Jewish Atheist

“The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Leaves from a Notebook,” 1903

“We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.”

Stephen Vincent Benet, “Litany for Dictatorships,” 1935

Comedians and others who fear for the future of the Republic have tried to portray the essence of Dick Cheney, perhaps to warn the rest of us, perhaps to deal in some way with their incomprehension of the Cheney phenomenon.

Vice President John Nance Gardner said the Vice Presidency wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.

From bucket of piss to Fuehrer-ship

It is a caretaker office, a ceremonial office, perhaps an advisory office, and, of course, a bench-warming office, somebody ready to step in if the worst should happen.

Yet in just a few short years, Cheney, albeit a creature of Washington for decades, has managed to transform this bucket of warm piss into his own personal Fuehrer-ship. The President cannot control him; quite the opposite. He is accountable to no one.

It’s not bad enough that he’s spent his whole worthless life wheeling, dealing, and politicking, enriching his oil and Halliburton cronies at taxpayer expense, never producing a single product or service of value.

No, the culmination of his career is to amass far-reaching yet mysterious political power – enough to enable him to start and maintain a $250 MILLION A DAY war on a pack of lies. The single “informant” upon whose say-so the whole war was based…turns out to have been a phony and a con-man, the whole WMD thing fabricated.

But Cheney got his war.

The Daily Show graphically portrayed Cheney as an avatar, whose power transcends time and space. To show how ancient is his power, they put his face on a Greek vase.

Cheney is a staple of late night comedians. Jay Leno, noting an eighth-cousin relationship between Cheney and Obama, joked that the same research found Cheney and Darth Vader to be second cousins.

We are fortunate to have the Web as a snapshot measure of what’s on the minds of the billion or so people now online. Cheney now occupies a prominent place in our consciousness: A Google search of “Cheney and “evil” turned up 185,000 hits. There were over 60,000 hits for “Cheney” and “Darth Vader.”

Cheney, the blandest of bureaucrats in appearance and demeanor, has even used the Star Wars reference himself, an ingenious reverse-psychological maneuver intended to dispel fears about him.

Lord Cheney

In a similar vein, Doonesbury has introduced a new character, Lord Cheney. His face is hidden beneath a medieval hooded cassock. He carries a staff with an eagle on the end. He speaks in the ominous, archaic-sounding English of James Earl Jones or Ian MacKellen, as the all-powerful villain/sorcerer in some fantasy or science fiction epic.

Speechwriters inventing pretexts for war — NOT

The funniest part (to me) is that in the strip, Cheney commands a speechwriter to create a pretext for the war with Iran. If speechwriters are creating pretexts for war, then the country is in serious, serious trouble.

Speechwriters, as I can tell you from personal experience, may synthesize the points of view of various people or bring order and clarity to their thoughts. They may, in the case of Presidential speechwriters, defend lies and bullshit – which I consider an abuse of the rhetorician’s art

But speechwriters NEVER make policy or construct pretexts for war. I guarantee you that the arguments the government used in order to sell the war in Iraq were provided to the speechwriters; they didn’t make any of it up.

But Lord Cheney doesn’t care about reality and truth. Whatever the speechwriters make up will do, because Lord Cheney is determined to go to war.

A lot can happen in a year.

I share Doonesbury’s alarm. The election of a new president is almost exactly one year away, and a lot can happen in a year. America in October 2001 was a very different country from America in August 2001. Another body blow like 9/11, and Cheney has his opportunity to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, even delay the election.

I will breathe a great sigh of relief if we’re not in another war when this man leaves office. As I write this, Pakistan is very unstable. Hopefully, the educated elites and Ms. Bhutto (I’m a big fan) will prevail, and things will calm down. But if that country falls apart, Cheney will have his third war.

The reason Doonesbury and I are so alarmed is that the braking mechanisms for such runaway power are simply no longer operative as they were in previous cases of gross misconduct.

There are no civil protests of any consequence. There is nothing like the pressure on the politicians that there was to end the Vietnam disaster.

America’s youth, immune from the draft, are plugged into their iPods, cell phones, and other technologies. Many of them have opted out entirely, choosing to live a second life online – literally.

Bill of Rights – who needs it?

So what’s to stop Cheney from suspending the Constitution, if he has what he considers a valid excuse? Most Americans don’t even know what the Bill of Rights is. They deserve Bush and Cheney. If Cheney suspended the Constitution, I don’t even know that most Americans would notice: they’re too busy shopping till they drop – or working three jobs to make ends meet because they’re taxed half to death.

The nation is in a very dangerous state of apathy about the incompetence of its leaders. I may be around when Social Security goes bankrupt, but I’m pretty much guaranteed to get what was promised to me. Others may not be so lucky. Some people may even get a negative rate of return. Almost inevitably, the Social Security tax will go way up and the benefits will go way down.

Astronomical debts coming due

The young folks plugged into the iPods are in a state of denial which may turn out to be disastrous, because it is THEY who will pick up the tab for the astronomical obligations of Medicare, Social Security, and other government programs with no end, including, now, wars.

And Congress? Forget about them. Parliament under Henry VIII was a bunch of rebels compared to these spineless, gutless panderers who agreed to this war on the shabbiest of evidence. Congress impeached Nixon for burglary; Clinton, for lying about sex. But they can’t find their cojones now.

Correction in the real world

So where’s the corrective mechanism? Sure, 185,000 people think Cheney is evil ON THE NET — but what about the real world into which Cheney extends his many tentacles?

What’s going to happen to the resolution to impeach Cheney? Is it going to go nowhere, because Lord Cheney has the power to make that happen?

How did it happen?

I ask again: how in the hell did this happen? Cheney has no personal militia or goons. He got where he is nonviolently, through a chain reaction of obedience and team play, of alliances built up over decades, so that everyone obeys, no one dares disobey, Lord Cheney.

I don’t understand how this man amassed such power, because I can’t empathize, at the personal level, with the way consensual power spreads: how at some point, one sells out one’s entire soul, intellect, and conscience for the sake of power, or even the perks of power, or even the appearance of power, or even closeness to power.

Somehow, Lord Cheney (and the obedience he had thus far amassed) broke the will of each individual (it was probably easier for some than others), compromised the ethics of each individual, made obedience and team play immensely more rewarding than independent thinking.

I don’t know exactly how the tragedy in Iraq happened, but certainly unthinking obedience to power had a lot to do with it. Cheney’s power.

Apparently Nietzsche’s “will to power” is very powerful indeed.

The man who would be Fuehrer

In an earlier entry I referred to Cheney as “the man who would be Fuehrer.”
I know – the first one to mention Hitler loses the argument. He is the gold standard for evil, and truly, I do not take his name in vain.

The picture is on page 4 of the 9/24/07 Chicago Tribune (the article is subtitled “Unrelenting hard-liner emerges from behind the scenes to rally Republican base”).

The eyes of Cheney fix upon me, a glowering stare without soul or conscience, seeing only the lies and half-truths manufactured by the brain behind them. They’re intent on learning whatever Cheney needs to know to control me. The thin unsmiling lips deliver the same message: I am the boss.

You can see all of this in any image of him, but this unguarded one seemed particularly revealing.

An unusual talent

Cheney is the only person I’ve seen who can speak out of both sides of his mouth, both semantically and physically.

He says something that means two different things at least…and as he does so, his mouth seems to spread and to be talking at you in two different ways, going through two sets of speech motions at the same time. It’s a marvelous example of the way the lies we utter can be written on our faces.

The Daily Show can ridicule him all it wants (I love “You Don’t Know Dick”), but he is the boss.

There are those who contend that Cheney has gone from a behind-the-scenes apparatchik to a megalomaniac whom no one dares cross…because of some psycho-physical change that took place a few years ago, after surgery.

That’s as plausible an explanation as I can think of. Mind and body are one, are they not? Like you and me, Cheney is the total of his experience imprinted on his neurology.

Profoundly un-American

That neurology compels him (i.e., the rest of him) to imagine and act out the profoundly un-American ideas that unquestioning obedience to him…as well as limitless secrecy and unaccountability on the part of the government…are all justified in the name of protecting the country.

Cheney is ready to sacrifice the very principles on which this country was founded, as many have already observed.

Americans allowed it to happen. It’s not as if there’s any mysterious conspiracy. Like the other Fuehrer, Cheney announced his aims: in this case, to leave the Executive Branch “in better shape than we found it.” As with Hitler, there were no secrets about what he was doing.

Congress out to lunch

But Congress is too busy micromanaging the lives of Americans…to actually defend their freedom.

Only Congress can create change. There will be no popular revolution, because the government has almost all the firepower, and it’s better that way. The less violence and suffering, the better.

An article in Harper’s earlier this year, written in the form of an intelligence assessment, suggested that the nation’s economy could not withstand indefinite military overreach, and there would be some kind of breaking point, but what that might be is not clear. Military coup was mentioned but dismissed; the generals would remain loyal.

But another terrorist disaster could trigger major change in America, by which I mean “government getting even bigger and more powerful and intrusive.”

A recent Harper’s essay called for a general strike to protest the disaster that is the Bush Presidency. Good idea in the past, maybe, but today Americans can’t be bothered. Too busy prowling MySpace and secondlife.com.

Thomas Jefferson advocated a revolution every now and then, but he was crazy, wasn’t he, with all his talk of liberty? The result: violent revolution has been removed from the table. Large numbers of Americans favor the very gun control that gives the government power to cancel out this part of the argument.

Many defenders of the Second Amendment find this state of affairs difficult to live with. I can sympathize.

But the fact is that the government has most of the guns, and that’s that.

Peaceful revolution

HOWEVER…the Founders knew the value of peaceful dissent. Jefferson even thought a free press more valuable than the government itself. PEACEFUL change is the result of the system they created.

This will work if people are paying attention and participating. Americans are doing neither. Voter turnout is shameful. Equally shameful: the politicians maintain a lock on the system by systematically excluding third parties via extremely difficult ballot access laws.

Also, big money has long since bought the government. The drug war, for example, is good business for lots of companies, as is war in general.

Wealth, mercenaries, and obedience

But the most crucial piece of our nation’s decline is a compliant populace. Americans have no interest in anything that doesn’t affect them – especially now that we have a home-grown mercenary military fighting our wars.

That plus unprecedented wealth have created a level of obedience that Hitler, Stalin, or Saddam could never have achieved by fear and force (although our government makes abundant use of these, too).

These are developments the Founders didn’t foresee, especially the all-important “consent of the governed” NEVER being withheld, because people are too busy, too wealthy, too distracted by machines that Jefferson, for all his scientific sophistication, could never imagine.

I think it was supposed to work in the following way: the people complain to Congress when the government steps out of bounds, the Congress restrains the Executive (that is, if Congress doesn’t get there first). So does the judiciary. Et cetera. Checks and balances, responsible to the people. That’s how they went after Nixon and Clinton.

But today, the people, the root of it all, don’t give a shit. So Congress can afford to be gutless and let catastrophes like the Iraq war happen.

And thus Fuehrer wannabees like Cheney can flourish, instead of being impeached (on grounds of failing to protect – and in fact undermining – the Constitution), tried, removed from office, and jailed.

Exchanging freedom for “security”

Americans have already shown how much freedom they’re willing to give up for incompetent politicians’ promises of security.

September 11, which the Administration constantly uses to stir up fear and gain obedience, was a harsh blow to something truly sacred and, until then, totally taken for granted: Americans’ feeling of safety on their own soil. It’s something many people around the world do not enjoy.

One more 9/11 – or worse – and this country will be so frightened and angry that Lord Cheney will have no trouble issuing new executive decrees, giving the government a lot more power, embarking on new military interventions, or even suspending the Constitution.

Even if that doesn’t happen, Cheney’s power will continue for another year, and if he starts talking about war with Iran, you can be absolutely sure he’s serious. A lot can happen in a year.

American fascism

I do not have to look at pictures of Hitler’s face again – or that of any tyrant in history – to know the grim visage of fascism when I see it. Back in the 80s, as I read in yet another Harper’s article, a sociology professor predicted that when fascism came to America, it would come wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

This man knew our country all too well. His predictions came to pass. People willingly accept the lies that created the war in Iraq, and with Cheney’s help, they stubbornly cling to them, because Cheney tells them that to do otherwise is unpatriotic. It was the Nazi genius Goebbels who knew that the Big Lie, told often enough, becomes true.

Unpatriotic government behavior

I, on the other hand, think it is unpatriotic for the government to make up wars and lie to its citizens.

It is unpatriotic for the government to neglect the defense of its citizens (Bush & Co. could have prevented 9/11; they were too busy, already focused on Iraq).

It is unpatriotic for the government to neglect the needs of its citizens and embark on foreign military ventures. It is unpatriotic for the government to intervene in other countries’ destinies and to sacrifice American lives and wealth to its ambitions.

It is unpatriotic for the government to make the world MORE dangerous through its meddlings and interventions…then have the gall to insist it needs MORE power, to protect us from the trouble it’s caused.

It is unpatriotic for the government to think it is unaccountable to the people.

It is unpatriotic for the President to act like a king.

I have cited in other writings Benjamin Franklin’s reply to a woman who asked him, after the Constitutional convention, what the Framers had “given us – a monarchy or a republic?”

Franklin said, “A republic, Madame – if you can keep it.”

We have not kept it. The government is in charge of every aspect of our lives. Franklin also advised that those who gave up liberty for the sake of government-defined “security”…deserved neither security nor liberty – and would end up with neither one.

Hijacked patriotism

How Franklin and the others would be appalled to see today’s America! Completely sold out to the consumer/media culture, while the government destroys the nation’s youth and wealth in yet another ill-advised war.

I read a letter, in the same edition of the Tribune that depicted Lord Cheney, from a Marine mother who was immensely proud of her son’s achievements and her own sacrifices. It was a heartbreaking letter for me.

The patriotism of both mother and son, their pride and honor, their unquestioning obedience to and faith in their government…had been hijacked by chickenshit neocon cowards (why aren’t THEY fighting?), jingoists, and liars – Bush, Rumsfeld, Snow, Rove, Gerson, Wolfowitz, Perle…and others, especially Lord Cheney.

It IS us.

I just saw another one of those movies or TV shows about government evil, with the inevitable moment in which the internal evildoers are identified, and another member of the government says, “This isn’t us.”

I didn’t originate this reply, but I repeat it here: Yes, it IS us.

It is us, not only because the US government does indeed lie and kill in our name (and has done so for a long time)…but also because we have seen the face of the enemy of liberty: it is the face of Lord Cheney.

We have seen the face of fascism, and we have done nothing. If I believed in God, I would say: heaven help us.

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Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author — most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056. He is the founder of Positive fHumanists International/PHI ©