A Colossal Wreck (65 page)

He accepted the prize not long after he’d displayed his boundless compassion for humanity by sponsoring an exhibition of Filipino “monkey men” in the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair as “the missing link” in the evolution of man from ape to Aryan, and thus in sore need of assimilation, forcible if necessary, to the American way. On receipt of the prize, Roosevelt promptly began planning the dispatch of the Great White Fleet (sixteen Navy battleships of the Atlantic Fleet) on a worldwide tour to display Uncle Sam’s imperial credentials.

Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919. The rationale
was his effort to establish the League of Nations. His substantive achievement was to have brought America into the carnage of World War I and to have refined the language and ideology of liberal interventionism. Between TR and Wilson, it’s hard to say who was the more fervent racist. Probably Wilson. As governor of New Jersey he was a fanatical proponent of the confinement and sterilization of “imbeciles,” a eugenic crusade that culminated in the US Immigration Act of 1924, which barred Jews and other suspect genetic material from entering the United States. Much against their will, many of these excluded Jews made their way to Palestine. Others involuntarily stayed in place in Russia and Eastern Europe and were murdered by the Nazis. Above all, Wilson at Versailles was the sponsor of ethnic nationalism, the motive force for the Final Solution. And they say Obama’s award has brought the Peace Prize into disrepute!

Carter got his prize in 2002 as reward for conspicuous good works. But there again, the message of the Nobel committee was—Take the rough with the smooth. It was Carter, after all, who amped up the new cold war, got Argentinian torturers to train the Contras, and above all dragged the United States into Afghanistan. It was in 1978 that a progressive secular government seized power in Afghanistan, decreeing universal education for women and banning child marriage. By early 1979 Carter was hatching plans with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China to arm mujahedeen and warlords in Afghanistan to overthrow the government and attempt to lure the Soviet Union into combat. In December 1979, after repeated requests from the government in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union sent forces to fight against the rebellion by the fundamentalists. The CIA launched the most expensive operation in its history to train and equip these fundamentalists and allied warlords.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee loves paradox, which is why I tend to believe that it toyed with the idea of giving Hitler the award in 1939, before the Führer’s sponsor withdrew the name. But it remained adamant about denying the prize to another nominee in 1939—Mahatma Gandhi—as it had done in 1937 and 1938, and would again in 1947 and 1948. When it came to the man Churchill described as a “half-naked fakir,” the committee lost the forgiving
appreciation of realpolitik it had evinced in the cases of men like Roosevelt and Wilson and became inflexibly high-minded. Jacob Worm-Müller, a Norwegian history professor who wrote a briefing memo for the committee, remarked censoriously that Gandhi “is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician.” Year after year the committee found reasons to reject him.

The chairman of this year’s committee, a ductile social democrat called Thorbjørn Jagland, was refreshingly frank about the selection of Obama. They could not, year after year, simply honor peace workers without marquee appeal. He didn’t mention it, but last year’s recipient, Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish President, drew a collective world yawn except among those fuming at his disgusting record as a broker in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia. So they decided to shop for the headlines.

People marvel at the idiocy of these Nobel awards, but there’s method in the madness, since in the end they train people to accept without demur or protest absurdity as part and parcel of the human condition, which they should accept as representing the considered opinion of rational men. It’s a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth: you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese, or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That’s the audacity of hope at full stretch.

So one shouldn’t take these prizes too seriously but simply cheer when a prize committee somewhere does the right thing. What do Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, and Pablo Neruda all have in common? They won the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples, which was in business from 1950 to 1955. Then it became the International Lenin Prize, honoring many estimable toilers for human betterment, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Salvador Allende, Sean MacBride, and Angela Davis. Read that list and you rapidly get a fix on the outer limits of the Nobel committee’s range of political sympathy. Obama’s award was a gift dispensed from the battlements of capital, recognizing that empire is in a safe pair of hands.

October 17

The transition from the Tennessee chunk of Interstate 40 to the Arkansas section always makes me laugh. On I-40 you start in Wilmington, NC, and ahead of you lie 2,555.4 miles of road, running through eight states, all the way to Barstow, California. Through Tennessee you roll for a day and half on smooth tarmac, often three lanes each way—tribute to the state’s wealth and the patronage powers of Senator Albert Gore Sr., father of the portly Warmist.

It was Gore Sr., along with a crafty Irish Rep. from Maryland called George Fallon, who was responsible for the bill enabling the financing of the Interstate system, appropriating $25 billion in 1956, sucking in a generous whack of the money for his own state, already engorged with federal pork for the Oakridge nuclear complex and the TVA. In honor of these achievements all Interstates entering Tennessee are labeled the “Albert Gore, Sr. Memorial Highway.” It’s no doubt why, out of forlorn hopes for emulation, Al Jr. preposterously claimed he’d invented the internet. The unimpressed citizens of Tennessee duly doomed Al Jr.’s presidential bid by voting for George Bush in 2000.

I rolled through Memphis, battleground for a very significant victory for We the People. The blueprint for I-40 had the Interstate slicing through Overton Park on the east side of town. There’s an old-growth arboretum here, also the famous band shell, one of twenty-seven built by the WPA in the 1930s. Elvis Presley gave his first paid concert there, opening for Slim Whitman on July 30, 1954. Since the shell was a graceful piece of architecture the forces of darkness yearned to bulldoze it flat and put in something useful like a parking lot. Lovers of the shell beat back two such onslaughts, and the shell survives, gussied up. The I-40 builders neared Memphis at a bad moment, in 1969. For a decade after World War II the freeway lobby crushed all before them. The downtowns of city after city were destroyed or menaced by rapidly advancing glaciers of concrete.
Si monumentum requiris
, go to downtown Buffalo and weep.

October 27

Across the country last weekend there were anti-war demonstrations, modest in turnout, but hopefully a warning to Obama that war without end or reason in Afghanistan, plus 40,000 more troops to Kabul, is not why people voted for him.

I spoke at our own little rally in my local town of Eureka, California. My neighbor Ellen Taylor decided to spice up the proceedings by having a guillotine on the platform, right beside the Eureka Courthouse steps. It’s in the genes. Her father was Telford Taylor, chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg.

When she told me about the plan for the guillotine, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. But Ellen said she wanted to reach out to new constituencies beyond the committed left, and what better siren call than the swoosh of the “Avenging Blade”?

A hundred years ago people liked to stress the similarities of the American and French Revolutions. Mark Twain composed the most passionate defense of the Terror ever written, in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
. But then, after 1917, the French Revolution was seen as the harbinger of Bolshevik excess and it grew less popular.

Up on the platform I took the guillotine issue head on. Only 666 aristocrats had been topped in Paris in what is now the Place de la Concorde; 1,543 throughout France. The reward: a decisive smack on the snout of the land-holding aristocracy; durable popular power for peasants, workers, and the petit-bourgeois:
M. le patron
and
M. le proprietaire
stepped into history.

There’s no sign of populism in any energetic form. The anger is formulaic.

October 28

Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Virginia, who got up early on the morning of October 19 and walked naked into his own kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing that happened to twenty-nine-year-old Eric Williamson was the local cops arriving to charge him with indecent exposure. It turns out that while he was brewing the coffee, a mother who was
taking her seven-year-old son along a path beside Williamson’s house espied the naked Williamson and called the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who happens to be a cop.

“Yes, I wasn’t wearing any clothes,” Williamson said later, “but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me.”

The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening rounds the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behavior. Hasn’t a man the right to walk around his own home (or, in this case, rented accommodation) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law: absolutely not.

Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop’s wife started to maintain that she first saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax County Police spokeswoman, stirred the pot of innuendo: “We’ve heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident.” The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time. They’ve also been papering the neighborhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson—a white guy who’s a commercial diver and who has a five-year-old daughter, not living with him.

I’d say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don’t throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his own plea deal, a faked police lineup, maybe an artist’s impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Williamson could end up losing his visitation rights and, worse comes to worst, getting ten years plus being posted for life on some sex-offender site.

You think we’re living in the twenty-first century, in the clinical fantasy world of
CSI
? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the seventeenth century with trial by ordeal, such as when they killed women as witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.

Let’s head north from Fairfax County to Massachusetts, home of the witch trials. How about if you’re white in Boston (wise decision), weigh yourself in your own bedroom with no clothes on and … But let my Boston friend pick up the story, because it happened to him:

It was the early ’90s. Early on Xmas eve two burly cops pushed into our house and invaded our bedroom—no warrant. They only backed off after they realized that the scale in our bedroom where I weighed myself was in front of a window. To see me there the born-agains who moved in next door (actually on the far side of a vacant lot separating us) had to keep a tight watch since it does not take long to weigh oneself.

My girlfriend was dressing in the bedroom and my mom and stepdaughter were visiting. By the time the cops understood that I had been weighing myself every morning, the paddy wagon was there ready to take me away.

I would have sued them but I was running for Congress at the time. The cops liked my opponent, a right-wing pro-lifer, and I have always thought that had something to do with their moral diligence that day. One of the cops, the chief, later resigned in a corruption scandal.

November 24

No one told us it would be boring, but it is—the Obama presidency. Having an adulterer and a moron at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight years apiece, plus Dick Cheney down the corridor, spoiled us. Which side of Bill’s head did Hillary hit with the lamp? Would George fight his way to the end of the sentence in his daily battles with the English language?

These days tranquility reigns—or seems to—in the Obamas’ private quarters. Senior White House staffers remain loyal and tight-lipped. Small wonder Jay Leno’s nightly show is sagging. There was nothing to make jokes about, at least until Sarah Palin went on her book tour.

Politics is getting duller by the day, too, as the idealists watch their expectations trickling all too swiftly through the hourglass. What’s left? Enforcing private coverage and savaging the Medicare Advantage plans of low-income seniors. Obama has dipped below 50 percent in public approval, which—so the pollsters tell us—is
nothing particularly unusual for a new President at this stage of the game. What’s going to stop him sliding down more?

But lo! There’s light a little way up the tunnel: the upcoming trial in the shadow of Ground Zero of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators, the best news for the print press since Monica Lewinsky. Ahead lie months of searing headlines and bloodcurdling editorial howls for vengeance in the
New York Post
and the
Daily News
.

The scenario envisaged by Obama, Emanuel and Attorney General Eric Holder is presumably that sometime before the election of 2012, KSM will be ushered into an execution chamber, thus vindicating Obama’s oft-advertised commitment to track down the perps of 9/11 and kill them. So eager was Obama to underline this point that while in Asia he declared that those offended by the trial will not find it “offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.” This remark came after his assertion that the trial would be “subject to the most exacting demands of justice.” Realizing that the latter remark might be construed by some pettifogging civil libertarians as prejudicial to a fair trial, Obama then added piously that he was “not going to be in that courtroom. That’s the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury.”