Worst of all, he's a decent human being
— For as long as Bush II has been in office, there have been bad
things to say about Paul Wolfowitz. Even a friendly profile in The Economist was
rather arch, with the correspondent comparing the deputy defense secretary to a
velociraptor, the murderous lizard from "Jurassic Park."
Journalists who
consider themselves serious track his career through his days at the State
Department in the Reagan years, and in Defense during the reign of Bush I. They
point ominously to his co-authorship of the Defense Policy Guidance document of
1992, which became the plan for the War on Terror with indecent haste after 9/11.
They suggest he has been maintaining an invasion plan for Iraq since around March
1, 1991. They demonstrate his connection to that creepy Project for a New
American Century
Journalists who shouldn't consider themselves serious (e.g. anyone with a
broadband connection to the Internet these days) just harp on his role in
promoting and defending Operation Iraqi Fiefdom.
For Pat Buchanan, he is
one of Those Jews, and Pat holds a first edition copy of the Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Neoconservatism. The ignorant mob that gets its worldview from
Michael Moore only knows him as That Guy Who Licked The Comb.
Yes, it
seemed Paul's positioning as a Vulcan-like geopolitician was fixed. And then,
with an illusionist's swiftness, Bush II completely changed Wolfowitz's image by
nominating him to head the World Bank.
Just about everyone with a stake in
the World Bank found this astonishing, even alarming. For a moment I thought Bush
was just going down an existing list of candidates in alphabetical order, with
Wolfowitz succeeding James Wolfensohn.
It wouldn't be the first time a
Defense Department official has moved from destroying one Third World country
with bombs to destroying many Third World countries with "development." That
would have been Robert McNamara. The difference was that McNamara was a
technocrat and remained a technocrat. Once he began to campaign for his own
nomination, Wolfowitz admitted that, yes, he's always been interested in the
travails of the less developed countries.
Within weeks we had video feed
of him embracing AIDS orphans in Africa. Once his reputation had been thus
sullied, even more damaging revelations leaked out. It seems that Fran O'Brien's
Stadium Steakhouse in the D.C. megalopolis, not far from the Walter Reed and
Bethesda hospitals, hosts a free banquet each Friday for the maimed and scorched
veterans of the War on Terror and their families. Our former men and women in
uniform undergo painful (and not always competent) rehabilitation. Bodies used to
running five miles and pounding out 100 push-ups now may collapse after a half
hour of slowly extending and flexing shattered joints. There are prosthetic
fittings and skin grafts. Lessons in hygiene must be relearned. (How does one
bathe with a hook for a hand?) Heads must be shrunk by learned psychiatrists
— quite a dodgy thing when some of the syndromes in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual are punishable by firing squad in the military and many of the
rest are grounds for less than honorable discharge.
In short, these people
are hurting. Fran's does what it can to give our vets a short respite from this
horror. It is a place that should daunt the idealism of the neocon.
Wolfowitz dined there regularly.
And, because complaints from disabled
veterans simply disappeared in the military machine, he would hand out his
business card, and tell the aggrieved to call his office. This goes well beyond
the art of "image-making," which prefers African AIDS orphans as props.
In
a town where networks are everything, the business card of the deputy secretary
of defense is worth far more than gold. How many defense industry lobbyists would
crawl through a Fort Bragg latrine to grasp the business card that a 19-year-old
amputee can reach out and grasp in his new prosthetic hook? How many lobbyists
would simply swipe it from the boy?
When history renders its final verdict
on America's role in Iraq, and on those responsible, Paul Wolfowitz will probably
be among the convicted. But remember what he did at Fran's, week in and week out,
for the broken soldiers of Walter Reed. It sets an honorable example.
— Brian Bartels
| Alan W. Bock is
a senior columnist at the Orange County Register.
|
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Solomonic wisdom — The U.S. Supreme
Court's two decisions on the display of the Ten Commandments on government
property could be seen as biblical. Remember the story of King Sol-omon,
confronted by two women claiming to be the mother of the same baby? He said he
would cut the baby in half, and when one woman objected, Solomon knew that was
the real mother and gave her the baby. The court went ahead and cut the
baby in half. In two seemingly contradictory 5–4 decisions, the court said
that a six-foot granite monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol was
constitutional, but framed copies of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courtrooms
were unconstitutional. Justice Stephen Breyer was the swing vote.
Actually, if you buy modern jurisprudence on the establishment of religion,
context matters, and there are reasons to differentiate between the two
cases. High court jurisprudence has focused on making sure the government
doesn't endorse or support any particular religion. While this is not the same as
establishing a church, one can understand the concern. But deciding whether an
action supports religion or merely acknowledges its historic importance is a
matter for prudence rather than principle. The court distinguished between
the Texas case — in which the Ten Commandments monument was one of 17
historical displays — and Kentucky, where a couple of judges added other
items to their religious displays only after complaints. The Texas case, it
figured, was a valid acknowledgment of the historic importance of the Ten
Commandments, while in Kentucky the judges were pushing religion.
Unfortunately, there's no clear principle to determine where the boundaries are,
so these decisions invite future litigation. — Alan W.
Bock
| Eric Kenning is
a freelance writer living in New York City. |
|
And how does that make you feel? —
Sometime around the 1970s, the government grew a goatee and put all of us on a
couch, nodding sympathetically, stroking its beard thoughtfully, and taking notes
while we agonized about any trifle whatsoever (except trifles like the loss of
privacy and liberty). We live in a frazzled therapeutic culture watched over by a
therapeutic state in which every problem or trend, most of them once covered by
the far-reaching French theory C'est la vie, is labeled a psychological disorder.
The list includes most crimes, a persistent taste for alcohol or drugs, high
energy when observed among children, easy distraction when observed among
children, childish behavior when observed among children, fatness, thinness, hard
work, laziness, anger, and absence of anger, all of them now an occasion for
feeding frenzies by counselors and consultants and other professional
meddlers. Even those of us not yet officially diagnosed with a
jargon-generated disorder are so fragile psychologically that we need to be
protected from allegedly offensive speech and humor on college campuses, from
jokes and flirtations and racy pin-ups in workplaces, from war photos and
unconventional opinions on television. We're also eligible for millions of
dollars in jury awards if anything more specific and suable than life leaves us
with permanent psychological trauma or distress, and by permanent we mean lasting
more than 45 minutes. So every public discussion of every event and issue is now
accompanied by the soft murmur of therapists in the background, cautioning us,
urging us, and soothing us, and every citizen is under careful scrutiny by
therapeutic custodians in white coats armed with verbal straitjackets and quick
to pounce, except maybe a president who invades a country and sends thousands of
young people to their death for no apparent reason, which is considered normal
behavior. Yet somehow we come out of it more unhappy and with our nerves
more on edge, judging from surveys that compare current levels of self-described
contentment with those in the 1950s, even though terrorism and AIDS and other
headlined menaces today are really no more menacing than communism and H-bombs
and polio were then. Maybe the epidemic of therapy is the problem. Maybe we've
been taught to exaggerate every transient feeling we dutifully get in touch with.
Maybe being repeatedly and officially told we can't control ourselves leads to a
vacuum of self-control filled by others, including the state. Karl Kraus'
observation a century ago about the work of his fellow Viennese, Freud, comes to
mind: "Psychoanalysis is itself the disease it purports to cure." But
Freud at least had a dark, stoic view of the human condition. Everything
essential in his work was anticipated by Book IV of Swift's "Gulliver's Travels,"
where human life is already reduced to irrational impulse, lust, and excrement.
He wasn't what he took himself to be, a scientist soberly making discoveries, but
he was an unconscious, inadvertent satirist. Like Swift, he combined a gravely
decorous style with grotesque absurdity, and like Swift, he thought the human
condition was basically incurable. The occupying army of counselors and
therapists in America today is mostly made up of smarmy, officious
sentimentalists and busybodies whose only real view of life is that no one should
ever be left alone to deal with anything, and that stoic fortitude is to be
avoided at all costs. To their everlasting credit, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and
other countries affected by the tsunami last December told the American grief
counselors to go home as soon as they arrived. — Eric Kenning
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