Bush left reality behind. Now we are all trapped

[Briar]

Bush left reality behind. Now we are all trapped


William Pfaff


...

American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives... We are the leading nation, the most moral, born with the redemptive mission to create what the Puritan preacher Jonathan Winthrop called the 'City on the Hill', the democracy 'of the people and by the people' that originated the modern world with our repudiation of monarchy and inherited privilege, establishing the greatest of republics, saving the Four Freedoms for the world by winning (alone!) both First and Second World Wars, then the Cold War, and now confronting the ultimate test of the 'long war' against Evil itself, incarnate as Terror.

Today this is the language of government, journalism, politics and foreign policy in the US, spoken in the policy discussions at Washington think-tanks and on the editorial pages of newspapers.

Is this Orwellian? Or is it just demagogy, politicians' lies, White House spin, journalistic laziness, formulations conceived to sell books? Or could it be cynical manipulation by apprentice dictators, energy industry and weapons-maker magnates, closet fascists?

...

It is not Orwellian because the creators of this cartoon-like conceptual world have themselves become actors in the virtual universe their ideas and actions have made. They have left reality behind - or they simply ignore it, as they did in invading Iraq.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1951704,00.html


So, as Mr Pfaff asks, now we have all been drawn into this world, how do we leave it?

[ixion]

1. kick, for 'reality-based' community

now living in a bubble in this virtual nightmare created by BushCo. :-(

[Briar]

2. Though it's quite a comforting fantasy to live in

as Pfaff suggests:

"The US, where actual people live, has been turned into an abstraction: the Sole Superpower, which everyone in the world knows is a Righteous Nation, the Mars (in the neocon Robert Kagan's formulation) defending the fragile Venus which is Europe, the Straussian (Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago philosopher) Realist unflinchingly battling in a Hobbesian universe to protect Kantian Europeans, with their illusions of global parliaments and peace, from nameless horrors.

"We are the tranquil Elephant (as another American academic, Michael Mandelbaum, has proposed) which by its very presence guards the smaller beasts of the savanna from carnivorous predators."

Who wouldn't want to be part of such a heroic national project?

(Well, only the unpatriotic and anti American...)

Pfaff suggests that we Brits are excused complicity in this, but I disagree. We still nurse colonial delusions of innate moral superiority to the lesser races of the world.