Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BY M. MARTIN
And so Karl Rove exits stage right, avowing to spend time with a family consisting
of a onetime trophy wife and a son entering college a vow as transparently
fraudulent as pastor Ted Haggard's recent assertions that a week long prayer
marathon cured him of a propensity for sucking cock. Just as it is merely a matter
of time before Pastor Ted once again finds himself on his knees in something other
than prayer, it is merely a matter of time before Karl Rove gets up to his own
brand of perverse nastiness. Unfortunately, while Pastor Ted's preferred kink
damages nothing but his credibility and his tonsils, Mr. Rove's favored
transgressions have some potential longterm consequences for us all.
In his role as George Bush's brain, Mr. Rove inflicted upon the state of Texas two
gubernatorial terms and upon the world two presidential terms for one of the
leastqualified leaders this country has ever known. As such, Mr. Rove bears a
very real responsibility for the thousands of lives and billions of dollars
squandered in places ranging from a coal mine in Utah to the wards of New Orleans
to the hills of Afghanistan to the destroyed neighborhoods of Baghdad. The
consequences of eight years of cronyism, incompetence, and naked greed will be
with America and the world for a long time.....but even that is not the true
legacy of Karl Rove.
The gift that keeps on giving, the legacy that will play out for the rest of this
century, is something more insidious and more pervasive. Mr. Rove, in his role as
"The Architect" of Mr. Bush's semielectoral victories and the Republican Party's
shortlived domination of America, was more than anything else an advocate of a
particular philosophy of politics and governance. The core of that philosophy is
to win power at all costs. In a democracy, that means the creation of an electoral
majority, even a razor thin one. The easiest way to create such a majority is to
exploit the differences between the many social and cultural factions within
society. The cost of such exploitation is to erode the common social glue that
bonds factions into a society.
If he ever even gave the matter thought, that probably seemed a small cost to the
man who launched his career by sabotaging a competitor's fundraiser with stolen
stationery, who bugged his own office to discredit a competing campaign, and who
considered rumors of miscegenation and lesbianism fair campaign tactics. It is an
enormous cost, thoughand as the interest compounds, the price may ultimately
include the continued existence of America as a nation.
Consider this: when we refer to Britain, Japan, or France as "nations", we are
speaking of entities with identities shaped by millennia of shared language,
ethnicity, cultural and religious values. When we refer to the United States of
America as a "nation", we refer to two centuries of largely democratic governance
based on certain legal and philosophic principles. There is no "American People"
that exists independent of that shared philosophy of governance. It is the glue
that binds us as a nation. From the very beginning, this was a nation of many
beliefs, many languages, many different colors of eye and skin.
Where Karl Rove's "winning is everything" philosophy of politics leaves off,
George Bush's "winner take all" philosophy of governance picks up. Taken
collectively, these two philosophies have undermined every single aspect of the
social glue that binds America into a nation. Where Mr. Rove has undermined
America's sense of community by dividing the electorate on every single issue
available, Mr. Bush has undermined America's credibility and selfidentity as a
nation by ruling as the very thing this nation was created to oppose: an
unaccountable despot who holds himself and his advisers above the law. In this as
well, Mr. Rove is culpable. The political atmosphere he has helped to engender has
resulted in an opposition party so weakened and fearful of political backlash as
to be incapable of carrying out their constitutional duties. As a consequence,
patently impeachable offenses go unchallenged and a morally indefensible war
bloodily grinds on.
As we collectively lurch into yet another season of presidential campaigns, there
is remarkably little hope that the damage done by Bush and Rove is likely to be
undone. Republican presidential candidates differ only in detail of how they would
perpetuate Bush's legacy of paranoia, corruption, and brutality. The democrat
favored by corporatist media, Hillary Clinton, is essentially Joe Lieberman in a
pantsuita cryptorepublican who's utterances on foreign and domestic policy
promise the continued erosion of American democracy and American credibility.
Assuming this pivotal historic moment passes without significant change, what can
we expect in another generation? This country is going to undergo some enormous
stresses. Global Climate Change is real, so is Peak Oil. It will become
increasingly expensive to maintain the lavish lifestyles Americans have come to
regard as a birthright. Our status as a debtor nation and as a nation of debtors
will not go away in a generation, nor will the countries we compete with (and
borrow money from) conveniently stop growing or lose the desire to also be
lavishly wealthy. Regardless who next occupies the White House or how quickly U.S.
forces are drawn down in Iraq, the United States will be paying militarily for
George Bush's decisions for decades to come. the current debate over a resumed
military draft is a preview of the inevitable.
The America of the Twentieth Century faced the equal of all these challenges and
prevailed. But that was the America celebrated in WWII movies, the archtypic
America where the infantry squad (or sub crew or bomber crew or whatever) included
a hick kid from Texas, a notsohick kid from California, and an assortment of
Jews, ItalianAmerican, secondgeneration poles and (in the later movies) African
Americans. The America of the TwentyFirst Century may not be so lucky. We've got
all the same ethnic/cultural stereotypes, as well as few new ones (the squad now
includes a few gays, Arabs, and wiccans, among others). But the sense that we're
all Americans and "all in this together" has been sadly, badly eroded, thanks to
politics of division and governance by fiat. When the bill comes due on the
Bush/Rove Era, paying it will require enormous shared sacrifice and shared sense
of purpose. Don't be too surprised when the Republic of California, the Free State
of New Hampshire, and the Hawaiian Nation decide they have priorities of their
own.