No Style :: No Content

Reality Check

In an earlier and more angry post, I accused middle-American voters of not being able to consider objective facts and make reasoned decisions. That might have been a little harsh. Maybe the behavior of these people evidences not the inability to consider objective facts, but rather the willful choice to ignore them (not surprising since many of these people prefer to read the Bible rather than the news). But if that's true, it makes the responsibility of the American public for what is coming even more grievous.

That willful ignorance is letting some very smart, extremely dangerous people run away with the ball. Unless reality and accountability start finding their way back into the process, there will be no stopping them.

I lifted this tract by Ron Suskind from William Gibson's weblog, which liberated it from New York Times magazine. This is the kind of thing that makes you stare at the ceiling in the dark, listening to the clock tick away...

"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure,�and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

What scares me most about this is not (only) that I think such people are evil and I oppose what they want to do, but that I think that we have terrible, terrible historical precedents of what happens when a powerful country gets an expansionist, ideology-based leadership that divorces itself from reality. Please forgive me for being alarmist, but when I hear the word empire I want to reach for a gas mask. The US is unquestionably superior in military and strategic power to any other country on the planet individually. But do Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Dick Cheney really have the hubris to believe that if it came down to it, the US could take on the rest of the world and win?

Some, with similar worldviews but in different countries and different times, have thought so. All have been wrong. And the penalty for being wrong is severe. A friend of mine once told me her father had to spend one summer of his childhood crawling through the bombed out ruins of Berlin, setting traps for pigeons because his family needed the protein.

We know what hubris leads to.

Posted by case at November 6, 2004 01:08 PM