Ariel Dorfman on How Bush Makes Fiction of Us All

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S

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 20:06:04 EST

Ariel Dorfman on How Bush Makes Fiction of Us All

 

 

 

 

I love this article from TomDispatch. He makes the point that I've

said - the problem with the Bush parodies are that they could be real.

It stops being a parody when it could be truth.

 

With that being said -- please make sure to take a look at my sign off

tagger. Truth or fiction? That happens to be truth. S

 

****

 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/

 

Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman on How Bush Makes Fiction of Us All

 

In April 2005, I posted a dispatch in which I claimed that " a senior

official in one of our intelligence agencies " had slipped me an

unpublished manuscript by " the President. " I added that I believed it

genuine and had done my best to vet it. My source, I mentioned, had

told me that the book might have had illustrations by either Paul

Wolfowitz or Donald Rumsfeld (though no illustrations arrived with

it). The title of the manuscript, I swore, was George's Amazing

Alphabet Book of the Contemporary World, or Al-Qaedas All Around and,

though it was missing two letters of the alphabet, K and R, it had

stirring contemporary entries for children like:

 

" W as in Waterboarding. Wally waterboarded Ahmed (see A). Kids,

it's not surfboarding, but almost! There's the board and the water and

the person on the board, and it's the main sport of the Central

Intelligence Agency (see G), and the great thing is -- you can do it

twenty-four hours a day. You never have to wait for the surf to be up. "

 

With this satire, I hoped to catch something of George's grim world. I

assumed that what I had written, including " George's " book, was far

too ridiculous on every level for anyone to take seriously and so

never put a humor warning on it. How wrong I was became clear as soon

as the first e-letters from readers arrived at the Tomdispatch

mailbox, filled with shock that the President had written such things,

or insisting I had been gulled, that this was obviously a product not

of the President but of the CIA. Certifiably sane but puzzled friends

got in touch to ask whether the " manuscript " was real or my fantasy.

In this way, I learned a painfully useful lesson, one Ariel Dorfman,

author of Other Septembers, Many Americas, absorbed recently -- as he

recounts in his piece below (a shorter version of which appears on the

Los Angeles Times Sunday op-ed page). The lesson is simple enough: The

Bush administration's actions since 9/11 have outstripped anyone's

ability to parody them; or, put another way, nothing in our world now

is too absurd, too far-fetched to seem plausible. This, of course, is

why one of the more popular news programs of recent years is Jon

Stewart's Daily Show where the silliest parodies often come closer to

our reality than anything you might see on the network prime-time news.

 

In fact, story after story from the Age of Bush reads like fiction of

an especially improbable sort. Take the recent account by James Moore,

author of Bush's Brain, a less than positive book about Karl Rove,

that was put up at the Huffington Post website. He describes how, a

year ago, he arrived at an airport, found himself on the government's

no-fly list ( " All I can tell you is that there is something in your

background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking

for... " ), and has been unable to get off it ever since, though he

continues to fly with some added inconvenience. ( " I have been on the

No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official

reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing

I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. " ) No

fiction, in other words, could be stranger than the truths of our

moment. Tom

 

Homeland Security Ate My Speech

by Ariel Dorfman

 

On December 27th, at 11:31 in the morning to be precise, agents of

the Homeland Security Department detained me at Miami International

Airport and proceeded to impound a speech I was supposed to deliver in

Washington, D.C. to a plenary session of the Modern Language

Association of America.

 

Well, not quite.

 

It is true that this is what I told some two thousand university

professors of language and literature who had gathered at a forum on

the " role of the intellectual in the twenty-first century " in the

Washington Hilton. I explained to them that the actions of the

Department of Homeland Security had made it impossible for me to

convey the words I had originally written and that instead I would

narrate the strange, drawn-out conversation I had held with those two

intimidating men in a windowless room at the airport as they discussed

my speech on how exactly to think ourselves out of the catastrophe of

our era.

 

The loss of that speech was, of course, a gigantic literary

fabrication. All through my talk, I provided innumerable clues that

this was indeed a tongue-in-cheek attempt to embody the contradictions

of being an intellectual in our present time of turmoil. I wanted to

use this " method " to obliquely lay out my ideas without launching into

the sort of preachy manifesto I dislike. I made references to Borges

and Nabokov, those literary masters of deception and apocryphal

manuscripts. I speculated that the agents were part of a special (and

hitherto secret) division of Homeland Security dedicated to weeding

out alien scholars with dangerous academic leanings.

 

I gave one of these agents a tall and gangly physique as well as

Trotsky-like glasses and wondered whether he was not exquisitely

versed in post-modern theory and subaltern studies. I detailed his

derisory comments regarding my central thesis that American

intellectuals could learn from the Chilean struggle against

dictatorship in their attempt to confront the erosion of freedom in

the United States -- that it was necessary to examine the lessons of

that other September 11th, the day in 1973 when Chilean President

Salvador Allende was overthrown. I pushed my description to absurd

levels, making those men grill me about possible Chilean sleeper cells

bent on revenge against the CIA for its role in that military coup

against Chile's democracy.

 

The whole literary exercise, in fact, was meant to be a gentle way

of poking fun at the bloated self-importance of intellectuals, a way

of scoffing at my own challenge to my colleagues to go beyond the

thousands who admire Susan Sontag and reach out instead to the

sixty-five million Americans who have devoured the Left Behind series

of apocalyptic bestsellers. Yeah, sure. Grandiose plans for critical

thought and seditious discourse and I couldn't even convince these two

agents with my arguments.

 

Indeed, in my fraudulent version of events, I made my listeners

keenly aware of my limitations. " You know what I think, Professor? " I

had the beefier, the more vulgar, of the two bogus agents say just

before they let me go, the one who hadn't seemed even remotely

interested in a syllable I uttered until that second. " I think you

guys at the MLA take yourselves too seriously, way too seriously. You

want people to understand what the hell you're talking about? How

about trying a little humor for a change? "

 

And I had done my best to listen to my own character. My answer to

him was this attempt to be funny at the MLA forum, this small story.

 

It should have been obvious that it was a story. A funny story. No

audience could miss that, right?

 

Well, not quite.

 

I discovered all too soon that some members of the audience had

taken me seriously, way too seriously. As soon as I descended from the

podium, I was stopped by several professors, none of whom I had met

before. One was puzzled that those agents had not Googled me and so

grasped that I was a completely harmless sort. Another wanted to know

if they had also taken my computer away.

 

In the hours that ensued, I discovered that they were not the only

ones to deem my tall tale trustworthy. People I did not know

approached me in the corridors of the Hilton to express their

indignation and to ask whether I had been roughed up. One of them

suggested that a petition be circulated protesting this infringement

of academic freedom.

 

At first, I was astonished. It was joke! And this was a literary

convention, for Keats sake! We earned our daily bread by parsing

double meanings, lionizing irony, amusing ourselves with aesthetic

chicanery.

 

But that afternoon, in a follow-up workshop, a graduate student

queried me about my experience, confessing that my story had filled

her with fear. If someone like me could be apprehended in that way,

what might not happen to her? What might not be happening at that very

moment to so many unprivileged, invisible others who were entering the

United States right now? How do we rebel against that sort of

repression, she asked, if the very act of speaking out could endanger

our family, our loved ones?

 

It was then, as I watched that small gathering of intellectuals

nod in agreement, that it finally dawned on me how deeply the

fictional account of my persecution by Homeland Security had resonated

with unbridled fantasies that seethed inside the heads of so many men

and women at that convention -- and unquestionably elsewhere in the

country. I doubted that any of the people I had talked to was in

immediate danger of being sent to Guantanamo or dispatched to a

country where they would be tortured. As one of my fictitious guards

had pointed out to me when I tried to persuade him that the United

States was on the verge of becoming a police state, I was totally free

to say anything I wanted at the MLA, to expostulate even the most

outrageous falsehoods. Nobody was going to arrest me -- or my

audience, for that matter -- for voicing a dissident opinion.

 

And yet there could be no denying the paranoia my story had tapped

into. If arguably rational academics believed me, it was because in

some profound recess of their psyches they had already imagined such a

possible world, had already inflicted that nightmare scenario upon

themselves in the shadows of their own dread. Perhaps that's why, no

matter how much I assured everyone I met that my tribulations had been

a hoax, rumors of my ordeal continued to spread at an alarming rate. A

former student told me she was writing a letter to the Washington Post

to complain about my mistreatment. E-mails began to arrive,

commiserating with my plight.

 

Everybody seemed absolutely ready to credit my absurd story as

perfectly real, as not, in fact, at all absurd. When I lamented the

naiveté of such a sophisticated audience to friends at the MLA, when I

declared my amazement at the reaction I had gotten, the answer was

unanimous: I was the naïve one.

 

Amazed? Why should I be amazed? Of course, people had found my

version of events -- to use an Aristotelian category -- a paragon of

verisimilitude. Isn't art, according to my master Picasso, a lie that

always tells the truth? To those friends, my fraudulent story was

terrifyingly plausible, all-too-unfortunately representative of a

country where citizens and non-citizens can indeed be kept forever and

a day in custody without charges, where illegal wiretapping is

rampant, where that obscene word " rendition " (or the even more

perverse " extraordinary rendition " ) has crawled into our everyday

vocabulary, where the Vice President insists that certain suspects may

have to be tortured in order to defeat terrorism, where the President

lies and invades another country under sham pretences and is not

impeached, where polls indicate that a majority of Americans are

willing to give up their civil liberties in order to be " secure. " Had

I not proclaimed in my own essays that anything can happen in the

United States, that anything can happen anywhere if ordinary citizens

are afraid enough to accept the slow destruction of democracy, to

justify the worst crimes against humanity if they feel their lives are

imperiled? And wasn't I as responsible as my gullible audience? Wasn't

I also laboring under the anxiety that this could truly befall me?

Wasn't my story, my telling of it, filled with an underlying panic?

Wasn't that what had made it so credible?

 

Undoubtedly, its credibility was also due to the unfortunate fact

that the room I had described, that windowless room in an airport

where I had not been detained, where I had not been interrogated, does

in fact exist. How can we know what is being perpetrated at this very

moment in such impenetrable chambers? How can we be sure that my

speech, or any other speech for that matter, is not being scrutinized

by some federal agency, transcribed for spying eyes? How can we even

find out who is being interrogated at this airport, that terminal, in

that other windowless room, right now? How can we be sure that we are

not next?

 

The sad truth about my story is that it comes straight out of the

trepidation and terror of September 11th, 2001. Before that date I

would not have concocted my chronicle in this manner, not here anyway.

I would not have thought about making it up because, quite simply,

most Americans would not have understood what I was talking about,

because nobody would have found it even slightly realistic.

 

The sadder truth is that I can invent an epilogue to my story.

 

Let us suppose that the United States suffers another terrorist

attack of even more devastating consequences than the last one, an

assault where maybe, who knows, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds

of thousands of men, women, and children die. That day, who can say

that there will not be a knock at my door and, when I open it, two men

there, one of them tall and gangly with Trotsky-like glasses; the

other shorter, beefier, and vulgar?

 

I can see them right now, right now in my head.

 

I can see them ask if I remember having spread lies about them,

about their efforts to fight the war against terrorism.

 

And then I can hear them, those two men, demand that I accompany

them, just for a few hours, they'll say, just for some routine

questioning.

 

And I am left to wonder if this new ending to my story is really

so unbelievable, if it is, after all, so absolutely, totally,

impossibly unbelievable?

 

Ariel Dorfman has written extensively about the relationship

between the two September 11ths, particularly in his book of

provocations, Other Septembers, Many Americas (Seven Stories). He is

also the author, most recently, of Desert Memories: Journeys Through

the Chilean North (National Geographic) and a novel, Burning City

(Random House), written with his youngest son, Joaquin. His website

is: www.adorfman.duke.edu.

 

Copyright 2006 Ariel Dorfman

 

 

***

" It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and

incumbency "

 

George W. Bush in Sweden, June 14th 2001, speaking to the Prime

Minister, unaware that a live TV camera was still running.