DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Strange bedtime stories By Ira Chernus
White House aide Karl Rove has a simple rule: when you are falling behind,
attack your opponents at their strongest point. In the upcoming election, the
Democrats' strongest point should obviously be Iraq. With the spotlight
eternally focused on the disastrous war there, Rove has to figure out how to
turn its dazzling beam to his party's advantage.
So he's borrowing a page from an ancient Iranian storybook and imitating
Scheherazade, the maiden whose husband's policy was "wed 'em, bed 'em, and kill
'em at dawn". Rove is telling Republican candidates to follow Scheherazade's
rule: when policy dooms you, start telling stories - stories so fabulous, so
gripping, so spellbinding that the king (or, in this case, the American
citizen who theoretically rules our country) forgets all about a lethal policy.
The Republican Party stories are the same ones white people have been telling
each other ever since they first set foot on North American shores: if you want
to be safe, go to the frontier and wipe out the Indians. As former State
Department official John Brown has noted, our Indian wars are not over yet.
Now Rove and his president are trying to sell the Iraq war as a frontier
conflict, too. They want us to see US troops as the cavalry putting down the
"Injuns". Or better yet, as pioneers creating "Fort Apaches" (in Iraq they're
called Green Zones) in the midst of a vast wilderness full of savages. What
strength, what courage it takes to survive. But they have a job to do: they
must teach the savages how to be free. And above all, like their pioneering
forebears, they must have the guts to stick it out until the job is done.
How do we know our military in Iraq has such beneficent motives? The answer is
simple - they are Americans, by definition the heroes, the good guys. Every
time they kill a bad guy such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they only prove once
again what good guys they are. (In a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, 68% of
Americans said the US war against Iraq has "helped to improve the lives of the
Iraqi people".)
Naturally, they hope, one day, to be able to go home to their loved ones and
live the peaceable lives they long for. But they aren't quitters like those
(Democratic) schoolmarms back East in the halls of Congress. They are real
frontiersmen, with the will and the resolve to stay the course. They won't be
scared off by suffering or bloodshed; sometimes - let's be honest - it takes
bloodshed for life to get better.
Republican fairy tales of heroic masculinity
George W Bush is already out on the congressional campaign trail riffing on
this old yarn. At a fundraiser for one Senate candidate he laid it out in all
its marvelous simplicity: "There's an Almighty; a great gift of the Almighty is
freedom for every man, woman and child ... The American people expect the
government to protect them. It's our most important job ... Iraq is now the
central front, and we've got a plan to succeed ... There's a group in the
opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done. They're
willing to wave the white flag of surrender."
And there, my friends, is the real choice we're being offered by Rovian
rhetoric: weak-willed cowardly Democrats against Republicans who tough it out,
whatever the cost, because - above all - they are real men.
The urge to prove manhood is central to the story. It may be what got us into
Iraq in the first place. For four decades now, neo-conservatives have bewailed
the feminization of America. A nation where women can wear suits and men can
have long flowing hair, even in corporate suites, drives them crazy. Since the
1970s they've touted belligerent policies, swaggering talk and massive military
budgets as the only way to stop liberals from imposing spinelessness on the
nation.
The neo-cons want to turn a nation of soft, lazy, mall-shopping, morally
squishy "relativists" back to the manly "strenuous life" that Theodore
Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan preached. That's one big reason they worked so hard
to send "our boys" (and "girls") off to the battlefields of Iraq. Rove may not
be a neo-con, but he's betting that the voters will be mesmerized by John
Wayne-style tales of "real men" fighting evil on the frontier - at least enough
Americans to avoid the death sentence that the voters might otherwise pronounce
on the party that brought us the disaster in Iraq.
The frontier tales may sound trite and hackneyed to some, but they won't go
away. You probably know them by heart. In fact, without a second thought, you
probably put them together intuitively and unconsciously to form a single
unified narrative, doing the Republicans' work for them. Many of your fellow
Americans still take that grand narrative as the tried-and-true tale about the
virtues that made America great.
Will women as well as men fall for these fairy tales of heroic masculinity?
There is still a gender gap in US politics. But since September 11, 2001 it has
narrowed considerably. Plenty of female voters now choose the candidate who
best embodies the "manly virtues", because it isn't really about sex or gender.
It's about an age-old cultural bias that says males make clear distinctions
between good and evil and then do whatever it takes to destroy evil, while
females offer dangerously tender-hearted understanding to everyone.
This gets us to the heart of the Scheherazade strategy. It plays on the
insecurity of Americans who feel that their lives are out of control. Rove
knows that (as Gary Bauer, a religious right politico, once put it) "Joe
Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why
he doesn't have a say in it." So Rove constantly invents simplistic
good-against-evil stories for his candidates to tell. He tries to turn every
election into a moral drama, a contest of Republican moral clarity versus
Democratic moral confusion.
Rove wants every vote for a Republican to be a symbolic statement: I am not
merely a feather blown around by what George W Bush has called "the winds of
change". My vote anchors me in the Republican Party - solid as a rock, tough as
the toughest pioneer, willing and able to bring the savage wilderness of this
terroristic planet under firm American control.
The Scheherazade strategy is a great scam, built on the illusion that simple
moralistic tales can make us feel secure, no matter what's actually going on
out there in the world. Though it never fulfills its promise, too many
Americans keep on falling for it. Why? Here are some clues from scholars who
trace it back to its roots in American Christianity. Catherine Albanese of the
University of California at Santa Barbara wrote: "Ordered conduct of foreign
policy will, according to the conservative ethic, keep evil at bay and erect
the safeguards that protect Christian life. Thus, containment for conservatives
means the management of evil." But the management of evil is a lifetime task.
Far from relieving anxiety, it is bound to create more of it - and, Rove
assumedly hopes, more people who crave the manly certitude that is supposed to
relieve anxiety.
Princeton's John F Wilson explains why. The obsession with managing evil comes
from "a concern, often exaggerated, to achieve control over those aspects of
life experienced as uncertain". From the Puritans to the present, people bent
on controlling their lives have been haunted by the inescapable fear that they
might lose that very control. When they find that they can't control themselves
or their lives or surroundings as completely as they might fervently wish, they
feel like failures; and, Albanese added, if they happen to think they are part
of God's chosen people, they may also feel a powerful obligation to live up to
God's expectation of perfect self-control. So they end up feeling not just like
failures but like guilty sinners.
Who wants to shoulder such a heavy burden? "To admit that too much was wrong
could jeopardize America's belief in its status as a chosen nation," Albanese
said. "Americans could not admit the deepest sources of their guilt without
destroying their sense of who they were." So, instead, they went (and still go)
looking for other people to control and blame them for their troubles. Our most
recent candidates are, of course, the terrorists.
Before you know it, you have, in Wilson's scholarly words, "essentially bipolar
frameworks for conceiving of the world: good versus bad, us versus them. The
puritan American while tightly disciplined is prone to be uncritical of self
and hypercritical of others ... [This] presupposes a fundamentally
authoritarian pattern of relationships within the world and reinforces that
pattern." In other words, when the US military tries to impose a
made-in-America order upon Iraq (or anywhere else), it lets us avoid facing up
to the abundant ills, evils and insecurities here at home.
Scheherazade fantasies and frontier realities
These are certainly deeply rooted, complex and real feelings. Rove's scam works
because the bipolar framework seems so believable. There is always more
American insecurity to feed our appetite for "staying the course" in Iraq. The
US presence there spawns more Iraqi insurgents, who make the whole story look
all too believable on the evening news. The cycle is endless, because the old
frontier story that is supposed to ease our insecurity actually fuels it.
It's certainly making the public insecure about the war. In a recent Washington
Post- ABC poll, only 37% of Americans approved of the way Bush is handling it.
So Rove's strategy may be an act of desperation. But it's also a shrewd trick -
some might call it genius - because it plays on the growing fear that Iraq
represents something truly awry in the American universe. It links the
Democratic Party to the chaos of Iraq by turning both into symbols of American
weakness, wilderness and instability.
The Republican Scheherazades say, in effect, "Things may seem out of control
now, but they're bound to be far worse under the Democrats, who are completely
incapable of keeping our fragile lives sheltered from the winds of violent
change." They tell the old familiar tales to plant seeds of doubt, to send the
voter into the booth asking one big question: "Even if the Republicans are
obviously not in control of this perilous world, do I dare to take a chance on
those weak-willed, flip-flop Democrats?" If a vote against the Democrats
becomes a vote against uncontrollable change - then the Republicans are likely
to have another election in their pockets.
Though the frontier story and its twisted offspring have deep roots in Puritan
Christianity, don't just blame the Christians for them. Long ago these tales
became the common property of secular American culture, too. And don't just
blame the Republicans. These are the same stories that led Democrats from
Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton to places like The Somme, My Lai, and Mogadishu,
promising wars to end war or communism or terrorism.
Yet ever since Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, the Republicans have managed to
make the old stories their own private property. When Democrats try to tell
them, they just don't sound believable any more. Right now, in fact, nothing
that most mainstream Democrats have to say seems to have the ring of
believability - or the Scheherazade strategy wouldn't have a chance of saving
the Republicans' political life in November. So what's a Democrat to do?
A Dem can start by seeing the risks in the Scheherazade strategy. For one
thing, Rove's story depends on believable images of American strength. If US
forces in Iraq keep suffering disasters between now and election day, voters
going into the booth will have a harder time hanging on to the image of
Republicans as their manly saviors.
It also depends on voters letting fairy tales, not logical thinking about
policies, determine their vote. The Democrats should not assume that most
voters will fall prey to alluring but absurd tales, as the king in Scheherazade
did. They can tell the voters - and themselves - a frontier story about another
traditional American virtue: the courage to trust that ordinary people will use
hard-headed common sense to separate fact from fiction.
The old stories tell us that the actual pioneers, not the ones who so long
inhabited our movie screens, had to confront life honestly. They couldn't
afford to "stay the course" just for the sake of saving face. And they couldn't
afford to play politics with matters of life or death. When things went wrong,
they were brave enough to admit it and use good old American ingenuity to set
things right. They were true democrats, expecting everyone to shoulder their
share of responsibility and giving their neighbors the right to express their
own opinions. They didn't call disagreement "disloyalty". They knew that even
the humblest guy or gal might have the best idea for fixing things.
Out on the frontier, pioneers needed that kind of courage and common sense to
make sure they and their families survived. It may be just what the Democrats
need to survive, too - trusting ordinary people, even Iraqis, to find practical
solutions to practical problems. If the Republican candidates want to play
Scheherazade, they have to recognize that the Democrats might have a more
honest, compelling story to tell. And we, the voters, are the king. We get to
decide who remains alive at dawn on November 8 and who ends up a political
corpse.
Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and author of the forthcoming book Monsters To
Destroy: The Neo-conservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be contacted at
chernus@colorado.edu
