With the movie Vice up for several Academy Awards
and a trumped up "state of emergency," it is time to compare the
Trump and Cheney/Bush presidencies. What comes to mind is chaos vs.
control. No, not KAOS vs. CONTROL as in the brilliant sixties
spy send-up Get
Smart. We’re talking Chaos and Control: the universal forces. While
both Trump and Cheney may be power mad rightwing leaders creating change, Trump
is chaos. Vice President Dick Cheney, whom the movie Vice portrays
as (and many believe to have been) the true leader of the Bush presidency,
is control. I have an emerging hope that, despite
appearances chaos may be more beneficial to the democracy than control.
For one thing chaos =
disruption, which we now value. We live in a time where Amazon, Uber and other
highly successful companies celebrate their “disruption” of business as usual. Trump
is the disruptive presidency. Could he be the chaos we need to
disrupt the system of complacency, ignorance and lack of engagement? Surely
the flaunting of separation of powers by declaring a fake state of emergency on
the heels of a government shutdown is a major piece of that. You didn’t know
the importance of separation of powers? Watch the president take your tax
dollars away from something you value and use it to build a wall; didn't know you needed the feds? Try
getting food stamps, visiting a national park, getting your tax return, seeing
a doctor, flying on a plane, during a government shutdown.
Let’s look at it more closely. Dick Cheney, the movie Vice reminds
and educates us, systematically, methodically and quietly seized power in the
Bush White House from the famously powerless position of the Vice Presidency. Cheney
recruited and cultivated the theory of “unitary executive power:” a
way to vastly expand the power of the executive beyond that of the other
previously “co-equal” branches of government, legislative and judiciary. When
Al-Qaeda attacked on 9/11, Cheney created, from that crisis,
opportunity (as the overworked Chinese maxim recommends). Convincing
Secretary of State Colin Powell to dissemble before the world about “weapons of
mass destruction,” the Bush-Cheney team was able to justify the invasion of
Iraq (instead of Afghanistan, which would have been the obvious choice),
allowing their big oil buddies to get their greedy hands on long-desired
petroleum fields.
Moreover, it seems that Cheney accomplished all this all fairly
secretly, largely out of the public eye. The consequences of
Cheney’s campaign for control were devastating. While US military
casualties were low as wars go, it is estimated that Desert Storm killed close
to 500,000 people in Iraq, including a high proportion of women and children. Nearly
100,000 Afghani people were killed. In the name of defeating
“terror,” the Patriot Act was created to justify secret extra judicial
procedures, indefinite detaining and torture of prisoners, as well as
legalizing broad domestic surveillance of Americans.
Compared to now, no one noticed. Yes, the Bush-Cheney
team was mocked, reviled and despised by Democrats and much of the world (how
did the old joke about Cheney's arrhythmia go? W was just a heartbeat away from
the presidency?). There were, of course, protests. But
it wasn’t like it is now: a fraction of the population noticed; a fraction
cared; a fraction could tell you what was happening. Proof
of this is provided by the re-election of Bush-Cheney.
Enter the chaos of the Trump presidency. Although posturing as another
rightwing power mad leader, Trump gives no evidence of discipline, control,
theories or system. “I have a gut,” he brags. “My style
of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high,
and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” (The Art of the Deal).
I’m sure Dick Cheney, alive and well with someone else’s heart in
his chest, sees that all this chaos could be put to good use for the rightwing. After
all, Trump’s tweets, bleeps and blunders as well as the Mueller investigation
are all a tremendous distraction. Any reasonable Control could use
it as a slight of hand to shove through all the pieces of the conservative
agenda that were still missing. And in some respects, this is
occurring. Trump’s surviving appointees are doing their best to
dismantle the Clean Air Act, protections for endangered species, civil rights
protections, etc. And then there’s Brett Kavanaugh (although him we
noticed).
But there’s also this: we are not at war. And, as the
midterm congressional election demonstrated, many more people are paying
attention. Look at
the number of presidential candidates.
Look at the voter registration.
Look at the crop of new women in Congress. Look at the move to the left.
There’s a spiritual element I haven’t spoken to that I want to
unpack: as a human race at least in the west, we’ve been taught to fear chaos
and change and to court control. But in the body, it is said that
all diseases are control and cures are chaos. Cancer is, while it
disrupts our lives, very systematic in how it builds and grows. And
all our medical “cures” for cancer (basically cutting (surgery) burning
(radiation) and poisoning (chemo) are chaotic. They are designed to
disrupt the system of cancer and to make it break down and cease to grow and
build on itself.
Prior to this presidency, we’ve been aware of a cancer growing in
our body politic: that cancer is complacency, ignorance and lack of engagement. Cheney
and his ilk exploited that cancer, encouraged it and grew it. Witness
the elimination of the fairness doctrine which allowed Fox News to rise. Maybe unwittingly, Donald Trump is the chaos
we needed to wake up from the dream that we could have a real democracy without
acting like the sovereign people we are on paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment