THIS MODERN WORLD

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality- concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy-which entails disagreement, which promotes candor-has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.

That’s from the essay by Susan Sontag that ran in the New Yorker shortly after 9/11, the essay that inspired Andrew Sullivan to spend the next couple of years giving his self-righteous little “Sontag Awards” to anyone who struck Little Roy (as Eric Alterman nicknamed him) as a fifth columnist, a traitor insufficiently worshipful of Dear Glorious Leader.

And you know what? Reading it from this perspective, it seems a hell of a lot wiser, and more prescient, than anything Andrew Sullivan has had to say over the past few years.

In addition to the article mentioned below, don’t miss this month’s Atlantic Monthly. I’m a new and enthusiastic convert on the basis of this single issue, which has an extraordinary article on life inside the Green Zone, as well as this detailed look at Karl Rove’s usual m.o.

I spent some time on airplanes this weekend, as you might have guessed.

Extraordinary stuff in Ron Suskind’s article in the NY Times Magazine this week:

Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush’s substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. ”He’s plenty smart enough to do the job,” Levin said. ”It’s his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me.” But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe at the president’s preternatural certainty and wonderment about its source.

There is one story about Bush’s particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record.

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ”road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

”I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. ”They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.”

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ”Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ”No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.”

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

And then there’s this:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

When the people running the country consider being “reality-based” a negative thing…that’s when you know you’re in trouble.

The whole article is here. It’s an easy, not to mention lazy, blogger’s copout to lift a quick excerpt and say “read the whole thing” — but I truly mean it here. You really, really want to read this article.

— What he said. I meant to write up something very similar to this, but now I don’t have to.

— Bob’s got his own blog. Go visit.

Image via Robert Spychala.* You can get your own Smirky/Snarly shirt here.

I’m off to Ohio. I’ll probably see some of you there.

* On my system, this site comes up as gibberish in Explorer but works in Safari. I only note this to spare myself an otherwise inevitable barrage of confused email. Assuming this is not a glitch specific to my own computer.