“The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion. ”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
“get your big trucks rollin down hiway 9
put on the armor it’s party time
gonna dance with the devil of our own design
get your big trucks rollin down hiway 9
* * *
well we got caught sleeping at the sentry post
now we’re standing toe to toe with what we feared the most
that old father and his son and the unheavenly host
we gotta do what we can don’t give up the ghost”
Eliza Gilkyson, Hiway 9
Yesterday, America suffered a substantial blow to its prestige abroad in a manner that has, so far, largely gone unnoticed and uncommented upon by the usual media pundits. The event was reported, but only as a sidebar story about our former President, George W. Bush, cancelling a trip to Switzerland apparently for fear that he might be prosecuted for war crimes. What everyone seems to have missed is that this is much more a story about the morality of our country than it is one about the perils facing Mr. Bush if he dares, in future, to leave the safety of our boundaries.
Not so long ago, it would have been impossble to imagine a time when a former American President could not venture forth into the world without the prospect of being received with honor – much less of a time when he or she might be threatened with imprisonment abroad for war crimes. Yet, America has apparently arrived at such a time and we have arrived without fanfare, without the accompaniment of shouting and yelling, and without the merest attempt at societal self-analysis as to how we managed such a result. How did we come so far in such a short time? How did we waste the massive goodwill created for our country during World War II by America’s citizen soldiers in a mere 50 years?
Like many things in life, the answer is really quite simple. And, as much as I despise the man, the answer is not that we had the stupidity to elect George W. Bush to the presidency – not once, but twice. George Bush is merely the culmination of something we have forgotten how to do, and if it hadn’t been George whom we elected to become president, it would have been someone else who looked and acted a lot like him. For George Bush is nothing more than a symptom of a national illness, not a cause.
What we have forgotten how to do is to examine seemingly complex issues through the lens of simplicity. We have forgotten how to see through the complexity insisted upon by those who either don’t totally accept our basic ideals or, more likely, chafe under the consequences of their application due to a desire for more power or more money. Humanity’s basic intellect rebels against the notion that ideals can be simply expressed and applied, seeking instead to glorify the finite differences that distinguish each of us from another – an instinct that those seeking power and fortune have perennially manipulated to their advantage over the decades of mankind.
I grew up in a so-called simpler time – the 1950′s. When those of us of my generation recall that era, we focus upon its outward manifestations, not its beliefs: the music; the lack of multiple, unimaginable forms of communication that exist today; the kinds of products that we used; our clothing styles and our hairdos; the overwhelming sense of safety we enjoyed. In short, those of us who are products of the era have wasted our time dreaming nostalgically of its aspects rather than about its beliefs. We have largely dismissed the 1950′s as an unsophisticated era in which American society ignored the more complex issues of our time. Today the decade seems an idyll: a rude time when peasants ruled; the Midsummer Night’s Dream of American society.
Ironically, the strength of the 1950′s lay in its simplicity. World War II proved to be a crucible in which American ideals were reduced to their essence, forged into the steel of belief, and generally shared by means of crisis among the increasingly diverse strands of the society which had evolved in the first half of the twentieth century. The 1950′s seem simplistic in hindsight because it was an era of shared beliefs combined with a profound sense of weariness. No society can survive the crucible of war without a subsequent time of recovery.
I suspect that similar periods of respite and shared beliefs exist after every major war in all human societies. How can they not? Furthermore, how can such periods survive for any appreciable length of time given humanity’s penchant for complication? It is no wonder that, when seen through the lens of history, such periods are reduced to times of misplaced idyll, since much of humanity prefers that such periods exist only in mythology rather than in reality.
Just as certainly as such periods exist, it is inevitably certain that the decades which succeed them will attempt to complicate the societal norms which prevailed in such periods in the belief that the essence of human society is complexity, not simplicity. We denigrate times of widely shared belief as unnatural and misguided. In point of fact, these periods seem, upon reflection, to be the true periods of clarity in any society, and the decades which naturally follow as periods of obscurantism. The challenge of any successful society appears to be that of enjoying the complexity wrought by diversity while simultaneously sharing the sharp focus of common beliefs.
America has failed to meet this challenge in our time. If we had, how could we have condoned locking up people in Guantanamo and throwing away the key? How could we have justified invading Iraq and Afghanistan on the principle of national interest? How could we have sold our own hard-won civil rights for a false sense of security in fear of a few old men in caves in Afghanistan who set out to deny us those self same rights?
In doing each of these things, we denied ourselves the benefits of our own stated ideals and and admitted our weakness in the bargain. In turning Guantanamo from a military base into a jail, we denied the dictates of at least the Fifth and Sixth Amendments of our Constitution to others on the basis that they are not American citizens and they aren’t on American soil. We ignored the fact that we are denying them a speedy and public trial and that we deprived them of liberty without due process of law. We did this by arguing that they are combatants in war and terrorists. We have incarcerated them based upon shared conclusions rather than as a result of due process, an act that cheapens our beliefs and weakens our society rather than strengthening either.
In allowing our Executive Branch to invade Iraq based upon made up scenarios of weapons of mass destruction and Afghanistan based upon the excuse of finding and catching Osama bin Laden, we have severely damaged the power reserved unto the Congress by Article I, Section 6 to declare war. We have ignored the wisdom of our founding fathers that a declaration of war should be a sober, thoughtful decision undertaken only after debate, in favor of allowing a powerful elite to decide when and where to waste the lives of our youth and our collective treasure. In doing this, we have to denied to George W. Bush the right to travel freely in those countries undeluded by America’s self-deception, for he is, rightfully, the embodiment of that powerful elite.
In seeking to feel secure in the aftermath of the terrible events of September 11th, we have sacrificed rights guaranteed to us under at least the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Even as I write, the Congress is deciding whether or not to renew provisions of the Patriot Act which allow the government to access my personal communications without a warrant and without probable cause. We have sold these protections for a pot of porridge, and we will rue the day when we finally realize the cost of their re-attainment, a cost now being paid by protesters in Egypt and Iran and a cost we already paid as a society during our own Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
We did each of these things only after much prolonged debate, the general tone of which in each case was that this particular situation was different for these specified reasons. In other words, in each case we have denied to others the benefit of those basic constitutional beliefs by arguing that the complexity of the matter at hand should prevail over their application. Even as such arguments deny basic rights to specific individuals and deliver demonstrable personal damage, the greater harm is always to the society that denies them through arguments of complexity.
I suspect that many of you reading the previous paragraph will immediately begin a mental sentence of your own beginning with the word “But”. If so, stop and ask yourself, instead, why you are attempting to do so. Then ask yourself whether you hold dear the basic beliefs written into our Constitution. If you hold those beliefs dear, you must also come to accept the consequences of the application of those beliefs and deny the use of the word “but” in the sentence you are forming in unthinking reflex to my comments.
In a nutshell, that is the challenge of shared liberties. They have always come and been retained only with great cost – great cost when first secured through the blood shed to defy the tyranny that denied them in the first instance and great cost in their application due to the societal fear engendered by the beliefs of those who demand such application. There was a simpler time when we knew and understood this challenge; a simpler time when we fought to maintain these liberties and did not hide them under a blanket of pejorative complexity; a simpler time when we knew what those liberties were with the clarity that comes from having just received their initial blessing.
And if we want to keep and enjoy these rights, we must stay focused on their purpose – they are nothing more than simple statements of our shared need for individual liberty. After all, liberty is nothing more (nor nothing less) than each individual man or woman becoming and remaining unburdened by an oppression that some majority wishes to impose upon them. Our founders inherently understood this, too.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence, In Congress, July 4, 1776
