Losing America

Last night and early this afternoon, I watched a couple programs on CSPAN. Last night's was a PEN event held in New York at the time of the Republican National Convention called "State of Emergency", hosted by PEN's current president, Salman Rushdie (whom I have noted in my recent posts on the capture of Cat Stevens). During the course of the event, a number of noted writers (Rushdie being the only one I recognized, I'm sorry to admit) read pieces from works by other authors, with the theme being freedom of expression, particularly in light of our current political affairs and repressive administration. One of the works read was a piece by Zbigniew Herbert, who had lived through WWII in Poland and the subsequent Soviet occupation. I'm sure that author Don De Lillo chose this poem because of its absolute perfect fit for the situation in Iraq today. I have included it on the webpage where I keep links to my posts concerning the seige of Falluja. It's called Report from the Besieged City. I hope you'll take a moment to read it.

Today, I have found the text of Rushdie's remarks at the PEN event, so I can reprint for you the texts of two quotes he offered. The first is from John Stewart Mills from a couple centuries ago "On Liberty":

The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat one after another until they pass into commonplace but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be thrown back for centuries....It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth has any inherent power...of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalty will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has consists in this: When an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times. But in the course of ages, there will generally be found persons to rediscover it until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand subsequent attempts to suppress it.

And the second is from the Cuban independence hero and poet, Jose Martí writing about the campaign and election of Grover Cleveland.

[W]henever it appears that a danger is imminent or an institution has been profaned beyond redemption or some vice has half-devoured the nation, there arises (with the reliability of a law and without great operators and when the evil can still be cured) the men and systems that can avoid ruin. They appear, do what they have to do, and drop from sight. And it also appears that a condition of this law is that the evil has to be extreme, as if the prosperous peoples never decide to change direction or perturb their habits until the reality is so dire that it is impossible to ignore. This was the law affirmed by the election of Grover Cleveland. The evil was grave. The Republicans entrenched in power cynically abused it. They subverted the integrity of the vote and the press. They mocked the spirit of the Constitution through partisan legislation, copied the tactics of tyrants, used overseas wars to deflect attentions from their actions. Who had a chance to compete against them, defeat them? If elections are won by the force of money, if the Republicans have a free hand with the national coffers . . . But a wave rose up that no one saw forming on the margins (and no one knows how it came, breaking over the heads of all the ambitious and illustrious politicians of the nation) despite the anger of the members of his own Democratic Party, despite time-proven practices and conceits, and landed in the White House a man just a little more than barely known, a tough but humble man fit for the task of fearlessly and patiently reforming the corrupt government. The wave brought Cleveland. Up close, you see that that the change has not been essential or durable, but circumstantial and like a proof. An eruption proving it can be done. The eruption of a fistful of men, a fistful of vulnerable people, nothing more than that, gave victory to Cleveland. A thousand votes less among 10 million voters and the President would have been an impure and sinister man, a brilliant sophist. He would have been Blaine.

Without getting into a critique of Grover Cleveland's presidency, which I cannot do, Rushdie's intent to point up the political situation today through this passage is well taken. Can the present-day "evil" still be "cured"? Will Martí's "law" of avoiding ruin hold for the country? Are there men and systems in place that can avoid it? I don't know. Perhaps the wave was carrying Howard Dean, and the HAARP press repulsed it. Maybe today's political technology has been honed to a finer tool by modern day Republicans. And, perhaps the condition for the "law" to work - that the evil has to be so extreme that it is too dire to ignore - hasn't quite been reached. Perhaps people have more distractions from recognizing the evil these days. When I look at the alternative to Bush, I think that the time has past for the cure, and now we will have to await the eventual ruin and subsequent uprising. Probably not in my lifetime, but who can say?

As for the program I watched today, it was an interview with NPR's Bob Edwards, who has written a book about the late Edward R. Murrow, one of the last of the true journalists. Edwards was asked if Murrow would "fit" in today's NPR lineup, and his response was, No. The reason he said is because when Murrow would reach a truth, he didn't think that you should bring in a liar to balance it.<