Essays from the Nick of Time (14 page)

Democracy, of course, is not an absolute but a relative value: “We’re not perfect,” the cry will sound, “but show us who is.” I’ll take a pass on perfection, but I’ll say this: when it comes to the egalitarian attitudes democracy presupposes, the Brits, for all their wigged getups and parliamentary histrionics, have it all over us.

I think I realized this fully a few years back when I happened to see a BBC program featuring an “interview” with a member of the House of Lords who had voted in favor of supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Though the member’s name escapes me, I can still recall the breathtaking frankness of the “conversation,” the utter lack of deference on the part of the interviewer, her willingness to insist on a satisfying answer and to mercilessly track down every attempt at evasion. So bare-knuckled was this exchange that I’m ashamed to say that my first reaction (this is how far I’d fallen) was discomfort. This was a major political figure, after all, and he was being treated like a truant with some explaining to do. More uncomfortable still, he himself seemed to accept that this grilling was the price one paid for public service, and that he’d better answer up and be quick about it.

My initial discomfort did not last long; by the time the man had been deemed sufficiently humiliated and sent packing, I was enchanted. It was as though I’d been permitted a glimpse of the world envisioned by the Founding Fathers, a world of educated, independent-minded citizens cognizant of the fact that theirs was the position of power, and, on the other side, representatives prepared to accept the fact that they were the hired help, laboring in a government—forgive me—of the people, by the people, for the people. And though the larger historical irony of the British showing us how to “do democracy” was not lost on me, I could not help but marvel, and envy, and wince at the unavoidable comparison.

But it’s not just the formal, procedural differences between the two political cultures (the mandated brevity of the British election season, or the government’s strictures on how much money a candidate can spend) that cast us in a sad and diminished light; it’s the difference in spirit that lies behind, and informs, these distinctions.

In general, the Brits act as though the government is their business and they have every right to meddle in it. Americans, by and large, display no such self-assurance (unless they’re throwing bricks at Washington, which underscores my point). To the contrary, we seem to believe, deep in our hearts, that the business of government is beyond our provenance. What accounts for this difference in attitude? My wife, whose family hails in part from England, has a theory: unlike us, the Brits don’t confuse their royalty with their civil servants because they have both, clearly labeled. Acknowledging the apparently universal desire to defer, they channel that desire, wisely, into the place where it can do the least harm, a kind of political sump. Americans, on the other hand, lacking the royal catch basin, are squeezed between pretense and practice. Though we continue to pay lip service to the myth of the independent American, we understand it as a fiction—nice for a Friday night with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s but about as relevant to today’s world as a butter churn.

On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Brits have become what we were once supposed to be. Consider the unavoidable (if largely symbolic) fact that our president lives ensconced in a palace, while 10 Downing Street is a row house. From there, consider the regal arrogance of the president and the president’s men: their refusal to justify or explain policy, or abide by the constitution, or respond to the concerns of Congress. Next, consider the spectacle presented by the president’s “meetings with the people,” when he deigns to have them. Consider the extent to which he is scripted, buffered, coddled; the extent to which his audiences are screened to assure that they consist of cheerleaders whose “questions” are nothing more than praise couched in the shape of a question, or who don’t even bother with the interrogative form and, like one woman at a Bush “rally,” walk up to the microphone and say things like “My heroes have always been cowboys,” then sit down to thunderous applause.

More? Recall an average press conference: President Bush striding to the podium, his slightly irritated, patronizing manner. Recall the press corps’ sycophantic chuckling at every half-assed quip, its willingness to accept the most insulting answers, its downright Prufrockian (“and how should we presume”) inability to challenge an obvious untruth. Consider the fundamental inequality implicit in the fact that the president is always addressed as “Mr. President,” while septuagenarian journalists are invariably “Tom” or “Judy.” Survey the whole, sad spectacle, soup to nuts, then dare to consider what the alternative might look like.

To indulge this fantasy, look up one of the question-and-answer programs on the BBC, and watch a prime minister sweat while answering questions from an audience specially selected, according to the
New York Times,
to assure that its members are “tough, and knowledgeable.” Or take in one of the many lengthy press conferences, noting in particular how seriously the PMs take the process, or how, on being told that they haven’t answered the question precisely, they apologize (apologize!) and try again. But why stop there? Make it hurt. Look up the session in which Prime Minister Tony Blair appears in front of a live audience whose indignant members demand an apology from him for going to war, and respond to his answers, as one woman did, with “That’s rubbish, Tony.”

Now recall that steel tycoon who, upon accidentally addressing the president as “Mr. Truman” rather than “Mr. President,” was never able to forgive himself for the breach of etiquette. Which one is the citizen, and which the subject?

The real problem we face is not the Bush administration’s imperial pretensions, its quasi-cultish stress on loyalty, or its instinctive suspicion of debate and dissent, but the extent to which the administration’s modus operandi is representative of a society increasingly conversant with the protocols of subservience. In the long term, it is this tilt toward deference, this willingness to hold our tongues and sit on our principles, that truly threatens us, even more than the manifold abuses of this particular administration, because it makes them possible.

Over a century and a half after its publication, Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
has calcified into a reference work, a Bartlett’s
Quotations
for journalists in a hurry. To those who still bother to read it, however, it offers something invaluable—a chance to plot our position on the road from, or to, despotism. Like any map, Tocqueville’s doesn’t presume to suggest where we will arrive, or when; it simply charts the terrain between two points—call them freedom and tyranny. Which direction we happen to be traveling, and how quickly, is up to us to determine, which “goal” we are currently approaching, the question at hand.

It’s not a difficult question to answer. On the contrary, unless one has been in a deep sleep for the past seven years, the answer is glaringly obvious. Tyranny isn’t something up ahead; it’s right here. It’s in the soil, in the very air we breathe. It’s the
other
climate change, and no less real. The old tyranny, from which we emerged as a nation, has been transformed by the wonder-working ways of time and advertising into a powdered wig, a tricorn hat, and the God-given freedom to burn hot dogs; the new tyranny, meanwhile—infinitely more dangerous, Made in America—looms just ahead, so large as to be very nearly invisible.

Why haven’t we noticed? Perhaps we’re too busy, or historically ignorant, to recognize the political beast when it stands before us, slavering in the road. Perhaps we’re so confused by the rope-a-dope tactics of our would-be dictators—just look at them, falling back into winking buffoonery one moment, attacking the enemies of righteousness the next—that we don’t quite know
what
to think.

There’s another possibility, of course—not a pretty one. Maybe we’re not out on the street protesting this administration’s abuses of power because we’re no longer the people we once were, because we’ve been effectively bred for docility, trained to defer to our leaders even though they reveal themselves, over and again, to be dishonorable, incompetent men, even though they rob us of what is rightfully ours, then present us with the bill for the removal of our legacy.

Equality, Tocqueville pointed out, “insinuates deep into the heart and mind of every man some vague notion and some instinctive inclination toward political freedom.” But what about inequality? Might it not, by precisely the same calculus, insinuate “some instinctive inclination” toward political tyranny? Of course it might. Once the idea of inequality is allowed to take root, a veritable forest of ritualized gestures and phrases springs up to reinforce it. The notion that some bow and others are bowed to comes to seem natural; the cool touch of the floor against our forehead begins to feel right: from classroom to corporate cubicle to the halls of Congress, deferential way leads on to deferential way, and at the end of the road, as Tocqueville foresaw, stands a
baaa
-ing polity “reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Lincoln had it right: “If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” We’re off to a fine start.

We have every reason to be pleased with ourselves. Bucking all recent precedent, we seem to have put a self-possessed, intelligent man in the White House who, if he manages to avoid being bronzed before his first hundred days are up, may actually succeed in correcting the course of empire. The bubble is rushing back to plumb; excitement is in the air. It would be churlish to quibble.

Still, let’s. Although the guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has indisputably changed, although the new boss is
not
the same as the old boss, I’m less certain about us. I’d like to believe that we’re a different people now; that we’re more educated, more skeptical, more tough-minded than we were when we gave the outgoing gang of criminals enough votes to steal the presidential election, twice, but it’s hard work; actual human beings keep getting in the way.

My neighbor, a high school teacher living about an hour outside New York City, wants to torture a terrorist. He’s worried because he believes that Osama—excuse me, Obama—cares more about them than he does about us. He’s never heard of the Spanish Inquisition. Another neighbor—an actual plumber, actually named Joe—wants Mark Haddon’s
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time
tossed out of the high school library. Joe came by recently. Did I want my kids learning how to curse and kill dogs and commit adultery? he asked. I said that my kids already knew how to curse, and that I hadn’t realized that killing dogs and committing adultery was something you had to learn. He showed me the book. He and his wife had gone through it with a blue highlighter and highlighted the words
crap,
shit
and
damn
every time they appeared, on every page. They’d written to Laura Bush about it, and received a supportive letter in return, signed by the first lady. “You’re a teacher,” he said. “Don’t tell me you support this kind of filth.” I asked him if he’d read it. Well, no, he said, but he knew what it was about. He didn’t really go in for reading, himself, he said.

I like a party as much as the next man, and I still have moments when I realize that the bastards are really, truly out and think that maybe, this time, it really is morning in America, but a voice from outside the ether cone keeps whispering that
we
haven’t changed at all, that we’re as dangerous to ourselves as we’ve ever been and that the relative closeness of the popular vote in this last election (given the almost embarrassing superiority of the winning ticket and the parade of catastrophes visited on the nation by the outgoing party) proves it. Go ahead and bask, this voice says, but that rumble you hear above the drums and the partymakers is real, and it’s coming our way.

What we need to talk about, what
someone
needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame—no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We’re deeply loyal to it. Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.

Seen from a sufficient distance (a decade abroad, for example), or viewed through a protective filter, like film, or alcohol, there can be something almost endearing about it. It can appear quaint, part of our foolish-but-authentic, naive-yet-sincere, rough-hewn spirit. Up close and personal, unromanticized and unfiltered, it’s another thing entirely. In the flesh, barking from the electronic pulpit or braying back from the audience, our ignorance can be sobering. We don’t know. Or much care. Or care to know.

What
do
we care about? We care about auto racing, and Jessica. We care about food, oh yes, please, very much. And money. (Did you catch the last episode of
I Love Money?
) We care about Jesus, though we’re a bit vague on his teachings. And America. We care about America. And the flag. And the troops, though we’re untroubled by the fact that the Bush administration lied us into the conflict, then spent years figuring out that armor in war might be a good idea. Did I mention money?
¹

Here’s the mirror—look and wince. One out of every four of us believes we’ve been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71 percent in angels. Forty percent of us believe God created all things in their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number—not coincidentally, perhaps—are functionally illiterate. Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around the earth. When one of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive in class because they have an indigo “vibrational aura,” which means that they are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the bookstores to lay our money down.

Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has migrated to the region of the belt—not below it, which might at least be diverting, but only as far at the gut—where it has come to a stop. The gut tells us things. It tells us what’s right and what’s wrong, whom to hate and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it’s where American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer appears in the little window of the eight ball: “Don’t trust him. Don’t know. Undecided. Just because, that’s why.” We know because we
feel,
as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in the human heart, like love.

I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and have successfully passed it on to my children. I don’t believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing—a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my fellow citizens, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don’t believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who
can
tell you, who know all about Islam, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers’ speculation that’s so divorced from history and actual, demonstrable fact, that’s
so
not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. “Way I see it is,” a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.”

Quite possibly, this belief in our own opinion, regardless of the facts, may be what separates us from the nations of the world, what makes us unique in God’s eyes. The average German or Czech, though possibly no less ignorant than his American counterpart, will probably consider the possibility that someone who has spent his life studying something may actually know more about it, or at least have an opinion worth considering. Not the American. Though perfectly willing to recognize expertise in basketball, for example, or refrigerator repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas, all folks (and their opinions) are suddenly equal. Thus evolution is a damned lie, global warming a liberal hoax, and Republicans care about people like
you.

But there’s more. Not only do we believe that opinion (our own) trumps expertise, we then go further and demand that expertise assume the position; demand, that is, that those with actual knowledge supplicate themselves to the Believers, who don’t need to know
because
they believe. The logic here, if that’s the term, seems to rest on the a priori conviction that belief and knowledge are separate and unequal. Belief is higher, nobler; it comes from the heart; it feels like truth. There’s a kind of biblical grandeur to it, and as God’s chosen, we have an inherent right to it. Knowledge, on the other hand, is impersonal, easily manipulated, inherently suspect. Like the facts it’s based on, it’s slippery, insubstantial—not solid like the things you believe.
²

The corollary to the axiom that belief beats knowledge, of course, is that ordinary folks shouldn’t value the latter too highly, and should be suspicious of those who do. Which may explain our inherent discomfort with argument. We may not know much, but at least we know what we believe. Tricky elitists, on the other hand, are always going on. Confusing things. We don’t trust them. So what if Sarah Palin couldn’t answer Charlie Gibson’s sneaky question about the Bush Doctrine? We didn’t know what it was, either.
³

How did we come to this pass? We could blame the American education system, I suppose, which has been retooled over the past two generations to stamp out workers (badly), not skeptical, informed citizens. Or we could look to the “great wasteland” of television, whose homogenizing force and narcotizing effect have quite neatly corresponded to the rising tide of ignorance. Or we could spend some time analyzing the fungus of associations that has grown around the word
elitist,
which can now be applied to a teacher driving a thirteen-year-old Toyota, but not to a multimillionaire CEO like Dick Cheney. Or, finally, we might look to the influence of the anti-elitist elites who, burdened by the weight of their Ph.D.s, will argue that the words
educated
and
ignorant
are just signifiers of class employed by the oligarchy to keep the underprivileged in their place, and then proceed to tell you how well Bobby is doing at Princeton.

But I’m less interested in the ingredients of this meal than in who’s going to have to eat it, and when, and at what cost. There’s no particular reason to believe, after all, that things will improve; that our ignorance and gullibility will miraculously abate; that the militant right and the entrenched left, both so given to caricature, will simultaneously emerge from their bunkers eager to embrace complexity; that our disdain for facts and our aversion to argument will reverse themselves. Precisely the opposite is likely. In fact, if we take the wider view, and compare today’s political climate (the arrogance with which our leaders now conduct their extralegal adventures, the crudity of the propaganda used to manipulate us, our increasing willingness to cheer the lie and spit on the truth, just so long as the lie is ours) to that of even a generation ago, then extend the curve a decade or two into the future, it’s easier to imagine a Balkanized nation split into rival camps cheered and sustained by their own propaganda than the republic of reason and truth so many of us want to believe in.

Traditions die hard, after all. Anti-intellectualism in America is a very old hat—a stovepipe at least, maybe even a coonskin. We wear it well; we’re unlikely to give it up just like that. Consider, for example, what happens to a man or woman (today as ever) the minute they declare themselves candidates for office, how their language—their syntax, their level of diction, the field from which their analogies are drawn—takes a nosedive into the common pool. Notice how quickly the contractions creep in and the sleeves roll up. The analogy to high school seems appropriate; the pressure to adapt is considerable, and it’s all in one direction—down. In American politics as in the cafeteria, the crowd sets the tone; it determines how to talk and what to think and who to like. It doesn’t know much, and if you want in, you’d better not either. Should you want out, of course, all you have to do is inadvertently let on—for example, by using the word
inadvertently
—that you’re a reasonably educated human being, and the deed is done.

Communicate intelligently in America and you’re immediately suspect. As one voter from Alaska expressed it last fall, speaking of Obama, “He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly.” This isn’t race talking; it’s education. There’s something sneaky about a man like Obama (or even John Kerry, who, though no Disraeli, could construct a sentence in English with a beginning, a middle, and an end) because he seems intelligent. It makes people uneasy. Who knows what he might be thinking?

But doesn’t this past election, then, sound the all clear? Doesn’t the fact that Obama didn’t have to lower himself in order to win suggest that the ignorant are outnumbered? Can’t we simply ignore the one-third of white evangelicals who believe the world will end in their lifetimes, or the millennialists who know that Obama’s the Antichrist because the winning lottery number in Illinois was 666?

For starters, consider how easily things might have gone the other way had the political and economic climate not combined into a perfect political storm for the Republican Party; had the Dow been a thousand points higher in September, or gas a dollar cheaper. Truth is, we got lucky; the bullet grazed our skull.

Next, consider the numbers. Of the approximately 130 million Americans who voted this past November, very nearly half, seemingly stuck in political puberty, were untroubled by the possibility of Sarah Palin and the first dude inheriting the White House. At the same time, those of us on the winning side might want to do a cross-check before landing. How many of us—not just in the general election but in the primaries, when there was still a choice—voted for Obama because he was the
it
thing this season, because he was so likeable, because he had that wonderful voice, because he was black, because he made us feel as if Atticus Finch had come home? If nothing else, the fact that so many have convinced themselves that one man, thus far almost entirely untested, will slay the culture of corruption with one hand while pulling us out of the greatest mess we’ve known in a century with the other, suggests that a certain kind of “clap your hands if you believe” naïveté crosses the aisle at will.

But the electorate, whatever its issues, is not the real problem. The real problem, the unacknowledged pit underlying American democracy, is the 38 percent of the population who didn’t move, didn’t vote. Think of it: a country the size of Germany—83 million people—within our own borders. Many of its citizens, after decades of watching the status quo perpetuate itself, are presumably too fed up to bother, a stance we can sympathize with and still condemn for its petulance and immaturity, its unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that in every election there is a better and a worse choice. Millions of others, however, are adults who don’t know what the Bill of Rights is, who have never heard of Lenin, who think Africa is a nation, who have never read a book. I’ve talked to enough of them to know that many are decent people, and that decency is not enough. Witches are put to the stake by decent people. Ignorance trumps decency any day of the week.