The Moment

Monday 13 October 2008
by: John Cory, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Arizona Senator John McCain. (Photo: Gunby / AP)
Senator McCain. Was this the moment? The epiphany? The realization that stoking the flames of bigotry and fear had come home to roost?

As I watched your town hall gathering, I wondered what was going through your mind when you came face to face with the incendiary results of your campaign tactics. What did you see and feel when that elderly woman said Obama was an Arab? Or the man who said he feared an Obama presidency? And all the others?

I saw your face. I watched your body language as you took the microphone and quickly distanced yourself from that one.

At that moment, did you see your reflection in the mirror of her eyes? A reflection, not of a maverick, but a pariah? Did you see the decades of American scar tissue? Birmingham? Burning crosses? The noose? Did you see that awful year in American history when Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, cut down in the prime of their dreams for a better America?

Did you hear the echo of Dr. King's words about being "judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character," and suddenly realize that it was not your opponent's character in question - but yours? Perhaps you heard the whisper of Langston Hughes when he asked, "What happens to a dream deferred ...? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?"

Did you suddenly smell the rot and fetid acrid aroma of fear and hate, the carcass of mendacious political tactics decaying at your feet? Or did you sniff the flop-sweat of your own campaign standing in a puddle of decimating poll numbers?

I watched your mouth dry up and wondered if you could taste the bitter words like "Arab," "terrorist," "treason," "kill him," - all served up on the plate of red meat politics by your campaign. Did it make you choke and want to spit out the rancid flavor of ignorance and violence? Or did you want to savor the success of the politics of personal destruction?

Did you feel the cold chill of defeat? Did your heart pound with the all-encompassing realization that you would never be president? Could you sense that the America you appeal to is stale and dying out and being replaced by the freshness of hope and tolerance and a rainbow of change?

No doubt, the media will genuflect before your image and be pushed by your campaign spinners to reanoint you as a maverick and honorable man in rising to the defense of your opponent. But your ads still sully the airwaves. Your surrogates still spew their venom. After all, this is just politics. People need to understand that. Nothing personal - it is just politics.

But here was this moment. And you know it, regardless of whether or not you were reading from cue cards or just looking down to avoid having to face the ugliness before you - you know.

And when the crowd booed as you struggled to use words about decency and honorable character to defuse the situation you created, you must have recalled the words from Proverbs, "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind ..."

This is not a moment for you to be proud of in this campaign. Garnering credit for coming to the defense of Senator Obama is like an arsonist claiming heroism for saving lives after having set fire to the building in the first place.

It does not matter how the media or your advisers and consultants spin this moment because it can only reflect badly on you. If it is tossed off as politics as usual, your campaign appears shallow and less interested in what's best for America than what is best for John McCain. If it is said that there is no room for this kind of rhetoric in a presidential campaign, then you look weak and unable to control your own staff that continue to push these messages. If it is about leadership and going against the flow, then we see that a McCain presidency will be divisive and reinforce the meme of "two Americas." We have already had eight years of a divided country from the man who ran as a "Uniter not a divider."

This was a defining moment.

And you, sir, lost.

The battle for the country's soul

Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.

In looking back, one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world. These warnings came not just from political opponents, but also from experienced allies, including the British Intelligence Service, the experts in the traditionally conservative military and the FBI, and, perhaps most surprisingly, from a series of loyal Republican lawyers inside the administration itself. The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from America's ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring.

From an article by Jane Mayer for the NYRB (read the whole article)


—July 15, 2008

Americophilia

From an article by Ian Buruma for the NYRB

There is such a thing as Americophilia. It does not have the rich pedigree of Anglophilia or Francophilia, or even Germanophilia. In fact, it is not always recognized as a bona fide philia at all. But it exists. It existed in Europe during the Jazz Age, and in Europe, Japan, and pretty much everywhere during the 1950s. Even the Vietnam War didn't really kill it, for the center of protest was still in America. Americans had the best lines, and tunes, against the war. It still exists, although it is in danger of going the way of Germanophilia, into the fog of nostalgia, the land of what might have been.

I have always been an Americophile, or at least from the moment, at a very early age, when I received a postcard of the Empire State Building from my father, who was on a business trip to New York. The US, then, was an exotic place, where everything seemed bigger, glitzier, richer, more exciting. Americophilia, in my generation, was nurtured by the sexy allure of popular music. Even the names of the most provincial American cities—Memphis, Tennessee; Flagstaff, Arizona—were turned into desirable fetishes through the lyrics of rock-and-roll.

The sexiness of American pop culture was not such a trivial thing. For it had the ring of freedom, of a country with endless possibilities, where you could do things that would make the lace curtains of old Europe twitch. Much of this was a myth, of course, as the Beatles, Americophiles themselves, found out when they outraged Middle America as soon as they landed on The Ed Sullivan Show. American conservatism, like everything else American, runs into extremes. But it was a potent myth, with some substance. What was beautiful was the idea of America, where man was free to pursue happiness in any way he liked, as long as it was lawful (or, perhaps, even when it was not).

Anybody, in theory, and often in practice, could reinvent him- or herself as an American in a way that was impossible to imagine anywhere else. The fact that many Americans, especially if they lacked the advantage of a pale skin, came nowhere near to fulfilling the American Dream did not destroy the beauty of the idea. It still held out hope to millions who were poor or persecuted, or just restless, that in America it might still be possible to find a better way of life.

Europeans such as myself, born in the aftermath of World War II, also grew up with another, related myth, which had a great deal of substance: liberation from Nazi occupation to the beat of Glenn Miller, the sweet odor of Lucky Strikes, and the broad smiles of guys from Memphis or Kansas City. As this summer's anniversary celebrations of the Allied landings in 1944 demonstrated, even the French never forgot that blessing.

It was with this fizzing cocktail of images, then, of swinging GIs, rock-and-roll, constitutional liberty, and the Empire State Building, that I first landed in the US with a spring in my step in the summer of 1970. In time the rosy hue of my Americophilia would fade a little. I soon noticed the bleaker sides of American life; American friends were often the first to point them out. And yet I retained something of that Kennedy Airport spring in my step, as though always in anticipation of adventures that could happen only here, in this vast land of promise.