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The Gadfly Bytes -- January 10, 2006The Erosion of Trust
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As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. William O. Douglas |
Trust is the moral cement that binds a just political order.
Like a person in good physical health, a society of trusting citizens takes
its good fortune for granted as each citizen goes about his personal
business. When we dwell in such a fortunate society, awareness and
appreciation of the bond of civic trust fades below the collective
consciousness, even as we continue to enjoy the benefits thereof.
We pay our bills and send personal messages through the mail, trusting the
Postal Service to deliver the mail on time and not open and read it en
route. We purchase our food and drugs confident that the food will not be
contaminated and that our drugs will be both safe and effective. When we go
shopping, we often do not bother to check the change returned to us at the
register, and we routinely write checks against bank deposits without
scrupulously checking our balance. In short, we generally
trust each other.
Despite two decades of relentless assault upon "big government" by the (so
-called) "conservatives," we have continued
to trust our government. Until very recently, we have expressed our
personal and political opinions in our homes and over the telephone and
e-mail, without fear that the government has planted a device to eavesdrop
on our conversations. The supreme law of our political order contains a Bill
of Rights which, we have confidently believed, guarantees our freedom of
speech, of worship, of assembly and the privacy of our persons and our
homes. And when our personal lives have been disrupted by an "insolence of
office," we have generally been assured that the courts would provide a
remedy, or failing that, the ballot box.. For as long as this benign regime of law and order has been secure,
it has seemed so ordinary, so "natural." that we have taken little notice of
it.
But today, many citizens are expressing fear that this benevolent
political order is in grave jeopardy. These individuals are called
“alarmists” by “conservative” pundits, and even “traitors” by a few
right-wing commentators.
I have experienced an alternative political order, albeit briefly. Of my
eight visits to Russia, the first three were during the final days of the
Soviet Union. During the summers of 1990 and 1991, I stayed with a friend in
his Moscow apartment. On one occasion, as we were having a free-wheeling
political conversation, he abruptly stopped me, put a finger to his mouth
and then pointed toward the ceiling, in the general direction of an
undetected yet plausible microphone. Thereafter, we carried on our
conversations outdoors. The brief stroll between the Metro station and his
apartment ran alongside the local post office, the upper floors of which
were lit "24/7." Why? I was told that the postal workers, under the
direction of the KGB, were reading personal mail en route to delivery. (To
this day, my Russian friends advise me not to expect my postal and e-mail to
be delivered to them unread). And on my trip to the Moscow Sheremetyevo
Airport to board my flight back to the States, my driver was pulled over by
The Militziya (traffic cop). He did not write out a citation.
Instead, at the driver's instruction, I handed the officer a $20 bill,
whereupon he waved us on. My feeling of liberation upon returning home to
California was palpable.
I returned with a renewed pride in my country, its Constitution and Bill of
Rights, its traditions of tolerance, fair-play and mutual trust, and with a
renewed gratitude for my good fortune in being a citizen of these free and
prosperous United States.
But in the past five years, that pride and gratitude have been clouded by
fear and foreboding.
Yes, we Americans have thrived in an atmosphere of mutual trust. But some of
the foundation of that civic trust has been seriously eroded, and unless we
repair and restore it, that trust may be lost forever.
Within the memory of all of us, we trusted the ballot box and were thus
assured that our political leaders enjoyed the legitimacy of "the consent of
the governed."
We enjoyed some expectation that those whom we elected to our Congress and
our legislatures represented those who voted for them, and not those who
financed their elections.
Our trust in our elected representatives had, in the past, been honorably reinforced by
our independent "fourth estate" – the press. When government or the elected
and appointed denizens thereof got out of line, the press stepped in and
exposed the waste, fraud and abuse. The New York Times publication of
the Pentagon Papers, and the Washington Post investigation of
Watergate were among the finest hours of American journalism.
And when representative government failed, aggrieved citizens could turn to
the rule of law, and ultimately the Supreme Court, as it desegregated public
education, enforced voting rights, protected the citizen's right to privacy,
and maintained the wall of separation between church and state.
Within the past five years, all these foundations of our civic and political
trust – the franchise, representative government, the press, the Supreme
Court -- have been severely compromised.
The Franchise:
In the 2000 presidential election, throughout
the country, but most significantly in the deciding state of Florida,
eligible voters in heavily Democratic districts were refused access to the
ballot box, or if they managed to vote their ballots were invalidated, all
this through an array of tactics too numerous to mention but familiar to
those who watched or read the transcripts of the hearings of the U. S. Civil
Rights Commission. It is virtually certain now that in 2000 a sizeable
majority of Florida voters intended to vote for Al Gore which, of course,
would have won him the White House.
Despite all this, soon after the 9/11 attacks, George Bush had the
unmitigated gall to proclaim to the Congress, to the American public, and to
the world that the terrorists "hate what they see right here in this
chamber: a democratically elected government." Alas, at that moment his
administration was not "democratically elected." We the People knew this,
and thus our implicit trust in the "sanctity of the ballot" has been taken
from us.
That betrayal of trust was compounded in 2004 in an election that was “won”
by vote totals largely collected and compiled on machines built by, and
secret software written by, admitted contributors to the Bush campaign and
the Republican party. These devices produce no printed or otherwise
independent record by which the vote totals can be verified.
Accordingly, if the vote totals in 2004 were accurate and Bush’s victory
fairly won, there is simply no way to prove this. And there is compelling
statistical, anecdotal and circumstantial evidence that it was not fairly
won. Moreover, the Republican Congress
is suspiciously uninterested
in passing legislation that would validate
computer generated votes.
So it comes to this: whether fair or fraudulent, computer voting provides no
independent data with which to validate the vote totals. Hence, the public
is given no reason to trust the official results of elections, and thus to
acknowledge the legitimacy
the legitimacy of the government.
The Courts: In the election of 2000, the "consent of the
governed" was overturned by that very institution that we had come to regard
as the final protector of our liberty and of the rule of law: the Supreme
Court of the United States. The text of
that treasonous decision,
Bush v. Gore – a compendium of
incoherence, inconsistency and special pleading in defense of a foregone
partisan conclusion – stands in permanent condemnation of the "felonious
five" who crafted it. The immediate cost of Bush v. Gore is the
realization, throughout the realm, that the Supreme Court can no longer be
trusted to act in behalf of the citizens at large or to serve as a protector
of the rule of law. Instead, it has become just another instrument in the
service of "The Establishment" of wealth and privilege.
The restoration of the stature and integrity of the Supreme Court after the
massive betrayal of public trust in Bush v. Gore will have to be
hard-won over a long time. And that restoration is by no means assured.
The Media: the American press, once the wonder and envy of the
civilized world, has been transformed from a watchdog to a lapdog of the
"conservative" political establishment. The mighty "pen," which facilitated
the end of a dreadful foreign war in Viet Nam and which forced a felonious
President from office, became, in the past two Presidential elections,
little more than a public relations arm of one of the contestants.
When Bush
entered office in 2000, a myriad of questions about his personal
qualifications and political positions were left unexamined. In the meantime, Al
Gore, generally regarded at the outset of the campaign as a skillful,
well-informed, highly intelligent, and honorable public servant, was
transformed in the public mind into a self-absorbed, pathological liar. This
was accomplished by the unrebutted media promulgation of what can only be
called a baseless slander. The particulars – that Gore claimed to have
"invented the internet," to have "discovered the Love Canal site," and so on
– all were invented whole-cloth and
broadcast promiscuously by the media.
Even so, Gore gathered more votes than Bush. But it was close enough that a
combination of conniving Florida pols, GOP thugs at the county election
offices, selective disenfranchisement of legal voters by a private and
partisan "research organization," and so on, topped off by Bush v. Gore,
sufficed to steal the election and violate the "consent of the governed."
The delinquency of the media in the 2004 election was, if anything, even
worse. A majority of the public was persuaded to believe, to the advantage
of the Bush-Cheney ticket, the demonstrably false claims that Saddam Hussein
was involved in the 9/11 attacks, had developed weapons of mass
destruction, and was a supporter of al Qaeda. This could only be
accomplished through a failure of the media to report the facts to the
American voters. Furthermore, thanks to the cooperation of the media, in the
minds of many voters John Kerry, an authentic war hero, was transformed into
a coward and a fake, and George Bush, a deserter, was transformed into a war
hero. Bush’s truncated “service” in Air National Guard was either ignored
or, when attempts were made to the report it, the maverick journalists paid
a heavy price. The attempt by Dan Rather ended his career.
As corrosive as outright lies to a democratic order, is media distraction
and irrelevance. Thus the public is served an endless diet of journalistic
junk food: Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Scott Peterson, the missing
teenager in Aruba, the love lives of Brad, Angela, Madonna, Jennifer and
other show-biz celebs, etc. ad nauseam. While a persistent problem
throughout the history of the commercial American media, under the regime of
Bush-II this constipation of substantive news and diarrhea of vacuous
blather has, for the first time, been deliberately designed to serve a
political purpose.
In the meantime, the theft of the Presidency, the transfer of the public
treasury to the wealthiest fraction of our citizens, and the lies spewed
forth to justify the invasion of Iraq, have all been judged by the media
moguls as unworthy of public attention. Nor has there been much media
attention to the cost in lives and treasure of the Iraq war, or the failure
of the administration, despite repeated reports and warnings, to deal with
the genuine threats of terrorism, with global warming, with federal
insolvency.
And so, through the accumulation and concentration of media control and
ownership, the regressive right has closed down the vigorous and diverse
public debate which is the lifeblood of a democratic society, all the while
promulgating the manifestly absurd public complaint that "the media has a
liberal bias."
Over the past two decades, "conservative" pundits and politicians have told
us endlessly that "government can't be trusted" – and that virtually all
government functions can best be handled by "private enterprise." As if to
prove their point, while in power the "regressives” have violated the
sanctity of the franchise and the integrity of the rule of law, and have
spewed out "misinformation" from the their ill-gotten public offices, all of
which has provided just cause to further distrust government. And when
nature delivers a devastating blow, as with the Katrina catastrophe, the
regressive regime further “proves” the inadequacy of “big government” by
putting an incompetent hack in charge of emergency response, and then
handing out emergency funds, through no-bid contracts, to “the usual
suspect” mega-corporations.
Meanwhile, the Presidency, and particularly Bush's Press office, have become
fountainheads of lies. Virtually from the moment that Dubya took office, we
were served the slander that the departing Clinton administration had
"trashed" the executive offices. The General Accounting Office set that
record straight. We were told that Saddam “kicked out the arms inspectors.”
A lie. That “we know where the WMDs are.” A lie. That all wire taps take
place with a warrant. A lie. That “we don’t torture.” A lie. But why go on?
There are hundreds more, (as documented
here,
here,
and
here).
Like their most steadfast media apologist, Rush "I'm not making this up
folks" Limbaugh, the Bush spinmeisters "make things up" to suit the
perceived needs of the moment. But why should we expect otherwise? These
folks come from the world of marketing and corporate public relations – the
same folks that have told us that "cigarettes are not addictive," that DDT
is "perfectly safe," and that concern about global warming is based on "junk
science."
The upshot: Trust and credibility are the mother’s milk of
effective democratic leadership. FDR and Churchill had it in World War II,
and so did George Bush when he stood at “ground zero,” bullhorn in hand.
Bush was trusted then because the public needed desperately to trust him.
But now Bush’s fund of trust, like that of LBJ and Nixon before him, has
been exhausted, and with it, his capacity to lead. For truth and reality are
remorseless adversaries, and eventually as the lies are exposed, trust
evaporates, whereupon leadership fails. Then follows a time of great
political danger. For if the discredited regime is to remain in power, civil
order, once accomplished through trust, mutual respect, and obedience to
law, must instead be achieved through force and threat, which is to say,
oppression.
So now, when our country has been dealt a grievous injury by the terrorists,
when the regime in power has proven itself incapable of dealing with natural
disasters or extricating itself from an ill-conceived and immoral war, when
the dreadful consequences of fiscal insanity are soon to come due, we are
called upon to place our trust and loyalty in an administration which has
gained office through an unprincipled manipulation and subversion of our
foundational political institutions: the vote, the rule of law, and the free
press. Today, when we desperately need to trust our government, trust, that
essential moral resource has, like the federal surplus, been squandered to
serve private greed and ambition.
The essential first step in restoring trust in our political institutions is
to separate from the government those who are most responsible for
discrediting those institutions.
Copyright by Ernest Partridge, 2006
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