Naomi Wolf: We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender

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Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:34:01 -0800

[Zepps_News] #Naomi Wolf: We Americans are like recovering

addicts after a four-year bender

 

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1635925,00.html

 

 

 

 

We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender

 

Bush made his white constituency feel good about themselves, but no

longer. Citizens are rediscovering democracy

 

Naomi Wolf

Monday November 7, 2005

The Guardian

 

In the US comic strip, Peanuts, there is a little boy who is always

followed by a cloud of dust. Wherever he goes, his cloud follows him.

George Bush can't shake his personal cloud. The until recently eerily

untouchable president has now lost his mojo. The man to whom the entire

US press corps has been on its knees for four years is finally in the

doghouse.

 

It is almost a cartoon of karma. First, hurricane Katrina hit - and the

sight of black and brown bodies floating in what had been the streets of

a US city, of babies crying for water, of old people shrouded in their

wheelchairs seemed to rip right through the collective fantasy of US

goodness and infallibility constructed by Dick Cheney and his cabal and

hyped by a crotch-strapped Bush in a flightsuit.

 

Article continues

How did he get away with so many lies for so long? After 9/11, Bush,

Cheney and Karl Rove successfully used the fear of more terrorist

attacks and the intoxicant of ruthless jingoism to sedate the country

and make it compliant.

 

They could not have had more fortunate timing. During an era when US

prestige abroad had already been declining, when US schools were turning

out subliterates, when the US economy was being crippled by competition

from harder-working south-east Asians and Chinese, Americans - and

especially American men - were feeling the sinking self-regard

characteristic of those losing prestige in once-great empires in decline.

 

Bush, Cheney and Rove changed all that with their myth making post-9/11.

Suddenly those feminists were no longer so threatening: we still needed

tough men in firefighter suits to protect the less powerful. Suddenly

American men could feel potent at the sight of a statue of a tyrant

toppling in a public square, could vicariously inhale the discourse

about " liberating the Middle East " and " spreading democracy " , could put

a yellow " Support the Troops " sticker on their SUVs and forget the

spiking mortgage, the downsizing of good-paying white-collar jobs, the

increasing obstreperousness of their women. Bush managed to be golden

for so long because he made Americans - and especially white American

men, his core constituency - feel good about their identity again.

 

Well, Katrina was like the end of the Wizard of Oz: the tiny, fibbing

man was revealed behind the great big voice and the inflated ideals.

Scene after scene of the failure of the US to act like the US held a

mirror up to our faces. It was like an intervention for a drug addict:

suddenly the lies, the hype, the intoxicants, the bad company, looked as

destructive to our true selves as Americans as they really had been all

along. " This is not who we are, " we realised inwardly, in revulsion at

our own long bender.

 

So now Bush can get no slack. The Miers fiasco showed him up as arrogant

- no news, but we are sick of it now. The Valerie Plame leak suddenly

feels serious, now that Bush has lost the monopoly on the word

" treachery " . The press is refusing to go away in the face of threats and

platitudes. We hit the 2,000 mark for dead young American men and women

in Iraq, and no one thought that was inspiring any more. The man can do

nothing right.

 

It's true that, in spite of Bush's current implosion, some rightwing

structures will remain well past this lame-duck presidency. The right

has a firm grasp on such powerful institutions as Fox News, the network

of thinktanks, and soon, probably, the supreme court as well.

 

But here is the thing about democracy: when it is really working, it is

not deferential to institutions. Real citizen action upends the

best-laid plans of the best-financed oligarchs. Alabama was locked up

politically in 1955 by segregationist old boys - but a bus boycott,

sparked by a seamstress, Rosa Parks, who did not want to give up her

seat, led the Jim Crow henchmen at the top into irrelevance. Because of

an outburst of second-wave feminist activism, Roe v Wade was passed in

spite of a number of conservative justices during a conservative Nixon

presidency. Before Katrina, when the mass hypnosis of US jingoism still

prevailed, there was widespread judicial support for curtailing the

rights of war prisoners. Now, because of a changed national mood, judges

seem far less eager to hand over authoritarian executive privilege to

Bush. Justices, in other words, are people who live in and cannot help

but respond to the bigger cultural shifts of their time. I believe in

the power of this cultural shift around us to move even the judiciary:

Institutions are made up of human beings, and no one likes being looked

at with contempt at dinner parties.

 

But will this shift in the wind affect US relations with the larger

world community? I think it could, but not, again, because our role at

the UN will change or because we will have an awakening about our

pathetic behaviour in relation to Kyoto. The shift in foreign relations

will be an outcome of ordinary human shame. We were willing to be held

in contempt by those effeminate Frogs - by " old Europe " - when we were

intoxicated with ourselves: our isolationism made that easy. But now we

are actually ashamed of ourselves at home, we can't bear international

contempt in the same way. Now it hurts.

 

I don't see Cheney being shamed into dropping his Halliburton cronies

now carving up Iraq. But I do see a renewed citizen interest in wind

power, in driving petrol-electric hybrid cars, in reading about the

short lives of the war dead - who, only six months ago, were spirited

home away from the cameras in their body bags, when protest was

considered unseemly. Today on the AOL homepage there is a headline about

Bush being jeered by a foreign leader: that story would never have made

it out of the land of blogs six months ago.

 

Like recovering addicts who have taken a step into a 12-step programme,

we are ready at last to hear how we have harmed others - and to try to

make amends. Star, the supermarket gossip tabloid, has put Angelina

Jolie's work with Ethiopian Aids orphans on the cover, with a bigger

photo than that of Paris Hilton's latest outfit. We used not to think

black children in trouble overseas had anything to do with us - until we

saw what happened to other black children, on our watch, here at home.

 

I do feel hopeful: everywhere I go, I hear disgust at our long drunken

lurch through recent history give way to a renewed interest among

ordinary people in activism, in justice, in what we used to understand

as citizenship. I am less concerned about whether this results in a

Democratic or Republican victory at mid-term elections than I am in

whether we get to be a democracy again.

 

I am seeing Americans across party lines look again at what made us for

so long, a moral force in the world - our judiciary, our until recently

free press, our almost-retired belief in the equality of all - and

think, yes, that is who we are. That is what makes us able to face

ourselves in the mirror of news events. That is what made the US great,

when it was great - not armies, not penal colonies, not a licence to

terrify the world.

 

Bush will never recover his swagger in our eyes: he was our dealer. What

remains to be seen is whether we will turn again to the next good drug

to come along, with the next charismatic pusher - or whether Katrina's

real legacy will lead us to do the hard work of reclaiming a civil

society rooted in reality. My bet is on the latter.

 

· Naomi Wolf is the author of The Treehouse, Fire With Fire, and The

Beauty Myth

 

 

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