Powerlessness Corrupts

One of the least impressive observations ever made was George Santayana's remark that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It's equally true, and far more profound, to say that those who do remember history are doomed to repeat it. And not merely to repeat it, but to see it looming well in advance, and tremble.

The history I'm inclined to remember, these days, has to do with exhausted, frightened societies that seek a scapegoat for the anxiety they feel at their own powerlessness. For as true as it may be that power corrupts, it's again more profoundly true that powerlessness corrupts. And the United States, at this time, is essentially powerless, and therefore essentially corrupt.

Having tried every medicine against melancholy, every tonic against age, and every balm for anxiety - all to no effect - we've decided that it's the working poor who are to blame for our unhappiness, or monogamous lesbians in their late sixties, or whatever other unlucky group seems helpless and friendless enough to inspire our righteous contempt and Vesuvian wrath. Having granted ourselves a license to abhor these people, we cheerfully forge God's signature upon it, and call it morality.

The terrorists hate our freedom, supposedly. They hate our freedom to dissent, our freedom of worship and association, and our freedom to pursue harmless, ordinary dreams of love and happiness. The strange thing is, at least half of our country basically agrees with them. Al-Qaeda's animus against Western Civilization is second in potency only to that of the Christian Right, whose hatred of our traditional freedoms makes it a veritable fifth column. These are the people who have sworn to defend us from tyranny, and will fight it to the last drop of our blood.

There's an old joke about a man who catches his wife in bed with his best friend. He pulls out a gun and puts it to his head. "What are you laughing about?" he demands. "You're next!"

That, in a nutshell, is George W. Bush's War on Terror. Either through secret assent with the terrorists' opinion of our own guilt, or through that self-defeating logic that compels people to throw things away for fear of losing them, we've chosen self-punishment and self-oppression as our primary weapons against the Forces of Evil. We seek the sort of power a man has when he puts a gun to his own head, the sort of power that turns to powerlessness the minute the trigger is pulled.

With what shall we replace outdated notions like charity and equality, once we've beaten the terrorists at their own game? With "traditional values," of course. With a refined moral sensibility that rejoices when a hospital refuses to aid a poor man, and hears the music of the spheres in the humming of a munitions factory. With moral delicacy that blanches at the sight of nudity, unless it's for the purpose of humiliating Arab men in front of their women and children. With compassion that aches for the unborn, while sneering at the bloodsoaked cardboard coffins of children killed by cluster bombs, and at the grief of their parents.

All of this is an abdication of responsibility, in favor of moral weakness. All of this makes us less strong and less safe.

Like his healthy forests and clear skies, Bush's "Culture of Life" is topsy-turvy shorthand for the aimless abuse of power. And power wielded without responsibility or intelligence increases powerlessness, for all intents and purposes; it can only lead to chaos, as the situation in Iraq demonstrates. Support for Bush expresses a sick country's need to revel in destruction at home and abroad...partly out of sadism, partly out of displaced guilt and anxiety, and partly as an expression of a weary culture's urge towards the abiding peace that can only come with its own extinction. It doesn't want power so much as it wants to be caught up in circumstances in which all responsibility can be abdicated, circumstances that justify anything.

This being the case, our use of power can't help but be self-defeating.