Shame Is For Sissies 

We're living through a time when Americans are challenged to comprehend and assimilate things we've never encountered before, things with no clear precedent in our public lives. Some of the most bewildering are provided by our elected leaders, at the highest level of power and responsibility. If you saw Gerald Herbert's AP photo of President Bush strolling hand-in-hand with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, what floored you was not the gesture. It was that this touching spectacle unfolded in full view of photographers, and that the formidable White House spin machine - which manipulates and micro-manages every particle of information that might influence the public's opinion of Mr. Bush - made no apparent effort to keep the image out of circulation.

Here was the leader of the nation that produced Osama bin Laden; the prince who exercises more control than anyone over soaring oil prices that hobble the American economy; the head of a harsh anti-democratic monarchy, a royal family linked intimately to the Bush family (like the bin Ladens) by a dozen embarrassing books. Here he was, just Uncle Abdullah, holding hands with the president of the United States and whispering sweet nothings about petroleum, the thing they both know and love the best.

Counting himself among the stunned was the fundamentalist Republican Gary Bauer.

"You wonder," Bauer told Time's Joe Klein, "if the folks at the White House have any idea of the impact an image like this has out in Middle America."

You wonder.

Has the United States been hijacked by aliens? Irony, inseparable from humor and from humility, is the most reliable litmus test for human intelligence. Art, literature, history and even philosophy become crude and mechanical in its absence; personality loses its charm, hypocrisy proliferates unimpeded. And this is the conundrum the Bush White House presents and has always presented. Can they possibly be so stupid, or are we dealing with something even more alarming than stupidity, an obliviousness born of cynicism, arrogance and the toxicity of power?

One theory is that we are suffering the revenge of remedial readers. There was sneering when ill-wishers outed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as academic train wrecks. I didn't sneer too much; obviously, there's a kind of feral cunning that trumps abstract intelligence on the political battlefield. But Bush's nomination of John Bolton for ambassador to the United Nations, no less than the uncensored prom photo with Prince Abdullah, chills us because neither intelligence nor cunning can account for it. Something darker is at work.

Bolton is simply the Republican fist with its middle finger held erect, a calculated insult aimed at the Democrats, the media and the world. Is this a coarse joke, irony served White House-style? For America's most visible and sensitive diplomatic post, they offer the ultimate anti-diplomat, an obnoxious bully so incapable of diplomacy or common tact that he offends everyone he encounters, Democrat or Republican, ally or enemy.

I have some background on Bolton that isn't generally available, a report from a friend of mine (nameless unless someone doubts him) who was his classmate in military school.

"Short, arrogant, unpopular and highly intolerant of other people's opinions," Bolton's classmate recalls, "sort of Napoleonic but without any of Napoleon's talent for leadership. Making him ambassador is like thumbing our nose at the UN, and foreign diplomats understand that."

Here is the developmental profile of a classic jerk. Already hopeless in the 7th grade, praised by no one save Jesse Helms, Bolton may soon be the angry face that America presents to the world. His description by a conservative Republican as "a kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy," "a serial abuser of little people," closes the case on Bolton's character. We've all met this miserable little prick somewhere, and we all regret it.

Does the White House relish the grim irony of Bolton at the UN, or miss it entirely? Which is worse? We all know the ways of bullies, the way humorlessness and power seem to seek each other out. For epic humorlessness, few bullies eclipse Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North Korea, whose government (according to Molly Ivins) sampled the diplomacy of John Bolton and denounced him as "human scum" and "a bloodsucker." Bullies and dictators seldom get the joke, and deal simply with irony — when you don't get the joke, you smash the joker.

The Kim Jong Il factor, the fascist factor, is what we need to fear most when our president displays serene indifference to irony, to criticism, to reality. This is something new in America, this language, this body language of unrestrained power and executive fiat. To the best of my knowledge, the barely elected Republican junta has no permanent, North Korean-style lock on the government of the USA : but they act as if they do.Pathology lurks. Somehow the whole country has begun to pay dearly for the fact that Bolton, Bush and Cheney were never the best or the brightest or the most beloved.

From harsh experience, I've come to believe that personality shapes history — that whatever shaped Alexander, Muhammad, Saladin, Luther, Robespierre, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin made the world we live in, to a far greater extent than class struggles, market forces or the clash of huge ideas. History is like a trail of gunpowder waiting for personality to strike a spark.

America's adolescent overconfidence, repulsive overconsumption, and moral vertigo guaranteed the rise of a class of hungry, humorless nonentities and mediocrities, severely limited in everything but their personal ambitions — scruple-free "kiss up, kick down guys" who confuse their own stunted, needy, self-righteous self-absorption with objective reality.

It's their turn now — unblushing self-promoters, purveyors of empty bravado, goat-brained thugs in Armani suits — all of irony's natural victims striking back at their tormentors.

The smell of curdled testosterone hangs over Washington, DC, like a chemical smog. The new ruling class takes its motto from one of its charter members, Edward von Kloberg III, the outrageous gay lobbyist who committed suicide in Rome recently, ending a career devoted to representing outlaw dictators and genocidal tyrants. He sold his services to Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu and admitted to courting Kim Jong Il and Paraguay's heinous Alfredo Stroessner. Asked how he squared his clients with his conscience, von Kloberg replied "Shame is for sissies."

How long, in Karl Rove's America, before "Shame is for sissies" replaces "E pluribus unum"? When the impudence and impenitence of George Bush or Tom DeLay leaves you speechless, remember their mentor von Kloberg, a man who would have handled public relations for Satan himself. Yet von Kloberg had one virtue his disciples lack: he was no hypocrite. He never once said he was defending traditional family values or making the world safe for democracy.

Von Kloberg has gone to his reward, perhaps to join some of the gruesome clients he liked to call "the damned." But his dark art lives after him, in a city and most dramatically in an administration which approaches every problem as an image problem. Indefensible, catastrophic invasion of an unoffending country? Just call it Operation Iraqi Freedom, call it a jihad for democracy. You don't have to be subtle, just change the words, repeat them incessantly, and disparage anyone who resists them. Arrogant and inflexible, the Bush administration has scored its greatest successes changing the words America uses, and reorganizing its flow of information.

Totalitarian thinkers, Hannah Arendt once wrote, are characterized by "extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it." If you told me 20 years ago that a cocky free press, still flaunting Richard Nixon's scalp, could be reduced to groveling impotence by the likes of George W. Bush, I guess I'd have laughed at you. But the other night I saw some film of Syrian troop carriers leaving Lebanon, and the voice-over said something like "another triumph for the President's master plan to liberate the Middle East."It startled me like a slap in the face. When did Karl Rove plant his microchips in their brains? The Goebbels Network is ever-expanding. A clamorous Right defeated the press by maneuvering it into a format where it couldn't function, a game it could never win. The adversary model, the snarling, shouting model favored by TV "news" programmers gives the impression that the press is divided into loyal Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Journalists — journalists by true vocation as opposed to some who list that occupation on IRS returns — are largely immune to ideology, rhetoric, and partisan politics. We have no heroes among politicians; we've seen too many clowns and thieves on both sides of the aisle. We don't vilify the president because we disagree with his philosophy; he has no philosophy. We oppose him because we're conditioned to hate liars, hypocrites, bullies and "serial abusers of little people," and he's assembled the most frightening collection we've ever seen.

By branding all unfriendly journalists (and other Americans who criticize the president) "liberals" — embittered members of a losing team — Karl Rove and company have ingeniously compromised fair comment and legitimate dissent.

In fact, some of the most articulate criticism of the White House has come from conservatives. "Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation as president will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations," argued American Conservative magazine. "The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the US, the doling out of war profits to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation's children...: It is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliche about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy."

It's my impression that the White House has no patience with principles, liberal or conservative, and no respect for people who cling to them. Principle, like shame or irony, is for sissies. Aside from a primitive lurch toward power, I detect no guiding principle in the Bush presidency except the first one young George learned in Texas — that oil is good and more oil is better.

If the media still hunted with live ammunition, Enron, Halliburton and the energy industry's pornographic profits since 9-11 would be enough to force this oil-soaked government to resign. (In disgrace? Remember disgrace?)

The first thing every reporter was taught, back when reporters were taught things, is that the best way to find the truth is to follow the money. A student of the Bush presidency watches the money flow relentlessly uphill. Americans who earn over $200,000 a year received 97 percent of Bush's $1.4 trillion tax cuts, while the money to pay for his hemorrhaging abomination of a war was squeezed from cuts in food stamps, school lunches, student loans and veterans' benefits. Look it up. When shame and irony leave the hall together, no obscenity is inconceivable.

Worse still than handouts to the wealthy is the reprehensible new legislation that blocks working Americans from climbing the hill where the money flows — laws like boulders rolled downhill to crush the scrambling underclass, the estimated 80 million Americans unable to pay their bills. Think about what it means to limit personal bankruptcies, inhibit class action suits against toxic employers like Wal-Mart, protect chemical polluters from liability lawsuits and cap settlements in personal injury cases. It means trying to eliminate what little protection ordinary citizens retain against corporate leviathans that cheat, exploit, and poison them, trap them in hopeless jobs, welsh on their health care, default on their pensions. It means stripping leverage from the people who have no leverage to spare.

The Bush administration's domestic policies are the blueprint for a new feudalism, a kind of fascist plutocracy. List all the democratic safeguards that separate a working American from a slave or a medieval serf. There are many. Labor unions? Their membership has been reduced by two-thirds since the 1950s, and the White House has them ticketed for extinction. Lawyers? In rightwing rhetoric, plaintiffs' attorneys like John Edwards are the devil's spawn. Courts, judges? The radical Right rains fire on responsible judges who resist its excesses, and labors to replace them with pro-business reactionaries. Congress? Don't play irony with me. The media? I rest my case. If Bush has his way, the poor man, like serfs and slaves of yore, will have no one but God to protect him. And the religious Right says God's a Republican.

While the President chides the Russians about democracy and free speech, he schemes to reward his corporate sponsors with a lucrative new version of slavery. If this was a class war, it's almost over, and the losers are being led off in chains. This is more serious than encouraging Fred Flintstone biology while the world laps the US in science education; more serious even than gang-raping the environment and fighting bloody unwinnable wars, launched by lies, that enrich your relatives and cronies. This is selling out America, this is suffocating its every dream and promise.

What God would confer his blessing on a punitive cult of "Christians" — and no few Jews — who answer only to the powerful and literally, not figuratively, rob the poorbox to pay for their wars? Are you listening to the anguish of a liberal? It's funny. If the government were magically seized by that micro-minority of PC radicals who attack free speech from the Left, I would be, as I've always been, among their harshest critics. I'm of an age and a turn of mind to return, with a few reservations, to the politics of my boyhood idol Barry Goldwater. Instead, the shameless bastards in Washington are turning me into the Che Guevara of AARP.

What's a radical, under the new corporate totalitarianism? If you wonder sometimes whether everyone in your family is human, play them Bruce Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad," a collection of songs that challenge you to care about Americans with no power, few breaks, few options. If one of your tribe mutters something about "bleeding-heart liberals," well, he has no heart, but he has a great chance to get ahead in the cannibal society George W. Bush and John Bolton represent.