DEAD PARROT

Number 29 -- Saturday, June 14, 2003

IDEA MAN

It is hard to credit the administration with what one could in good conscience call ideas. Bush himself, though he clearly possesses certain kinds of intelligence, is famously anti-intellectual and so inarticulate that his handlers must reduce the Message of the Day to a printed slogan on a backdrop lest he fail to make himself understood. His decisions seem more like reflexes--of class interest, of political advantage, of personal animus--than like the results of a thinking process. Despite the White House press office's occasional lame assertions that he has been spotted reading something, no one can doubt that he would rather be cutting brush, watching football on TV, schmoozing with a $200,000 donor, or ordering a missile strike than settling in with a book.

Nevertheless, this apparent mental desert does contain a few oases of thought; and however poisonous the wells may be, it is still important for us to know about them. The influence enjoyed by the neocon theoreticians at the Weekly Standard has been well publicized. William Kristol, the magazine's editor, was known as "Dan Quayle's brain" when he served the VP as chief of staff and has now devoted himself (NY Times, 4/5) to pushing a course of study for Bush, including works like Supreme Command, by Eliot Cohen. Cohen doubles as a professor at Johns Hopkins and a member of the Defense Policy Board. The chief appeal of his book for Bush, aside from its imputation of supremacy, may be the jacket imagery, which features photos of both Lincoln and Churchill, the latter menacingly cradling a sub-machinegun.

All in all, the right wing's stock claim that our universities are hotbeds of liberalism appears ridiculous in light of both the number and the audacity of academic apologists for the regime. It is true that one of the most interesting of these, Victor Davis Hanson, is a registered Democrat, but his affiliation only goes to show how far the Democrats have strayed from their true course. A classics professor who has written extensively about the wars of ancient Greece, Hanson espouses a cynical-sentimental militarism (more on this seeming contradiction in a moment) that recently won him a dinner invitation from Dick Cheney. His career and ideas are the subject of a profile by Laura Secor in the Boston Globe (5/25).

Entering college at UC Santa Cruz in 1971, Hanson recoiled from what he regarded as the anarchy and naive idealism that he found there ("no rules, no grades, co-ed dorms"--forsooth!) and sought as an antidote the study of a classical culture that seemed to him more realistic in its acceptance of humanity's fallen state. So far, so good. But realism untutored by experience becomes its own form of naive idealism, and Hanson (who, like so many of the political leaders his ideas now impress, never served in the military) was soon romanticizing war in works such as Carnage and Culture, the book that caught Cheney's attention. For Hanson, both carnage and culture are good things--the former so long as it is visited upon our enemies, the latter so long as it is the culture of "the West."

That there is a "West" sharply distinct from and superior to the rest of the planet is the kind of rigid bipolar thinking that naturally resonates with Bush. (Hanson has fought fierce academic wars against fellow classicists who sought to shade this analysis by acknowledging the interpenetration and interdependency of cultures.) According to Secor, Hanson believes that one of the West's chief distinctions is its "uniquely effective military culture thanks to inherited Greek values." As she summarizes his argument, "Greek warriors defeated numerically stronger armies...because they were citizens who participated in political life and felt ownership of their wars, because rational inquiry allowed them to develop superior weaponry, and because they cleaved to a strategy of head-to-head 'shock battle' that aimed for nothing short of the enemy's annihilation."

Few things seem to excite men like Hanson and Cheney so much as the thought of other men pushing spears through each other's bellies. What "ownership"! Hanson becomes positively maudlin in his celebration of Greek farmer-soldiers. The language with which he describes them--"keen-eyed," "horny-handed," carrying a "cargo of self-reliance, hard work, and a peculiar distrust of rich and poor alike"--comes straight from America's own ample fund of self-congratulatory mythology. It throws "annihilation" into a dreamy soft focus while we all get lumps in our throats at the thought of Minutemen mustering on the village green.

Since modern warfare, as practiced by the United States, consists mostly of dialing the coordinates and pressing the button, one does not need particularly horny hands to wage it. No doubt Hanson chalks up this softening to the "rational inquiry" that has brought us the cluster bomb and may soon add the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator to the arsenal. But though it may not quite measure up to the good old days at Thermopylae, the Iraq war was good enough for Hanson. His only worry about it, he told Secor over lunch, is that we may not have inflicted enough punishment to make our point. "Maybe the war was so surgical and quick," he reflected, "that the Iraqis don't really think that they lost."

With intellectuals like this supplying the rationale, one may wish that Bush would go back to relying solely on his reflexes. Hanson's next book, for which Random House has given him a whopping $500,000 advance, will be about the Peloponnesian War, the 27-year struggle that resulted in the end of Athenian democracy. It is a topic for our times.

JUST FOR FUN

DP REVIEWS

The George Bush in question in Lydia Millet's George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (Simon & Schuster, 2000) is Number 41, Poppy. The time-frame of the novel corresponds exactly with the old man's presidency, an era which, as Millet reconstructs it, seems both almost quaintly remote and as immediate as a well-aimed howitzer round. For all the loose talk in the media about how 9/11 opened a chasm in American history and politics, the continuities far outweigh the changes. In this over-the-top satire, written before W had a record for Millet to target specifically, the father's tub-thumping jingoism, single-minded defense of class interests, and brazen assault on the English language clearly presage those of the son. We make a great mistake if we regard 41 as a wise elder whose example 43 has chosen to disregard.

Rosemary, the narrator of Dark Prince, is a hefty ex-con (vehicular homicide) who gets out of prison during the 1988 election campaign and immediately sizes up the prospects with an expert pundit's eye. Dukakis, she observes, looks more like a "podiatrist with orthopedic specialty," a "professor of political science," or a "poultry supplier to the greater Boston area" than like a president. But though "G.B.," as she always refers to him, is the obvious winner, Rosemary's obsession with him does not begin in earnest until, alone in her trailer and well oiled with Baby Duck, she watches his inaugural address. At her factory job the next day, she finds herself quoting such lines as "Freedom is like a beautiful kite that can go higher and higher with the breeze" and at odds with coworkers who have missed the beauty of the speech. "They wouldn't know blue blood from gutter trash," she reflects. "G.B. was full-fledged American aristocracy, but all they wanted was a raise and a health plan. No vision."

As the new administration gets down to business, the aristocrat's determination to punish international lowlife has lowlife Rosemary's fervent support. "You can only lie down and take abuse for so long," she says of the Panama invasion; "sooner or later you have to strike back." By this time she has constructed a cruciform G.B. effigy into which she hammers a rusty nail every time he suffers criticism from the L.B. (liberal bourgeois) press. Only after Iraq occupies Kuwait, however, and G.B. dismounts his helicopter and proclaims, "This will not stand!"--only then does she understand that she has fallen in love. What wins her is not just the macho bluster but the boyish vulnerability that it conceals. He is "a man of action, a G.I. Joe fresh off the assembly line with special-edition gray hair"; at the same time, he is "a gangly prepubescent...giving a presentation to his Scout troop to win his Shotgun Shooting badge. All he'd had before was Bugling, Dog Care, Rabbit Raising, and Insect Study. I heard the high-pitched squeak, and my heart broke for him."

The machinations by which Rosemary attempts to pursue her love affair (and to discredit the inconvenient spouse, B.B., who is always waging a tiresome Crusade Against Illiteracy) are as entertaining as they are implausible. A legacy from a boyfriend who has finally succeeded in overdosing provides her with cash for such useful purposes as renting sound trucks and making large contributions to the Republican National Committee. Finally, on her 32nd White House tour, she actually catches sight of G.B., lurches toward him, and suffers an embarrassing pratfall. The realization that he is laughing at her cools her ardor somewhat.

That Millet should draw us into fantasy is only fitting in a novel that takes American political life as its subject. Her heroine's practice of whiting out the names of characters in Harlequin romances and replacing them with "George Bush" and "Rosemary" is hardly more delusional than much of what has been said and written about either 41 or 43. In fact, Rosemary makes a gallant effort to be realistic. With the new names in place, she notices that a scene in one of the Harlequins strikes several false notes: "George Bush gathered Rosemary to him, the burnished skin on his strong arms bronze in the candlelight. 'I love you,' he murmured breathlessly. 'I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt you, my sweet red-blooded mystery.'" Recalling G.B.s insistence that "I will never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are," she decides that the whole passage must be rewritten: "George Bush gathered Rosemary to him, the pale skin on his spindly arms silver in the candlelight. 'We will work hand in hand,' he announced quite warily. 'When America says something, America means it.'" If only Thomas Friedman and George Will showed a similar concern for verisimilitude!

Dark Prince is a lively read, with rueful laughter to be had on almost every page--and laughter of any kind is a precious commodity these days. Moreover, the novel explores one of the most pressing and perplexing questions that we have to face: how people in such large numbers can be drawn to idolize a leader who serves interests entirely contrary to their own.

[I am grateful to DP reader Beth Hanak for suggesting this book.]