-but-authentic, naive-yet-sincere, rough-hewn spirit. Up close and personal, unromanticized and unfiltered, it’s another thing entirely. In the flesh, barking from the electronic pulpit or braying back from the audience, our ignorance can be sobering. We don’t know. Or much care. Or care to know.
What do we care about? We care about auto racing, and Jessica. We care about food, oh yes, please, very much. And money. (Did you catch the last episode of I Love Money?) We care about Jesus, though we’re a bit vague on his teachings. And America. We care about America. And the flag. And the troops, though we’re untroubled by the fact that the Bush administration lied us into the conflict, then spent years figuring out that armor in war might be a good idea. Did I mention money?1
Here’s the mirror—look and wince. One out of every four of us believes we’ve been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71 percent in angels. Forty percent of us believe God created all things in their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number—not coincidentally, perhaps—are functionally illiterate. Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around the earth. When one of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive in class because they have an indigo “vibrational aura,” which means that they are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the bookstores to lay our money down.
Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has migrated to the region of the belt—not below it, which might at least be diverting, but only as far at the gut—where it has come to a stop. The gut tells us things. It tells us what’s right and what’s wrong, whom to hate and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it’s where American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer appears in the little window of the eight ball: “Don’t trust him. Don’t know. Undecided. Just because, that’s why.” We know because we feel, as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love.
I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden
to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don’t believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing—a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my fellow citizens, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don’t believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, who know all about Islam, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers’ speculation that’s so divorced from history and actual, demonstrable fact, that’s so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. “Way I see it is,” a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”
Quite possibly, this belief in our own opinion, regardless of the facts, may be what separates us from the nations of the world, what makes us unique in God’s eyes. The average German or Czech, though possibly no less ignorant than his American counterpart, will probably consider the possibility that someone who has spent his life studying something may actually know more about it, or at least have an opinion worth considering. Not the American. Though perfectly willing to recognize expertise in basketball, for example, or refrigerator repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas, all folks (and their opinions) are suddenly equal. Thus evolution is a damned lie, global warming a liberal hoax, and Republicans care about people like you.