Exterminate the Brutes

Glenn Greenwald makes the case—again—that the dauphin and his chorus-line of Tzarettes in the various and sundry offices of the Executive have set the course for a previously discovered country called divine-right monarchy.

To which I respond: well, yes and no.

It seems to me an error to interpret the gaseous lawyering that reads Article II of the US Constitution like a piece of experimental fiction open to endless reinterpretation as an intentional program to remake this nation in the image of The City on the Hill as imagined by Pasolini. I’m alternately as frightened, appalled, angry, weary, resigned, and saddened as the next guy by the antipathy of this particular administration for the fruits of classical Liberalism, which is, if I might drop the pose of the cynically disinterested observer for just a moment, the only foundation of governance worth one goddamn in this world: the only value system that I admire; the only social compact I’ll sign onto; the only good and decent way to run a civilization and still let a sneering, self-superior homo like myself get up and do pretty much what he pleases with his life, his conscience, and his fortunes.

But people are venal and afraid. They desire security above all things. They’re averse to risk. They’re averse to responsibility. The precursors to modern liberal governments—and plenty of modern liberal governments themselves—all eventually collapsed under the weight of their own inevitable militarism and authoritarianism, not only because evil governors conspired to strip men of their freedom, but because men demanded that their freedom be taken from them. The archetype of the protective patriarch, the king who is benevolent at home and victorious abroad, is one of the most deeply embedded in the human psyche, and no ponderous declarations of limited government and universal rights will forever withstand the desire of the people to wake up knowing their enemies are being slain and their borders are secure. Men don’t tire of wars; they only tire of losing them.

What I’m saying is that George W. Bush is attempting to fulfill a popular wish, and his unpopularity isn’t the result of an American people slowly waking to the fact that their rights are being taken away by an ad-hoc dictatorship, but because their enemies aren’t being slain and their borders aren’t secure.

What people dislike about Geroge W. Bush isn’t that he’s reinventing himself as an American potentate, but that he’s an impotent potentate, and that the violence he’s projected onto our perceived enemies isn’t awesome and victorious but tawdry and pathetic, enacted on the bodies of helpless prisoners with a brutality made worse because it’s so damnably sophomoric.