DEAD PARROT

Number 30 -- Saturday, June 21, 2003

STALKING ROE

When the House, by more than a 2-to-1 margin, passed a bill banning "partial birth abortion" (NY Times, 6/5), it both asserted a medical expertise that few of its members can legitimately claim and gained a tenuous but important foothold for the right-wing campaign to deprive women of hard-won and essential rights. The procedure, known less inflammatorily to doctors as "dilation and extraction," is seldom used; according to one analysis, it represented just one-sixth of one percent of all abortions performed in the year 2000 (Times, 3/11). And, though only an ogre could love its grisly details, it may be necessary for preserving a woman's life or health. Nevertheless, the bill makes a perfect stalking horse for the administration and its Christian conservative allies.

As Karl Rove told reporters at the time of the annual "March for Life" in January, "For now, we're focusing on getting the partial birth abortion ban and doing something about cloning" (Times, 1/23). Bill Clinton, who knew a stalking horse when he saw one, vetoed the ban twice; Bush is certain to sign it into law. And with new Supreme Court appointments in the offing, Rove's "for now" becomes the ominous operative phrase. There can be no doubt that Roe v. Wade, which legalizes the other 99 and five-sixths percent of abortions, is next up for review.

The selectivity of Bush's compassion is its most noteworthy feature. When compassion advances his agenda, he feels it--or at least makes it a talking point; otherwise, he's stone. We hear a great deal about the victims of Saddam's tyranny, nothing about the victims of American cluster bombs. "Innocent children waiting to be born" (as Bush called them in a phone message to the March for Life protesters) qualify for presidential protection. U.S. soldiers who actually have been born, many of whom are scarcely more than children, are thrown into harm's way as necessary sacrifices in the cause of Bush's claim to be tough on national security. Like that of Randall Jarrell's famous belly gunner (see DP #17: What Poets Know), who had to be washed out of the ball turret with a hose after being splattered by flak, their lives are grotesquely aborted before they have well begun. The political points to be scored from these losses depend on well staged patriotic ceremony and rigorous avoidance of the physical realities. It is not so with partial birth abortion. In celebrating the House victory, anti-choice lobbyist Douglas Johnson told the Times (6/5) that "Two-thirds of Congress, 70 percent of the public and four Supreme Court justices say there is no constitutional right to deliver most of a living baby and then puncture her head with a scissors."

That Johnson should choose to make his specimen victim a female signals a key nuance in the anti-choice position: women must be protected, yes, but only when they are half-formed, helpless, and utterly without minds of their own. Even then they may not qualify, as Jeb Bush showed with his grandstanding decision to appoint a guardian for the fetus that a mentally disabled woman conceived when she was raped (Boston Globe, 5/14). The woman, who is incapable even of speaking, would seem to have met all the Republican tests for appropriate femininity, but Jeb went with the fetus instead, attempting (unsuccessfully, it turned out) to force her to carry it to term. This is what his bro in the White House refers to as a "culture of life" (Times, 1/23).

Among the most serious threats to the culture of life (which is, in fact, a culture of authoritarian patriarchy) are grownup women who want to make decisions for themselves, offer opinions on public policy, and possibly even compete with men. Though a Condi Rice can serve as valuable window dressing, Laura--seen but not heard--is the stock in trade. Married to her, you know you're not going to hear about it when you restore Reagan's gag rule on abortion counseling at family planning clinics and remove information about condoms from government web sites (Globe, 1/21).

As for sex, don't even think of it, girls! Lewis Lapham points out in Theater of War that post-Clinton national sanitary codes require all involved in American politics to be neutered; and politicians with Christian constituencies to cultivate are quick to demand the same sacrifice of others. The parody web site whitehouse.org (see DP #29: Just for Fun) catches the tune of the times in a speech attributed to "Queen Mother Barbara Pierce Bush" on the occasion of the first annual Clitoridectomy Day: "Starting Saturday," BB announces, "gynecologists, dentists and TV repairmen throughout the country will be performing this surprisingly economical procedure on potential harlots throughout America without charge or warning."

With parody and reality becoming more and more difficult to distinguish, a coalition of women's groups has begun planning what it hopes will be the largest pro-choice rally in at least 12 years. The place: Washington. The date: April 25, 2004.

GOP RENEGADE AT WORK

Common sense and political courage sometimes show up in unexpected places; once in a long while, they appear in the same place at the same time, as they have in Bob Riley, the Republican governor of Alabama, who is asking people of the state to approve its largest-ever tax increase, $1.3 billion (Times, 6/4). Unlike his party's leadership in Washington, Riley has faced the fact that the existing tax structure is both regressive in allocating the pain and inadequate in providing for society's needs.

That Riley is sticking his neck out would be an understatement, and few would have predicted that he would be the man to stick it. Not only is he a Reagan fan and look-alike, but he served six years in Congress without ever voting for a tax increase and, the Times reports, "was once named its most conservative member." But something has led him to begin questioning Republican orthodoxy on taxation. Perhaps it was the fact that state taxes in Alabama now kick in not at the poverty level but at the starvation level: a family of four starts paying when its income reaches $4,600 a year.

Riley's plan would raise the threshold to $17,000. To offset the loss of revenue and an existing $675 million budget deficit, he would boost the tax rate a percentage point, end a deduction for federal taxes paid, and slap a small levy (0.1 percent) on the value of stocks and bonds--all measures that would compel the well off to dig just a little deeper in supporting public services. The governor's refreshing shift in perspective has even led him to snipe at the state's most holy shibboleth: "If we ever demand the level of excellence out of education that we do out of football," he says, "we'll be fine."

Alabamans who believe that they can reject the plan in the September 9 referendum and continue to enjoy their football may be in for a surprise. The state school superintendent, Ed Richardson, has announced that he will order all 1400 public schools to shut their doors as of October 1 if the tax increase is voted down and the legislature doesn't find another way to provide funding (Birmingham News, 6/14). That prospect has made people sit up and take notice, though whether their primary concern is the education or the games remains unclear. One county superintendent responded by remarking that "if we have to close schools Oct. 1 and shut down football in the middle of the season, well, it's just bone-chilling to even think about."

Dead Parrot salutes a Republican governor who is willing to risk chilling his constituents' bones with the truth about perpetual tax cuts. "I said in the campaign," Riley told the Times, "we'd never transform the culture in Alabama until we had an entire administration for whom re-election wasn't the pre-eminent thing." His principled stance puts him at odds with a president for whom re-election is not just the pre-eminent thing but the only thing.

TIN MAN FLIES OVER

Ari Fleischer, who seems bent on reaching new heights of fatuousness in his last days with the administration, may have topped out aboard Air Force One during Bush's flight home from Qatar (NY Times, 6/6). Seeking to put a positive spin on the decision to skip touching down in Baghdad, where it was feared that the liberator might not be warmly received, Fleischer hailed the airborne inspection tour as "a harbinger of other flights to come"--flights that would transform Iraq into "a wonderful tourist center around the world, given its glorious history." Like a real estate broker touting the "possibilities" of a shack, our First Mouthpiece looks at a country where the lights and water don't work and AK-47's are more plentiful than square meals and he sees...a theme park in the making! Fleischer also seized the opportunity to celebrate the boss's grasp of detail, telling reporters that Bush "showed a real familiarity with the sights of Baghdad, the topography of Baghdad" (Yahoo News, 6/5).

One of the "sights" that Bush was able to recognize from 31,000 feet was the palace compound where he had attempted to assassinate Saddam with an air strike on the first night of the war. Hot intelligence at the time indicated that the dictator and his sons were holed up in a bunker there, but subsequent on-the-spot investigation has showed that no bunker even existed (Times, 5/29)--Saddam's hidey-hole was as imaginary as his military threat to the United States.

Another attempt at decapitation took place on 4/7, when four 2000-pound bombs flattened a restaurant in the Mansur district where Saddam was said to be lunching with accomplices. One problem with this approach is that it destroys the evidence, and American forces are now engaged in sifting, sorting, and analyzing the rubble at the site (Times, 6/4). Since there is a great deal of rubble in a crater 20 feet deep, the ghoulish operation is likely to go on for some time. But if it uncovers a gobbet of flesh that DNA testing proves to be Saddam's, we'll know that the operation was worth it--including the collateral damage. According to neighbors, the bodies of 8 to 10 civilians had been recovered at the time of the bombing and 18 more were still missing. That the Israelis would feel equally entitled to this highly personal form of pre-emption and would kill bystanders and crater the "road map" with it did not occur to Bush at the time. When they did so, he professed himself "troubled" (Times, 6/11).

Promoting war as a species of hand-to-hand combat between your own champ and the enemy leader is effective propaganda. Even if your guy doesn't get any closer to the action than six vertical miles (and waits until weeks after the shooting has--mostly--stopped to do it), the trope satisfies people's need for a simple narrative with a strong physical denouement. A man my wife and I met when we were working the polls for an antiwar candidate last fall may typify the intended audience. He didn't know what to make of the fact (which he heard from us for the first time) that none of the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis, but he did know exactly what should be done with bin Laden and was very keen on telling us. His program involved serial dismemberment.

The trouble is, if you pitch things so personally, sooner or later you have to come up with a body to dismember. Otherwise, you've embarrassed yourself and made your villain into a romantic refugee, a desperado whose evasions take on an underdog glamour. To prevent Saddam from becoming a Desert Fox or Scarlet Pimpernel, a backhoe, two bulldozers, two cranes, and 17 dump trucks are scraping away at a big Baghdad hole in the ground. Once they find what they're looking for, Disney can move in.