Shame Is For Sissies 

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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."