Wednesday, May 24, 2006 | by nathan

Paranoia

You know, I would be fine with the President. I would be fine if all that happened was that I disagreed when he spoke. I disagree with him on almost every single thing. I oppose the war, the tax cuts, deficit spending, The Patriot Act, the federal marriage amendment, and slashes in veterans’ health care, among many others. I fully support abortion rights, stem cell research, alternative fuel technologies, environmental initiatives, and separation of church and state. Among other things.

I would be fine just disagreeing with George W. Bush. What makes me hate him - and I really do not want to hate - is the fact that he makes me paranoid. I hate it when my worst fears and opinions about someone turn out to be correct. After 9/11 I began to worry about George W. Bush. He has that same gleam in his eye that his father had; it is a gleam that the two of them share with Ike Turner - something in them tells me that they are not quite right.

After 9/11, when all of that rhetoric was happening about "With us or against us" and blah blah blah, I began to worry that our phones were being tapped. The Patriot Act worried me at a deep, soul-sick level. The Iraq War almost made me completely lose my shit. And everywhere, lies. The war is going well. Things in New Orleans are fine. Global warming does not exist. The economy is strong. Iran must be stopped, but North Korea is more or less Okay, or, at least, nothing we need to worry about.

Turns out, the war is a mess, and it has been from day one. Things in New Orleans are still not fine, almost a year later. The economy has sucked ass since this president took office; as a lower-middle class person, I know this to be true. It all makes me crazy, because everywhere I look in the media, and in the two or three people I know who still support this president, there is this massive denial, this willful ignorance, as if the world will start caving in if we admit that things are not absolutely perfect.

It makes me feel crazy. I spent an hour this morning grinding my teeth together in rage while watching CNN. Then I tried to calm down by watching trailers over at Apple, but I saw two movie trailers that made the crazy fear start up again:

1) Who Killed The Electric Car? Turns out, big oil. Who owns big oil? Well, the president and vice-president, for starters.  

2) An Inconvenient Truth. This administration denies that global warming exists because they get money from the people who cause it, who will stop making money if we stop global warming.

To use the inevitable Joss Whedon reference, an exchange from the final episode of Angel:

Angel: The people who don’t care will never understand the people who do.

Hamlton: Yeah, but we won’t care. 

I think that this is so deeply true in our world as to be frightening. There are people in our world who have a lot of power, and a lot of money, and in order for them to keep it they have to continue destroying the world, and the poor, and the future has to not matter to them; nor do the lives of people they do not know, or care about, or understand. They must believe that poor people deserve to be poor, that oppressed people need to be oppressed for their own good. They must constantly make their main spiritual practice the practice of being right, because the only alternative - the practice of being kind - is too costly.

Nietzsche was right, in a lot of ways. In our world, the will to power is what gets you power. Ethics are not as important in our world as whether or not you have power. Look at Ken Lay - he screwed literally millions of people out of their entire hopes for retirement, because he wanted more money, more power. And he has it - he was the single largest contributor to the Bush/Cheney campaign fund, and now, no matter what he has done, he is going to get off because he knows the right people. 

Nietzsche was right, but only because the world is a horrifically screwed-up place. Power matters because we are slaves to it. We want wealth, and influence, and respect, and to have our tiny little feelings validated.

The problem is, it seems, when you get a whole lot of power, or a whole lot of money, if you want to make more - or even keep what you have - then inevitably someone must suffer for that. I don’t know how to deal with the fact that people suffer in the third world so that I can have my piddling little lifestyle. I do not understand how people like Bush and Cheney and Ken Lay sleep at night. Do I think people with a lot of power and money can weild these things compassionately? Only in the sense that I believe it is possible for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle, but only with a very, very large miracle.

The problem is that every paranoid fantasy we on the left have had about Bush’s administration has come horrifically true. We suspected that there were enemies lists, that our conversations were being heard, and yet we knew that this must mean that we were crazy, and so we felt crazy for thinking it. And yet - we were right.

We suspected that going into Iraq would be a horrible mistake, with far too many deaths and no clear way to get out, and yet everyone seemed to tell us that we were crazy for thinking so. And yet, we were right.

We were right that no one was really doing anything in New Orleans. We were right that people very high up in the administration had given the order to reveal Valerie Plame’s identity and endanger her life for nothing more than political retribution. We were right that oil companies were making windfall profits when we were all-too-willingly paying three bucks a gallon for gas - after all, there had been a hurricane; of course the oil companies had to charge more.

Maybe as an American I have too much of a sense of entitlement. But what it comes down to is this: THESE PEOPLE DO NOT CARE. Bush does not care about the people in New Orleans, or the ones in Iraq, or the poor women who will have to get back-alley abortions from Dr. Nick while rich women go get a "D&C" from their doctors. He does not care about the thousands and millions of gays and lesbians who commit suicide, because he gets a ton of money from James Dobson’s followers. He does not care about millions of new cases of asthma in young people in poor areas with horrible pollution, because he and his family live on a giant ranch in Texas, and he gets a lot of money from oil companies who create that pollution, even though they really do not have to.

He does not care because if he cared, he would have to give up a lot of what has made him powerful. And yet, he has to pretend to care. He has to lie and say that he is protecting you, and your family, by having someone monitor every phone conversation in America, and by sending young kids to die or lose their limbs in Iraq, by making things a whole lot harder on the working poor and the middle class.

These people go through the motions, and they go home to their families every night sincerely believing that they did what is best, unable to see that they have been so corrupted by power and wealth that they no longer know what is best for America, so corrupted that they are unable to care. There is never enough power, see; never enough money.

I hate that I think this way about the people running this country, because time was I would think someone was a little crazy who said things like this. But we who have spent the past six years having crazy, unhinged thoughts about Bush have been right at almost every turn. This does not make us good people; it does not even mean we are not mentally ill. But that we have been right about everything else makes me think that I am right when I say that Bush does not care, and never will.

They will keep killing the electric car because the oil companies keep them in money.

They will keep trying to criminalize gays and lesbians and poor women because the religious right keep them in voters.

They will keep marginalizing the American worker because big business makes more money off of cheap immigrant labor, or from outsourcing to the third world (thereby keeping the third world marginalized), and big business supports them.

They will get in bed with anyone who can deliver them to where they want to be.

I worry that we have gone so far that only a revolution - a real revolution - may be the only thing that can bring us back. But I continue to believe in democracy, in the people. I continue to believe, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice."

I tend to think it doesn’t so much bend toward justice as it weaves, bobs, dances, and cavorts around and eventually ends up there. I just wish that me sitting here grinding my teeth together was more of a help than it is. 

Movies, Living In America