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omnium gatherum, n. : a collection of many different, often unsorted, ideas or items. |
Perfect incisive omniscience."On further acquaintance with the modus operandi of
the Bush Administration, I've come to think that the attributions of a competent
criminal intelligence miss the point. They give credit where no credit is due,
and they fail to account for both the increasingly evident childishness of
American culture and the corollary attitudes of entitlement that over the last
thirty years have infected ever-larger sectors of the country's equestrian
class. President Bush and his friends bear comparison not to Jesse James or
Commodore Vanderbilt but to a clique of spoiled trust-fund kids. Certain of
their superiority by virtue of their wealth (whether derived from corporate
salary, family inheritance, or a sweetheart real estate investment), they fit
the profile of wised-up teenagers who don't want to hear it from anybody telling
them what to do -- which shoes to wear, how to behave in a dance club, when to
speak to the caddie or the French ambassador, why it might not be a good idea to
wreck the Social Security system, redirect the flow of the Missouri River, or
invade Iraq. Smug in their cynicism, proud of their selfishness, pre-Copernican
in the sense that they know it is the sun that revolves around them, not they
who revolve around the sun, fortune's children interpret corrections as insult,
amendments as impertinence -- old news,
uncool.
... It is with acts of vandalism that juvenile delinquents proclaim their manhood, and what else is the Bush Administration's record over the last five years if not a testimony to its talent for breaking things? ... ...the Bush Administration speaks for the kind of people who assign no value even to the idea of government, find no use for such a thing as an American res publica. Why should they? What's to learn? Everybody who is anybody in Houston or Palm Beach knows that government is a trailer park for deadbeats who can't afford to hire their own servants, furnish their own police protection, hire cheap Chinese labor, pay their taxes in Bermuda. Government is worth owning for the same reasons that one might own a gambling casino or a brothel, a financially rewarding enterprise staffed with quick-witted pimps and can-do waiters. If government is undeserving of respect, worthless except as a means of money-laundering, then why go to the trouble of hiring well-qualified people to collect the taxes and sit in the chairs? What needs to be done that can't be done by one's college roommate, tennis partner, brother-in-law, former secretary, personal lawyer, or golfing buddy? Adults spoil the fun. They remind the young heirs that government is a matter of long-term maintenance, a learning how to see, know, and care for other people. The lesson follows from the recognition that the national security doesn't consist in a handsome collection of military uniforms but in the heath, well-being, and intelligence of a democratic citizenry. The jeunesse dorre don't stoop to maintenance; they find it tedious and boring, not glamorous, apt to take time away from thinking about one's hair. Adults also give offense by not picking up on the importance of teenage loyalties (in the club or out, with us or against us); also by reason of their sometimes trying to tell the truth, which in the Bush Administration is a cause for summary dismissal... Understand "government" as a synonym for "adult," and what we have now in Washington is the sovereignty of the state in the careless and resentful grasp of teenage anarchists. The historical precedents are legion, among them the reign of the adolescent Roman Emperor Nero; more often than not the story doesn't lead to a happy or romantic ending, but maybe I'm unduly pessimistic, and possibly what we have before us is the dawn of a new golden age. If so, at least some of the credit is deserved by all the good people in the fashion, news, banking, and entertainment industries who have made America great. If Vice President Cheney and his business associates don't know how to think or read, they owe their peace of mind to an educational system that teaches by television clip and film montage; if President Bush and his companions in arms delight in all things shallow, derivative, and dumb, they take their sense of ease and comfort from the assurances of a consumer market and a popular culture that place a high value on those qualities." Excerpted from Lewis Lapham's "Editor's Notebook", Harper's Magazine, December 2005. Indeed, his prose is one of my favorite
aphrodisiacs.
Posted: Wednesday - December 14, 2005 at 02:57 AM | |