The United States of Fear (24 page)

No, it’s the whole airless shebang we call elections that’s gotten to me, the bizarrely hermetic, self-financing, self-praising, self-promoting system we still manage to think of as “democratic.” That includes, of course, the media echo chamber that ginned up a nationally nondescript political season into an epochal life-changer via a powerfully mad—as in mad elephant—populace ready to run amok.

I’m no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense. So let’s start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.

For at least thirty years now, what’s gone up is income disparity in this country. Paul Krugman called this period “the Great Divergence.” After all, between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1 percent controls 24 percent of the nation’s income. Or put another way, after three decades of “trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich. In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, the number of millionaires actually increased. The combined wealth of the four hundred richest Americans (all billionaires) rose by 8 percent in 2010, even as, in the second quarter of the year, the net worth of American households fell by 2.8 percent.

Up at the top, individually and corporately, ever more money is on hand to “invest” in protecting what one already possesses or might still acquire. Hence, the 2010 elections had a price tag that obliterates all previous midterm records, estimated at $4 billion to $4.2 billion, mostly from what is politely called “fundraising” or from “outside interest groups”—from that 1 percent and some of the wealthiest corporations, mainly for media and influence campaigns. In other words, the already superrich and the giant corporations that sucked up so much dough over the last thirty years now have tons of it to “invest” in our system in order to reap yet more favors—to invest, that is, in Sharron Angle
and
Harry Reid. If that isn’t dispiriting, what is?

The right-wing version of this story is that a thunderstorm of money is being invested in a newly aroused, mad-as-hell collection of Americans ready to storm to power in the name of small government, radically reduced federal deficits, and, of course, lower taxes. This is a fantasy concoction, though, even if you hear it on the news 24-7. First of all, those right-wing billionaires and corporate types are
not
for small government. They regularly and happily back, and sometimes profit from, the ever-increasing power of the national security state to pry, peep, suppress, and oppress, abridge liberties and make war endlessly abroad. They are Pentagon lovers. They adore the locked-down “homeland.”

In addition, they are
for
the government giving
them
every sort of break, any sort of hand—just not for that government laying its hands on them. They are, in this sense, America’s real welfare queens. They want a powerful, protective state, but one that benefits them, not us. All of those dollars that scaled the heights in these last decades are now helping to fund their program. For what they need, they only have to throw repeated monkey wrenches into the works and the Tea Party, which really isn’t a party at all, is just the latest of those wrenches.

Faced with all our national woes, are we really a mad-as-hell nation? On that, the jury is out, despite the fact that you’ve heard how “angry” we are a trillion times in the news. Maybe we’re a depressed-as-hell nation. What we do know, however, is that the rich-as-hell crew are making good use of the mad-as-hell one.

In October 2010, Amy Gardner of the
Washington Post
offered a revealing report on the Tea Party landscape. Of the 1,400 Tea Party groups nationwide that the
Post
tried to contact, it reached 647. Many of the rest may have ceased to exist or may never have existed at all. (“The findings suggest that the breadth of the tea party may be inflated.”) What the
Post
researchers found bore little relationship to the angry, Obama-as-Hitler-sign-carrying bunch supposedly ready to storm the gates of power. They discovered instead a generally quiescent movement in which “70 percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year.” Most of them were small, not directly involved in electoral politics, and meant to offer places to talk and exchange ideas. Not exactly the stuff of rebellion in the streets.

On the other hand, the funding machines like Tea Party Express (run by Sal Russo, longtime Republican operative, aide to Ronald Reagan, and fundraiser/media strategist for former New York governor George Pataki), FreedomWorks (run by Dick Armey, former Republican House majority leader), and Americans for Prosperity (started by oil billionaire David Koch) had appropriated the Tea Party name nationally and were pouring money into “Tea Party candidates.” And don’t forget the Tea-Partyish funding groups set up by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s bosom buddy and close adviser. That these influential “tea partiers” turn out to be familiar right-wing insiders—“longtime political players,” as the
Post
put it, who since the 1980s “have used their resources and know-how to help elect a number of candidates”—shouldn’t be much of a shock. Nor can it be so surprising that familiar right-wing political operatives are intent on creating a kind of political mayhem under the Tea Party label.

As for the TV set that filled your living room with the sound and fury of an “epochal” election, isn’t it curious how little attention all the commentators, pundits, and talking heads on that screen paid to where so much of that money was actually landing? I mean, of course, in the hands of their bosses. Vast amounts of it have come down on the media itself, particularly television. I’m talking about all those screaming “attack ads,” including the ones sponsored by the unnamed outside interest groups that the talking heads just love to analyze, rebroadcast, and discuss endlessly? These are the very ads enriching the media outfits that employ them in a moment when the news world is in financial turmoil. It was estimated that, for election 2010, the TV ad bill would reach $3 billion (up from $2.7 billion in the 2008 presidential campaign year, and $2.4 billion in the 2006 midterms that brought the Democrats back to power in Congress). For the companies behind the screen, in other words, those ads are manna from heaven.

If, in another context, someone was selling you on the importance of a phenomenon and was at the same time directly benefiting from that phenomenon, it would be considered a self-evident conflict of interest. In this particular case, all those ad dollars are visibly to the benefit of the very media promoting the world-shaking importance of each new election season. But remind me, when was the last time you saw anyone on television, or really just about anywhere, even suggest that this might represent a conflict of interest?

The media aren’t just reporting on a particular election season, they’re also filling every space they can imagine with boosterism for just the kinds of elections we now experience. They are, in a sense, modern-day carnies, offering endless election spiels to usher you inside the tent. Whatever they themselves may individually think about it, they are working to boost the profitability of their companies just as surely as any of those right-wing funders are boosting their corporate (or personal) profits. They are not outsiders looking in, but a basic part of the hermetic, noisy, profitable system we think of as an election campaign.

As for the election itself, none of us really had to wait for the results of midterm 2010, the Anger Extravaganza, to know that it wouldn’t be transformative. This isn’t rocket science. We already knew what the Democrats were capable of (or, more exactly, not capable of) with sixty votes in the Senate and a humongous advantage in the House of Representatives, as well as the presidency. So you should have a perfectly realistic assessment of how much less of “the people’s business” is likely to be done in a more divided Congress, in which the Republicans control the House.

After the election, whatever the results, we already knew that Obama would move even more toward “the center,” even if for decades the so-called center has been drifting rightward without ever settling on a home; that he would try to “work with” the Republicans; that this would prove the usual jokes; and that the election, however breathlessly reported as a Republican triumph or Tea Party miracle (or anything else), would essentially be a gum-it-up-more event. Though none of the voluble prognosticators and interpreters you’ll listen to or read are likely to say so, those right-wing fundraisers and outside interest groups pouring money into Tea Party candidates, angry maniacs, dopes, and whoever else is on the landscape undoubtedly could care less. Yes, a Congress that gave them everything they wanted on a proverbial silver platter would be a wonder, but gum-it-up works pretty darn well, too. For most Americans, a Washington in gridlock in a moment of roiling national crisis may be nothing to write home about, but for those fundraisers and outside interest groups, it only guarantees more manna from heaven.

And the good news, as far as they are concerned, is that the state that matters, the national security, war-making one, hardly needs Congress at all, or rather knows that no Congress will ever vote “no” to moneys for such matters. Meanwhile, the media will begin cranking up for an even more expensive Election 2012. Long before this election season came to a close, my hometown paper was already sporting its first pieces with headlines like “Looking Ahead to the 2012 Race” and beginning to handicap the presidential run to come. (“Although [President Obama] will not say so, there is at least a plausible argument that he might be better off if [the Democrats] lose . . . [I]f Republicans capture Congress, Mr. Obama will finally have a foil heading toward his own re-election battle in 2012.”)

Whether the country I once wanted to represent was ever there in the form I imagined is a question I’ll leave to the historians. What I can say is that it’s sure not there now.

Even though we promptly dubbed the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York City “Ground Zero”—once a term reserved for an atomic blast—Americans have never really come to grips either with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or with the nuclear age that they ushered in. There can be no question that, as the big bang that might end it all, the atomic bomb haunted Cold War America. In those years, while the young (myself included) watched endless versions of nuclear disaster transmuted into B-horror films, the grown-ups who ran our world went on a vast shopping spree for world-ending weaponry, building nuclear arsenals that came to number in the tens of thousands.

When the Cold War finally ended with the Soviet Union’s quite peaceful collapse, however, a nuclear “peace dividend” never quite arrived. The arsenals of the former superpower adversaries remained quietly in place, drawn down but strangely untouched, awaiting a new mission, while just beyond sight, the knowledge of the making of such weapons spread to other countries ready to launch their own threatening mini–Cold Wars.

Even fifty years after that first bomb went off over the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima, it still proved impossible in the United States to agree upon a nuclear creation tale. Was August 6, 1945, the heroic ending to a global war or the horrific beginning of a new age? The
Enola Gay
, the plane that dropped the Hiroshima bomb, and a shattered schoolchild’s lunchbox from Hiroshima could not yet, it turned out, inhabit the same exhibit space at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Still, for people of a certain age like me, Hiroshima is where it all began. So I would like to try, once again, to lay out the pieces of a nuclear story that none of us, it seems, can yet quite tell.

In my story, there are three characters and no dialogue. There is my father, who volunteered at age thirty-five for the Army Air Corps, immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in Burma, was painfully silent on his wartime experiences, and died on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983. Then there’s me, growing up in a world in which my father’s war was glorified everywhere, in which my play fantasies in any park included mowing down Japanese soldiers—but whose nightmares were of nuclear destruction. Finally, there is a Japanese boy whose name and fate are unknown to me.

This is a story of multiple silences. The first of those, the silence of my father, was once no barrier to the stories I told myself. If anything, his silence enhanced them, since in the 1950s male silence seemed a heroic attribute (and perhaps it was, though hardly in the way I imagined at the time). Sitting in the dark with him then at any World War II movie was enough for me.

As it turned out though, the only part of his war I possessed was its final act, and around this too, there grew a puzzling silence. The very idea of nuclear destruction seemed not to touch him. Like other schoolchildren, I went through nuclear-attack drills with sirens howling outside, while—I had no doubt—he continued to work unfazed in his office. It was I who watched the irradiated ants and nuclearized monsters of our teen-screen life stomp the Earth. It was I who went to the French film
Hiroshima Mon Amour
, where I was shocked by my first sight of the human casualties of the A-bombing, and to
On the Beach
to catch a glimpse of how the world might actually end. It was I who saw the mushroom cloud rise in my dreams, felt its heat sear my arm before I awoke. Of all this I said not a word to him, nor he to me.

On his erstwhile enemies, however, my father was not silent. He hated the Japanese with a war-bred passion. They had, he told me, “done things” that could not be discussed to “boys” he had known. Subsequent history—the amicable American occupation of Japan or the emergence of that defeated land as an ally—did not seem to touch him. His hatred of all things Japanese was not a ruling passion of my childhood only because Japan was so absent from our lives. There was nothing Japanese in our house (one did not buy their products), we avoided the only Japanese restaurant in our part of town, and no Japanese ever came to visit. Even the evil Japanese I saw in war movies, who might sneeringly hiss, “I was educated in your University of Southern California” before they met their suicidal fates were, I now know, regularly played by non-Japanese actors.