Wrapped in the Flag (43 page)

I looked across the kitchen table at my little old mother and realized she was crying. “I can’t,” she admitted. “I can’t see the numbers anymore.”

Several trips to the eye doctor confirmed what she had dreaded: her early-stage macular degeneration had advanced, and now she had glaucoma. I held her hand while the doctor delivered the worst possible prognosis—before long Mother would be blind. She needed help beyond what I could provide, so I hired a trained caregiver who came three days a week. Almost immediately, my mother complained about cold tea, hard eggs, and burned toast. She hollered that the shower was too hot and fussed when it was too cold. The “maid,” as she insisted on referring to her helper, could not get Mother’s girdle on or adjust her back brace.

Several women quit without explanation. One, who was kind enough to warn me that she was leaving, explained the situation. “Working for the queen is impossible,” she said. I understood exactly what she meant.

Mother had to move to an assisted-living facility, a reality she finally accepted after my brother Jay R. and my sister Mary championed the idea. The new arrangement took a mountain of pressure off of me. One of the staff workers at the new place put it like this: “We’ll take care
of
her so you can care
about
her.”

Mother refused to participate in any of the structured activities, declaring it
all “fun and games for senile old ladies,” but at least she was safe and received regular meals, showers, and meds. Her eyesight deteriorated and her hearing failed, and she seemed to lose track of things all the time, but compared to a lot of the residents, she was stable.

Over the next year, I began to notice how many things she didn’t “know” anymore, like my name and the names of her grandchildren, but she was an ace at fooling the doctors. After all, how many women nearing ninety could name the first five American presidents and recite the Preamble to the Constitution? Mother was so convincing that no one bothered to ask her what year it was, where she lived, or her deceased husband’s name. “She’s sharp as a tack,” one doctor told me. “No Alzheimer’s.”

I knew he was wrong.

Two weeks before the 2000 presidential election, I arrived in Tampa to visit my sister and take a much-needed vacation. As I stepped out of the airport terminal into the delicious warmth of Florida, I twirled and giggled. “I don’t want to live here in the summer,” I told Janet. “But in November, it’s Florida forever.”

A couple of days later, as we basked in the joy of French roast coffee and the
New York Times
, I complained about the presidential election. “I can hardly wait for this thing to be over,” I said. “It has gone on and on and on.”

I’d voted absentee—for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman—before leaving Wisconsin, but my decision was more of a “no” to nominee George W. Bush rather than a “yes” to Vice President Gore. As far as I was concerned, anything would be better than a Texas Republican selling himself as a “compassionate conservative.”
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“We’re still suffering from Reagan’s compassion,” I said.

“I’m voting Gore,” my sister said. “But his whole campaign has been as dull as dirt.”

“You are right about that,” I said. “But I’ll take a professor, even a boring one, over a cowboy any day.”

Two weeks later, eight hours after Janet and I had settled on a sofa to watch the election returns, neither one of us was laughing. The network reporting of vote tallies and projections for state winners had devolved into chaos. Ultimately it all came down to Florida, Florida, Florida, just as Tim Russert predicted.
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We went to bed expecting the whole mess to be sorted out in the morning.

But instead of clarity, we had thirty-six days of “hanging chads,” recounts,
and court challenges. It took the Supreme Court to award those twenty-six contested electoral votes through a tangled process of three competing lawsuits.
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In the end, George Bush became the forty-third president of the United Sates, and Al Gore walked away with a moral victory: he’d actually received more popular votes than Bush—543,816 more to be exact.
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Bush was inaugurated president on January 21, 2001, promising to “advance my convictions with civility, to pursue the public interest with courage, to speak for greater justice and compassion, to call for responsibility and try to live it as well.”
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Protestors, the largest since the swearing in of Richard Nixon in 1973, lined the inaugural parade route. Some shouted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, that son of a Bush has got to go.” Others waved posters reading “Hail to the thief” and “Selected not elected.”
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Things improved for President Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney as they moved through their eight formal balls, funded by $40 million from the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Much later, America learned that a lot of that cash had come from big corporations that did business, or wanted to do business, with the federal government.

President Bush was everything I didn’t want in the White House, and I breathed a sigh of relief when he seemed to favor clearing brush on his Crawford ranch over any legislative agenda. He did, of course, sign first-day executive orders undoing as many Clinton-era policies as possible without going through the Congress, and he got a slew of right-wingers, many from his dad’s administration, confirmed for various federal posts.

For the JBS, the new Bush administration proved that little separated the two political parties. As Birch president John McManus wrote, “Rhetoric aside, each has labored for many years to bring our nation into a New World Order. This long-standing goal of the Insiders calls for building an all-powerful United Nations with total authority over a weakened United States and for fastening big-government socialistic programs on the American people.”
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According to McManus, Bush was cementing his place in that Insiders’ club by filling his administration with those very Insiders, especially members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential think tank “used to promote the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”
³⁶
Among the CFR members in Bush’s inner circle were Condoleezza Rice (national security advisor), Donald Rumsfeld (secretary of defense), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense), Colin Powell (secretary of state), and George Tenet (CIA director).
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By far, the most influential and dangerous of all the Insiders had to be the vice president, Dick Cheney, a man who filled the role of Bush’s “primary mentor.” Cheney had actually outlined his agenda for U.S. foreign policy in a number of position papers spanning the period from the early 1990s through the Bush era. Writing in
Harper’s
in 2002, David Armstrong described that agenda as a plan “for the United States to rule the world. . . . It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.”
³⁸

The JBS agreed with David Armstrong that Cheney had written his war plan and implemented it when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. They had one area of disagreement, however. Armstrong thought Cheney’s goal was absolute U.S. power. For the Birch Society, the objective was more sinister: “Mr. Bush and his team of Insider strategists (Dick Cheney and others) have ignored their solemn oath to uphold the Constitution while committing America’s military might to UN-authorized conflicts. The planned transfer of U.S. armed forces to the world body’s control continues to unfold.”
³⁹

Once Bush and Cheney choreographed the invasion of Iraq, the JBS escalated its critiques of the war, calling it “President Bush’s plan to make Iraq into the U.S. of the Middle East,” while pointing out the seemingly endless glitches, mistakes, and disasters of the ongoing conflict.
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Of course, none of these plans were known when our leaders gathered on September 14, 2001, for the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance in Washington’s National Cathedral.
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Like millions of Americans, I watched as the church filled with row after row of decorated military officers, influential politicians, former presidents and first ladies, and leaders of every major religion.

That day my heart was broken and afraid. Those leaders, strong and resolute, were our hope, my hope. That day I was no Democrat. I was no liberal critic of the GOP. I had put away my politics. On September 14, 2001, I was an American, period.

I had no idea that the terrorist attacks three days earlier would usher in a decade of war and crush the American economy. I had no clue that my country would redefine torture as “enhanced interrogation” and use waterboarding to try to get information from detainees. I wouldn’t have imagined that my country would cover up the abuses of prisoners in Iraq.
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I would never have believed that our policies would make Iraq a prime recruiting area for more extreme terrorists while our president declared “Mission Accomplished.”
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I could not know that in seven years, millions of people would be unemployed,
the American economy would be in free fall, and George W. Bush would become America’s most unpopular politician.
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And I never would have guessed, not in a hundred years, that the John Birch Society would be as critical of President Bush and the fiasco in Iraq as I was.

All of this was future shock.

On September 14, 2001, like millions of Americans, I wrapped myself in the flag and wept as the Navy’s Sea Chanters sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

“We’re coming for you,” I said. “Whoever you are.”

The pundits like to say that 9/11 brought Americans together. Whatever our creed, whatever our race or politics, when the Twin Towers fell, America was reborn. Out of the rubble of horrific tragedy and unbearable loss, we’d rise again—a nation united in common purpose. That day was the crucible in which we were purified.

I thought of my mother on the Day of Prayer and Remembrance, and I promised to find a new way with her. Perhaps, maybe, just maybe, 9/11 could bring us together.

It took only a few days to realize that Mother had a very different view of it than I did. She’d already identified the true enemies of America, the dark forces at the heart of our suffering. The horror in New York was, first and foremost, the work of a righteous God exacting awesome retribution for the sins of homosexuality, abortion, contraception, and perversions rivaling those of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I was sure Mother didn’t actually watch the
700 Club
, but she sounded a lot like Jerry Falwell when he appeared on that show on September 13. “God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve,” he said, naming the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians “who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say,
you helped this happen
.”
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