One Saturday morning I woke up to the smell of fresh coffee. I walked out into the living room and Deo and Cole were already awake. CNN was on the television and they were eating oatmeal.
"Keith Olbermann just called the Bush Administration a dictatorship," Cole greeted me, laughing.
"Good morning," I replied, rubbing sleep out of my eyes. "That's interesting." Then I poured coffee in a mug, took a shower and went to the library 'cause I'm a big loser.
Of course, people have been calling Bush a totalitarian executive for years because of his administration's unilateral approach to policy:
>The US is a rebel among docile powers on the UN Security Council, vocally refusing in the grand theater of international diplomacy to rule out military intervention in the various countries currently threatening nuclear proliferation.
>Though Congress never approved John Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN, Bush left him at the post as "representative" for a year and a half.
>A month after the Baker-Hamilton Commission recommended a phased withdrawal from Iraq, Bush announced a surge in troop levels.
>Anyone who saw An Inconvenient Truth knows that Bush is pretty much single-handedly destroying the planet with his tendency to protect big businesses from environmental constraints and that, if only Al Gore had been elected president, the ice caps would remain fully intact.
>The ACLU will tell you that the Bush Administration is probably watching me type this right now and researching my ties with Al Qaeda or any other threat to national security.
>Bush locks foreign nationals up at Guantanamo without warrant.
…These are all terrible things, but George W. Bush is not a dictator. Just to suggest that he is is to make light of the suffering of people under actual totalitarian rulers. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe rules over a nation that almost never allows foreign journalists to enter the country for fear that they might give the country negative press. In Zimbabwe the opposition parties are routinely crushed because Mugabe issues directives to his police forces to suppress, i.e. beat/shoot/burn, the originators of political discontent. Mugabe's picture graces the cover of newspapers and is readily visible in private stores, schools, all over the place.
I read a similar account regarding Saddam Hussein by a journalist who visited Baghdad before America's occupation of Iraq. She walked through a marketplace trying to count how many pictures of Hussein she saw, but lost count and decided to quantify it simply by saying, "More than one per minute." The removal of the large statue of Hussein from central Baghdad early into the war was propagandized in America as a shining moment for Democracy. I needn't remind you all of the wretched qualities that Hussein possessed as a leader that demarcated him as a dictator. Though I never supported the invasion, nor do I still, the rule of Saddam Hussein was never within the power of the Iraqi people to remedy. I do not mean this as a comment on the whole "Is the world better off without Saddam" issue; it is merely an observation of the electoral operations, or lack thereof, of one political system.
In North Korea, until recently, pictures of Kim Jong Il littered government buildings and public marketplaces. No official reason was given for the reduction of his likeness in the citizens' daily lives, but it was alleged by several insiders that Kim Jong-Il was concerned that the omnipresence of his image invited unflattering accusations of mental ideological dogma, or a "personality cult." The North Korean government is routinely accused of gross violations of human rights, holding up to 50 thousand people, including children, in a concentration camp for individuals accused of political crimes. Talk of Kim Jong Il's successor is an enigmatic topic that is never regarded as a choice for North Korean citizens.
Back in college I babysat for a very wealthy family one afternoon. They had one little girl, Taylor, who was six. Taylor and I played outside and colored in coloring books and then she took me up to her room to play with her dolls. I followed her through the doorway made of mahogany and looked around her lush digs. Then I noticed something sick; hanging over Taylor's nightstand was a framed picture of George W. and Laura Bush. Talk about brainwashing your kid.
In the documentary Jesus Camp a group of mostly homeschooled fundamentalist Christian kids pray before a life-sized, cardboard version of President Bush. The kids are led in worship by a crazy Evangelical woman (whom I'm not entirely convinced is not a lesbian) thanking God for the strong leadership of Bush in the face of the evils of homosexuality and abortion threatening to destroy our nation.
And yet, on telephone poles around the city, I see pictures of Bush portrayed as a monkey. My writing this stupid blog is evidence of the fact that we are not ruled by a dictator. People, lately, mistake the tyranny of the majority* for dictatorship. A tyrant executive implies that the citizenry has no power to change its government. George Bush is the president of the United States because we let him be. Many people stood behind the Iraq invasion initially at least in part because the Bush administration pushed the ideal of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Not for nothing! If you're outraged that this invasion was predicated on so many lies do not throw your hands up in despair. Take back your republic through the very tool we've been neglecting to exercise: enfranchisement. Apathy and "the deep slumber of a decided opinion" have led our nation to a point where presidents are elected by very few people, and yet so many are left to bitch about it.
You say you want a revolution? Read. Then vote. Or you don't get to complain.
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*Of voters, anyway.
**Sometimes I think about posting what I'm listening to while I write these in that little box, but nobody could ever take me seriously ever again if I answered honestly. Oh Goddddddddddd.
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