And another word for fearmonger is…
About a month ago I wrote this personal reflection on what it was like to grow up without fear during the years of “V”, “The Day After”, and “Red Dawn.”
I have updated that post by shaking my head in utter disappointment and disgust at a recent editorial penned by none other than former Ronald Reagan speechwriter: Peggy Noonan.
Just a few days ago, the journalist and powerful conference organizer Steve Clemons wrote about a U.S. plan to oppose “a legal definition of terrorism.”
This news came from a leaked memo allegedly penned by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton — the same envoy who so impressed a Republican-controlled Congress that he had to be appointed during a summer recess.
Now, why would this administration fear a legal definition of terrorism?
Yesterday I wrote to promote and embrace Spencer Ackerman’s claim that the Iraq war and the Guantanamo Bay “extra-constitutional” prison colony are logical to the administration because they believe they need to prove the point that the Executive should not be tied down by laws it finds inconvenient.
Once again, why would this administration fear a legal definition of terrorism?
Perhaps, its not our soldiers they’re worried about. Perhaps, they’re worried about their analysts, planners and speechwriters. Or isn’t the definition of a terrorist anyone who willingly sows fear to reap political gain?
Consider Noonan’s piece. At first brush, it appears as if she is talking about recent base closures. But then she quite disingenuously neglects to inform her readers (or her choir?) that these are administrative shifts in funding — funding that apparently has no limits during a time of a war without logical end.
So why talk about base closures at all? Because, in this case, it provides her with adequate cover under which she can furiously lob bombs at an unsuspecting readership: pounding away at apocalyptic scenarios not to advance some specific argument about these specific military bases and these specific programs but, simply, to advocate on behalf of protection from monsters.
Please, someone, tell me that Noonan’s piece isn’t a rhetorical scare tactic. Why else beat so loudly around the Bush? But do the ends — affirming the Bush doctrine — really justify such execrable means? Do we really need to turn Americans into a pile of spineless, quivering cowards so this one administration can get a pass on every single decision it makes?
People who exploit this kind of writing often get away with it because we’re not a very literary society. For whatever reasons, Americans don’t put much stock in words. We are a sophisticated culture with a very advanced legal system but we are not really that into, say, The New York Review of Books.
This leads me to suspect that people who write as Ms. Noonan has chosen to do know they can get away with doing things with words because words aren’t the measure of men in contemporary America, “deeds” are.
Of course, you can do many things with words. Amen. You can found a nation by writing some of them down. Sometimes, you can do really fancy things with words. After all, literature had a pretty big head start on Hollywood. Good writers have been pulling a fast one on willing audiences for a very, very long time. Subliminable, indeed.
Sometimes it’s not the point you’re trying to make that matters, it’s how you go about trying to make it. Sometimes, the effect is the point of a piece of writing just as sometimes, to some people, the ends justify the means.
This is familiar political and linguistic territory for Ms. Noonan. During her days at the White House, the U.S. funded the Contras knowing, fully, that they were insurgents who sometimes used terrorist tactics to achieve their perhaps noble, perhaps mistaken aims.
In fact, it was during those heady days that the following case was tried at the International Court of Justice: The Republic of Nicaragua v. The United States of America.
(By the way, I didn’t know that “Each of the five permanent members of the Security Council — France, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – have always had a judge on the Court.“)
Maybe I should be very grateful to Ms. Noonan for being so explicit that she ended up on James Wolcott’s personal journal.
Clearly, it is very important, then, to seek to establish a legal and binding definition of terrorism.
Even if one doesn’t get approved, just talking about it often enough might leave this bloc’s advanced archery division without one of its potent flaming-turd quivers.
Otherwise, the 2008 campaign is going to suck more than an 8-month run of Japanese Noh theater on prime-time television.
Postscript
What’s with the Noh mask? I think we tend to overlook just how surreal and symbolic American politics are and have been for some time now. In fact, I would say that everytime some pundit or reporter describes a candidate or elected official as “candid” or “off-the-cuff” or a “straight-shooter” we venture even deeper into the territory of the artificial, the crafted and the simulated.
Suffice to say, Robert Redford is working on a sequel to “The Candidate.” Hollywood may be full of rich phoneys, but they didn’t get rich by refusing to sell to Americans precisely what the latter wanted to buy.
The same can most certainly be said for the current administration — simply replace “rich” with “powerful.” Once they’re out of office, they’ll do just fine converting that “power” into “riches.” It’s what politicians always do — especially those who represent the wealthy, first and foremost.