Awakening to those same old monsters under my bed

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Image by epSos.de via Flickr"][/caption]

Remember that feeling when Dubbya was President of being stuck in some nightmare that you just couldn't wake up from?  Things went from embarrassing to illegal to inhuman pretty quickly.  The world turned against the US and even Americans.  And, like a nightmare within a nightmare,  there just seemed to be no way out of the stupidity and hubris and criminality that was the US administration. This week while in Naples, Italy my daughter and I had one of those moments when the nightmare felt over, when a small glimmer of morning, a new dawn, as Ronald Reagan put it, shone bright. A kiosk was selling Barack Obama license plates and a Barack Obama poster.

Why do they have those," my daughter wondered. It's funny, but I think it's because people here are really proud that Americans have a President who is so smart, so much smarter than Bush.  I think it also means a lot to them that Americans seem to have put centuries of racism aside to elect a Black man too.  It seems hopeful, like maybe things can get better."

But when I woke up this morning, I got one of those creepy feelings in the pit of my stomach, like the nightmare I had about monsters under my bed wasn't just a nightmare.  That it was true. It started with Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin, as my nightmares often do. Last Sunday, Cheney' confessed to torture on ABC's "This Week."  "I was a big supporter of waterboarding" keeps playing out in my head, the smugness over a technique that Barack Obama and every other person except the Bushies has defined as TORTURE made the monsters under the bed rattle and roar. Days after Cheney's creepy confession to torture, the Obama Justice Department  ruled "no misconduct" in the torture memos.  So the Cheney Monster and its spawn will probably never be contained. Palin is somehow nearly as creepy.  I got a FB announcement from her this weekend  ( I and 12,000 other people are her Facebook "friends"): "Global warming?  More like a snow job"

Over the last few months, and even again today, very unsettling revelations have come to light about the “settled science” of man-made global warming... there’s been no significant warming since 1995; that the medieval period may have been warmer than today... The man-made global warming hysteria isn’t based on sound science, and the Obama administration’s energy policy isn’t based on sound economics. If the climategate revelations teach us anything, it’s that we need to cool down the rhetoric and fire up our common sense.

Faced with the nightmare of stupidity that is Palin, I try to retreat into my own little academic world, the ivory tower, although we all know where a lot of the Bushies went, the writers of torture memos, the defenders of unilateral wars. In my professional association's newsletter, there is good news.  The Obama administration has restored academic freedom.   According to the American Sociological Association, the State Department has ruled that South African Professor Adam Habib will finally be allowed to reapply for a visa.

In a major victory for academic freedom and civil liberties, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has signed orders that effectively end the exclusion of a prominent scholar who was barred from the United States by the Bush administration, and who the American Sociological Association (ASA) had invited to participate in the 2007 ASA Annual Meeting in New York. During the Bush administration, the U.S. government denied visas to dozens of foreign artists, scholars and writers — all critics of U.S. foreign policy and many of whom are Muslim — without explanation or on vague or unspecified national security grounds.

Oh good.  Academic freedom is restored.  Except I also get this news from my colleague Lynn Owens. A prominent scholar, author, and anarchist, Gabriel Kuhn, was denied a visa on the new Homeland Security online preauthorization system.  Given that Kuhn has traveled to the US many times before and was coming to speak at universities and bookstores about his two new books, he thought it was a mistake and applied again.  Kuhn was denied twice.  According to a statement made by my colleague,

We are losing the ability to move and act freely in this world, all under the guise of making us ‘safer.’ As someone who studies the role of travel, movement, and border crossings in the construction of social movements and political activism, I can tell you that programs like the unaccountable ‘No Fly List’ will have a serious effect on the possibilities... to build and maintain connections...”

Here's the thing about nightmares. You have to wake up from them.  You have to make sure the monsters aren't lurking under the bed, in the closet, behind the curtains.  That never happened.  The Bushies were never held accountable because the change Obama represented was rhetorical, symbolic- a souvenir license plate at a kiosk half way around the world.  Not unimportant.  But not the sort of change that would have ended torture and illegal wars, prosecuted those responsible, ensured freedom of thought and ideas and critique, and allowed us- Americans and all the people of the world, to finally have peaceful dreams.

Comments

[jake brodsky]

The first step to getting your argument taken seriously is to use names precisely and stop referring to broad generalizations that merely indicate you disagree with them.

We name even the monsters of history by the names they called themselves. Adolph Hitler is still called Adolph Hitler, not some cutesy or insulting substitute. If his deeds are terrible, George W. Bush's name alone will suffice to convey the evil you seem to feel he has perpetrated.

So, what evils has he committed? Arrogance? Stupidity? If that were a criteria for evil, we might as well vilify every president in US history. The no-fly list? Well, that might be an interesting case; but you fail to state exactly what we might do differently.

If you wish to be taken seriously Ms. Essig and perhaps win others to your way of thinking, you need to write more precisely. What you wrote here doesn't convey much except a vague feeling that President Obama wasn't everything you had hoped for.

[Laurie Essig]

Actually Mr Brodksy- the point was that Cheney and Bush were not held responsible for what were in fact evil acts- creating a war out of lies, torture, disregard for the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions and that because the Obama administration never swept the monsters away it means that they are still- in many ways- in charge. As for the evil that is Palin- a very likely presidential candidate in the next election- denying global warming to justify that greed that is big oil (that is her purpose) will kill more people than most dictators manage. You may not see the connections between these things- but the connection for me is there was never a clean break- and so all the "hope" that Obama might actually hold war criminals accountable for war crimes, reinstate freedom of dissent (yes, is is extremely IMPORTANT when critics of the US are denied visas), etc. is just that- a tacky license plate a world away.