I heard the start of President Bush’s inaugural today on the radio as I was driving to BART. As I pulled into the parking lot he was delivering that line about “history also has a visible direction set by liberty and the author of liberty.” There was a ton of applause. Was the crowd just giving God a hand? Or was this another bit of coded, covert language between Bush and his fundamentalist followers, alerting those in the know that the End Times are near?
I turned off the radio to catch my train, figuring that I’d only heard the introduction to the Inaugural, and would catch up on the heart of the address — you know, the part where Bush actually talked about some of the problems the nation faces and some of his plans for dealing with them — later in the day. When I looked the full presentation up online this evening, though, I saw that that was it: by the time I pushed the “off” button, Bush had rounded third and was heading home, with just a couple more paragraphs to go.
This speech wasn’t just soaring rhetoric. It was a lighter-than-air burst of helium verbiage — lofty language untethered from the perplexing world we occupy and from the messy events of the last four years, sentences floating off into an empyrean of millennial vagaries.
The world is a simple place to Bush. For him, “the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right” is one that involves no hard calls. And since America represents freedom and freedom is eternally right, it must still be right even when it locks hundreds of people away for life without trial or it tortures prisoners in a war launched on a lie. We are the forces of freedom; we can admit no wrong because we can do no wrong.
Sounding like a bizarre cross between Hegel, Woodrow Wilson and the nihilists of “The Possessed,” Bush spoke of a “fire in the minds of men” (Dostoyevsky’s phrase, adopted by James Billington as the title of a famous book about “revolutionary faith”) that would spread freedom around the world. Freedom! Who would oppose it? But it is a word so universally embraced, even by those who flout its essence most crudely, that it means nothing when simply uttered; it has meaning only when our actions make something of it, when our deeds fill in its outline.
While Bush’s text spoke of freedom, his imagery told a different story, a tale of retribution and flame. America’s enemies set “a day of fire” on 9/11. We must respond with the “untamed fire” of freedom that America will bring to the benighted world. Fire with fire.
Bush isn’t talking about a little flame of hope in the darkness; he’s not singing “This Little Light of Mine.” He’s talking Biblical conflagration. His fire is the cathartic inferno dreamed of by people who are confounded by a world they know is out of their control — one that, incomprehensibly, is not moving in a visible direction. Burn it down and start anew, clean, fresh, free of disagreement, of doubt, of the pain of history and the sting of one’s own past mistakes.
In this yearning, George Bush eerily finds kinship with those he’d rank as the “enemies of freedom” in misfired revolutions through the ages — movements that placed their commitments to self-defined abstractions ahead of the rights and needs and lives of breathing human beings. The cause comes first. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Condolences, young lady, but it’s all so you can vote.
There must be people out there who find Bush’s fiery talk uplifting. I found it alternatingly depressing and horrifying. Idealism fueled by ignorance and unanchored by reality can be the savagest fire of all.
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