A Study in the Rhetoric of George W. Bush
--This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of
Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May
10, 2007
Mark Danner, TomDispatch, June 2, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070601_a_study_in_bushs_rhetoric/
When my assistant greeted me, a number of weeks ago, with the news that
I had been invited to deliver the commencement address to the Department
of Rhetoric, I thought it was a bad joke. There is a sense, I'm afraid,
that being invited to deliver The Speech to students of rhetoric is akin
to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star: Whatever
prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by
performance anxietythe suspicion that your efforts, however
enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional
standards. A daunting prospect.
The only course, in both cases, is surely to plunge boldly ahead. And
that means, first of all, saluting the family members gathered here, and
in particular you, the parents.
Dear parents, I welcome you today to your moment of triumph. For if a
higher education is about acquiring the skills and knowledge that allow
one to comprehend and thereby get on in the world - and I use "get on in
the world" in the very broadest sense - well then, oh esteemed parents,
it is your children, not those boringly practical business majors and
pre-meds your sanctimonious friends have sired, who have chosen with
unerring grace and wisdom the course of study that will best guide them
in this very strange polity of ours. For our age, ladies and gentlemen,
is truly the Age of Rhetoric.
Now I turn to you, my proper audience, the graduating students of the
Department of Rhetoric of 2007, and I salute you most heartily. In
making the choice you have, you confirmed that you understand something
intrinsic, something indeed ... intimate about this age we live in.
Perhaps that should not surprise us. After all, you have spent your
entire undergraduate years during time of war - and what a very strange
wartime it has been.
When most of you arrived on this campus, in September 2003, the
rhetorical construction known as the War on Terror was already two years
old and that very real war to which it gave painful birth, the war in
Iraq, was just hitting its half-year mark. Indeed, the Iraq war had
already ended once, in that great victory scene on the USS Abraham
Lincoln off the coast of San Diego, where the president, clad jauntily
in a flight suit, had swaggered across the flight deck and, beneath a
banner famously marked "Mission Accomplished," had declared: "Major
combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed."
Of the great body of rich material encompassed by my theme today -
"Words in a Time of War" - surely those words of George W. Bush must
stand as among the era's most famous, and most rhetorically unstable.
For whatever they may have meant when the president uttered them on that
sunny afternoon of May 1, 2003, they mean something quite different
today, almost exactly four years later. The president has lost control
of those words, as of so much else.
At first glance, the grand spectacle of May 1, 2003, fits handily into
the history of the pageantries of power. Indeed, with its banners and
ranks of cheering, uniformed extras gathered on the stage of that vast
aircraft carrier - a stage, by the way, that had to be turned in a
complicated maneuver so that the skyline of San Diego, a few miles off,
would not be glimpsed by the television audience - the event and its
staging would have been quite familiar to, and no doubt envied by, the
late Leni Riefenstahl (who, as filmmaker to the Nazis, had no giant
aircraft carriers to play with). Though vast and impressive, the May 1
extravaganza was a propaganda event of a traditional sort, intended to
bind the country together in a second precise image of victory - the
first being the pulling down of Saddam's statue in Baghdad, also staged
- an image that would fit neatly into campaign ads for the 2004
election. The president was the star, the sailors and airmen and their
enormous dreadnought props in his extravaganza.
However ambitiously conceived, these were all very traditional
techniques, familiar to any fan of Riefenstahl's famous film spectacular
of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. As trained
rhetoricians, however, you may well have noticed something different
here, a slightly familiar flavor just beneath the surface. If ever there
was a need for a "disciplined grasp" of the "symbolic and institutional
dimensions of discourse" - as your Rhetoric Department's website puts it
- surely it is now. For we have today an administration that not only is
radical - unprecedentedly so - in its attitudes toward rhetoric and
reality, toward words and things, but is willing, to our great benefit,
to state this attitude clearly.
I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put
forward by the proverbial "unnamed Administration official" and
published in the New York Times Magazine by the fine journalist Ron
Suskind in October 2004. Here, in Suskind's recounting, is what that
"unnamed Administration official" told him:
"The aide said that guys like me were in what we call the reality-based
community,' which he defined as people who believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and
murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut
me off. That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he
continued. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you
will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors
... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' "
I must admit to you that I love that quotation; indeed, with your
permission, I would like hereby to nominate it for inscription over the
door of the Rhetoric Department, akin to Dante's welcome above the gates
of Hell, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
Both admonitions have an admirable bluntness. These words from "Bush's
Brain" - for the unnamed official speaking to Suskind seems to have been
none other than the selfsame architect of the aircraft-carrier moment,
Karl Rove, who bears that pungent nickname - these words sketch out with
breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines
reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows
meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the "reality-based
community" - those such as we - are figures a mite pathetic, for we have
failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has
made reality its bitch.
Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect
for truth; or perhaps it should be "truth" - in quotation marks - for,
when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea
of fidelity in describing it? What faith, after all, is owed to the
bitch that is wholly in your power, a creature of your own creation?
Of course I should not say "those such as we" here, for you, dear
graduates of the Rhetoric Department of 2007, you are somewhere else
altogether. This is, after all, old hat to you; the line of thinking you
imbibe with your daily study, for it is present in striking fashion in
Foucault and many other intellectual titans of these last decades -
though even they might have been nonplussed to find it so crisply
expressed by a finely tailored man sitting in the White House. Though we
in the "reality-based community" may just now be discovering it, you
have known for years the presiding truth of our age, which is that the
object has become subject and we have a fanatical follower of Foucault
in the Oval Office. Graduates, let me say it plainly and
incontrovertibly: George W. Bush is the first Rhetoric-Major President.
The Dirtied Face of Power
I overstate perhaps, but only for a bit of - I hope - permitted
rhetorical pleasure. Let us gaze a moment at the signposts of the
history of the present age. In January 2001, the Rhetoric Major
President came to power after a savage and unprecedented electoral
battle that was decided not by the ballots of American voters - for of
these he had 540,000 fewer than his Democrat rival - but by the votes of
Supreme Court justices, where Republicans prevailed 5 to 4, making
George W. Bush the first president in more than a century to come to the
White House with fewer votes than those of his opponent.
In this singular condition, and with a Senate precisely divided between
parties, President Bush proceeded to behave as if he had won an
overwhelming electoral victory, demanding tax cuts greater and more
regressive than those he had outlined in the campaign. And despite what
would seem to have been debilitating political weakness, the president
shortly achieved this first success in "creating his own reality." To
act as if he had overwhelming political power would mean he had
overwhelming political power.
This, however, was only the overture of the vast symphonic work to come,
a work heralded by the huge, clanging, echoing cacophony of 9/11. We are
so embedded in its age that it is easy to forget the stark, overwhelming
shock of it: 19 young men with box-cutters seized enormous
transcontinental airliners and brought those towers down. In an age in
which we have become accustomed to two, three, four, five suicide
attacks in a single day - often these multiple attacks from Baghdad
don't even make the front pages of our papers - it is easy to forget the
blunt, scathing shock of it, the impossible image of the second airliner
disappearing into the great office tower, almost weirdly absorbed by it,
and emerging, transformed into a great yellow and red blossom of flame,
on the other side; and then, half an hour later, the astonishing
flowering collapse of the hundred-story structure, transforming itself,
in a dozen seconds, from mighty tower to great plume of heaven-reaching
white smoke.
The image remains, will always remain, with us; for truly the weapon
that day was not box-cutters in the hands of 19 young men, nor airliners
at their command. The weapon that day was the television set. It was the
television set that made the image possible, and inextinguishable. If
terror is first of all a way of talking - the propaganda of the deed,
indeed - then that day the television was the indispensable conveyor of
the conversation: the recruitment poster for fundamentalism, the only
symbolic arena in which America's weakness and vulnerability could be
dramatized on an adequate scale. Terror - as Menachem Begin, the late
Israeli prime minister and the successful terrorist who drove the
British from Mandate Palestine, remarked in his memoirs - terror is
about destroying the prestige of the imperial regime; terror is about
"dirtying the face of power."
President Bush and his lieutenants surely realized this and it is in
that knowledge, I believe, that we can find the beginning of the answer
to one of the more intriguing puzzles of these last few years: What
exactly lay at the root of the almost fanatical determination of
administration officials to attack and occupy Iraq? It was, obviously,
the classic "over-determined" decision, a tangle of fear, in the form of
those infamous weapons of mass destruction; of imperial ambition, in the
form of the neoconservative project to "remake the Middle East"; and of
realpolitik, in the form of the "vital interest" of securing the
industrial world's oil supplies.
In the beginning, though, was the felt need on the part of our nation's
leaders, men and women so worshipful of the idea of power and its
ability to remake reality itself, to restore the nation's prestige, to
wipe clean that dirtied face. Henry Kissinger, a confidant of the
president, when asked by Bush's speechwriter why he had supported the
Iraq war, responded: "Because Afghanistan was not enough." The radical
Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. "And we need to humiliate
them." In other words, the presiding image of The War on Terror - the
burning towers collapsing on the television screen - had to be
supplanted by another, the image of American tanks rumbling proudly
through a vanquished Arab capital. It is no accident that Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, at the first "war cabinet" meeting at Camp
David the Saturday after the 9/11 attacks, fretted over the "lack of
targets" in Afghanistan and wondered whether we "shouldn't do Iraq
first." He wanted to see those advancing tanks marching across our
television screens, and soon.
In the end, of course, the enemy preferred not to fight with tanks,
though they were perfectly happy to have us do so, the better to destroy
these multi-million-dollar anachronisms with so-called IEDs - improvised
explosive devices - worth a few hundred bucks apiece. This is called
asymmetrical warfare, and one should note here with some astonishment
how successful it has been these last half-dozen years. In the post-Cold
War world, after all, as one neoconservative theorist explained shortly
after 9/11, the United States was enjoying a rare "unipolar moment." It
deployed the greatest military and economic power the world has ever
seen. It spent more on its weapons, its Army, Navy and Air Force, than
the rest of the world combined.
It was the assumption of this so-called preponderance that lay behind
the philosophy of power enunciated by Bush's Brain and that led to an
attitude toward international law and alliances that is, in my view,
quite unprecedented in American history. That radical attitude is
brilliantly encapsulated in a single sentence drawn from the National
Security Strategy of the United States of 2003: "Our strength as a
nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a
strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and
terrorism." Let me repeat that little troika of "weapons of the weak":
international fora (meaning the United Nations and like institutions),
judicial processes (meaning courts, domestic and international), and ...
terrorism. This strange gathering, put forward by the government of the
United States, stems from the idea that power is, in fact, everything.
In such a world, courts - indeed, law itself - can only limit the power
of the most powerful state. Wielding preponderant power, what need has
it for law? The latter must be, by definition, a weapon of the weak. The
most powerful state, after all, makes reality.
Asymmetric Warfare and Dumb Luck
Now, here's an astonishing fact: Fewer than half a dozen years into this
"unipolar moment," the greatest military power in the history of the
world stands on the brink of defeat in Iraq. Its vastly expensive and
all-powerful military has been humbled by a congeries of secret
organizations fighting mainly by means of suicide vests, car bombs and
improvised explosive devices - all of them cheap, simple and effective,
indeed so effective that these techniques now comprise a kind of
ready-made insurgency kit freely available on the Internet and spreading
in popularity around the world, most obviously to Afghanistan, that land
of few targets.
As I stand here, one of our two major political parties advocates the
withdrawal - gradual, or otherwise - of American combat forces from Iraq
and many in the other party are feeling the increasing urge to go along.
As for the Bush administration's broader War on Terror, as the State
Department detailed recently in its annual report on the subject, the
number of terrorist attacks worldwide has never been higher, nor more
effective. True, al-Qaida has not attacked again within the United
States. They do not need to. They are alive and flourishing. Indeed, it
might even be said that they are winning. For their goal, despite the
rhetoric of the Bush administration, was not simply to kill Americans
but, by challenging the United States in this spectacular fashion, to
recruit great numbers to their cause and to move their insurgency into
the heart of the Middle East. And all these things they have done.
How could such a thing have happened? In their choice of enemy, one
might say that the terrorists of al-Qaida had a great deal of dumb luck,
for they attacked a country run by an administration that had a radical
conception of the potency of power. At the heart of the principle of
asymmetric warfare - al-Qaida's kind of warfare - is the notion of using
your opponents' power against him. How does a small group of insurgents
without an army, or even heavy weapons, defeat the greatest conventional
military force the world has ever known? How do you defeat such an army
if you don't have an army? Well, you borrow your enemy's. And this is
precisely what al-Qaida did. Using the classic strategy of provocation,
the group tried to tempt the superpower into its adopted homeland. The
original strategy behind the 9/11 attacks - apart from humbling the
superpower and creating the greatest recruiting poster the world had
ever seen - was to lure the United States into a ground war in
Afghanistan, where the one remaining superpower (like the Soviet Union
before it) was to be trapped, stranded and destroyed. It was to prepare
for this war that Osama bin Laden arranged for the assassination, two
days before 9/11 - via bombs secreted in the video cameras of two
terrorists posing as reporters - of the Afghan Northern Alliance leader,
Ahmed Shah Massood, who would have been the United States' most powerful
ally.
Well aware of the Soviets' Afghanistan debacle - after all, the U.S. had
supplied most of the weapons that defeated the Soviets there - the Bush
administration tried to avoid a quagmire by sending plenty of air
support, lots of cash and, most important, very few troops, relying
instead on its Afghan allies. But if bin Laden was disappointed in this,
he would soon have a far more valuable gift: the invasion of Iraq, a
country that, unlike Afghanistan, was at the heart of the Middle East
and central to Arab concerns, and, what's more, a nation that sat
squarely on the critical Sunni-Shia divide, a potential ignition switch
for al-Qaida's great dream of a regional civil war. It is on that
precipice that we find ourselves teetering today.
Critical to this strange and unlikely history were the administration's
peculiar ideas about power and its relation to reality - and beneath
that a familiar imperial attitude, if put forward in a strikingly crude
and harsh form: "We're an empire now and when we act we create our own
reality." Power, untrammeled by law or custom; power, unlimited by the
so-called weapons of the weak, be they international institutions,
courts or terrorism - power can remake reality. It is no accident that
one of Karl Rove's heroes is President William McKinley, who stood at
the apex of America's first imperial moment, and led the country into a
glorious colonial adventure in the Philippines that was also meant to be
the military equivalent of a stroll in the park and that, in any event,
led to several years of bloody insurgency - an insurgency, it bears
noticing, that was only finally put down with the help of the extensive
use of torture, most notably water-boarding, which has made its
reappearance in the imperial battles of our own times.
If we are an empire now, as Mr. Rove says, perhaps we should add, as he
might not, that we are also a democracy, and therein, rhetoric graduates
of 2007, lies the rub. A democratic empire, as even the Athenians
discovered, is an odd beast, like one of those mythological creatures
born equally of lion and bird, or man and horse. If one longs to invade
Iraq to restore the empire's prestige, one must convince the democracy's
people of the necessity of such a step. Herein lies the pathos of the
famous weapons-of-mass-destruction issue, which has become a kind of
synecdoche for the entire lying mess of the past few years. The center
stage of our public life is now dominated by a simple melodrama: Bush
wanted to invade Iraq; Bush told Americans that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction; Iraq did not have such weapons. Therefore Bush lied, and
the war was born of lies and deception.
I hesitate to use that most overused of rhetorical terms - irony - to
describe the emergence of this narrative at the center of our national
life, but nonetheless, and with apologies: It is ironic. The fact is
that officials of the Bush administration did believe there were weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq, though they vastly exaggerated the evidence
they had to prove it and, even more, the threat that those weapons might
have posed, had they been there. In doing this, the officials believed
themselves to be "framing a guilty man"; that is, like cops planting a
bit of evidence in the murderer's car, they believed their underlying
case was true; they just needed to dramatize it a bit to make it clear
and convincing to the public. What matter, once the tanks were rumbling
through Baghdad and the war was won? Weapons would be found, surely; and
if only a few were found, who would care? By then, the United States
military would have created a new reality.
I have often had a daydream about this. I see a solitary Army private -
a cook perhaps, or a quartermaster - breaking the padlock on some
forgotten warehouse on an Iraqi military base, poking about and finding
a few hundred, even a few thousand, old artillery shells, leaking
chemicals. These shells - forgotten, unusable - might have dated from
the time of the first Gulf War, when Iraq unquestionably possessed
chemical munitions. (Indeed, in the 1980s, the United States had
supplied targeting intelligence that helped the Iraqis use them
effectively against the Iranians.) And though now they had been
forgotten, leaking, unusable, still they would indeed be weapons of mass
destruction - to use the misleading and absurd construction that has
headlined our age - and my solitary cook or quartermaster would be a
hero, for he would have, all unwittingly, "proved" the case.
My daydream could easily have come to pass. Why not? It is nigh unto
miraculous that the Iraqi regime, even with the help of the United
Nations, managed so thoroughly to destroy or remove its once existing
stockpile. And if my private had found those leaky old shells, what
would have been changed thereby? Yes, the administration could have
pointed to them in triumph and trumpeted the proven character of
Saddam's threat. So much less embarrassing than the "weapons of mass
destruction program related activities" that the administration still
doggedly asserts were "discovered." But, in fact, the underlying
calculus would have remained: that, in the months leading up to the war,
the administration relentlessly exaggerated the threat Saddam posed to
the United States and relentlessly understated the risk the United
States would run in invading and occupying Iraq. And it would have
remained true and incontestable that - as the quaintly fact-bound
British foreign secretary put it eight months before the war, in a
secret British cabinet meeting made famous by the so-called Downing
Street Memo - "the case [for attacking Iraq] was thin. Saddam was not
threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of
Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Which is to say, the weapons were a rhetorical prop and, satisfying as
it has been to see the administration beaten about the head with that
prop, we forget this underlying fact at our peril. The issue was never
whether the weapons were there or not; indeed, had the weapons really
been the issue, why could the administration not let the U.N. inspectors
take the time to find them (as, of course, they never would have)? The
administration needed, wanted, had to have, the Iraq war. The weapons
were but a symbol, the necessary casus belli, what Hitchcock called the
maguffin - that glowing, mysterious object in the suitcase in Quentin
Tarantino's Pulp Fiction: that is, a satisfyingly concrete object on
which to fasten a rhetorical or narrative end, in this case a war to
restore American prestige, project its power, remake the Middle East.
The famous weapons were chosen to play this leading role for
"bureaucratic reasons," as Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of
defense and until quite recently the unhappy president of the World
Bank, once remarked to a lucky journalist. Had a handful of those
weapons been found, the underlying truth would have remained: Saddam
posed nowhere remotely near the threat to the United States that would
have justified running the enormous metaphysical risk that a war of
choice with Iraq posed. Of course, when you are focused on magical
phrases like "preponderant power" and "the unipolar moment," matters
like numbers of troops at your disposal - and the simple fact that the
United States had too few to sustain a long-term occupation of a country
the size of Iraq - must seem mundane indeed.
Imperial Words and the Reality-Based Universe
I must apologize to you, Rhetoric Class of 2007. Ineluctably,
uncontrollably, I find myself slipping back into the dull and
unimaginative language of the reality-based community. It must grate a
bit on your ears. After all, we live in a world in which the
presumption that we were misled into war, that the Bush officials knew
there were no weapons and touted them anyway, has supplanted the
glowing, magical image of the weapons themselves. It is a presumption of
great use to those regretful souls who once backed the war so fervently,
not least a number of Democratic politicians we all could name, as well
as many of my friends in the so-called liberal punditocracy who now need
a suitable excuse for their own rashness, gullibility and stupidity.
For this, Bush's mendacity seems perfectly sized and ready to hand.
There is, however, full enough of that mendacity, without artificially
adding to the stockpile. Indeed, all around us we've been hearing these
last many months the sound of ice breaking, as the accumulated frozen
scandals of this administration slowly crack open to reveal their queasy
secrets. And yet the problem, of course, is that they are not secrets at
all: One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are
doomed to be revealed - and to remain stinking there before us,
unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.
If this Age of Rhetoric has a tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the
frozen scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and revealed, in a
never-ending torture familiar to the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor
half-eaten liver. A full three years ago, the photographs from Abu
Ghraib were broadcast by CBS on 60 Minutes II and published by Seymour
Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far back, I wrote a book entitled
Torture and Truth, made up largely of Bush administration documents that
detailed the decision to use "extreme interrogation techniques" or - in
the First President of Rhetoric's phrase - "an alternative set of
procedures" on prisoners in the War on Terror.
He used this phrase last September in a White House speech kicking off
the 2006 midterm election campaign, at a time when accusing the
Democrats of evidencing a continued softness on terror - and a
lamentable unwillingness to show the needed harshness in "interrogating
terrorists" - seemed a winning electoral strategy. And indeed Democrats
seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not to filibuster the
Military Commissions Act of last October, which arguably made many of
these "alternative sets of procedures" explicitly legal. And Democrats
did win both houses of Congress, a victory perhaps owed in part to their
refusal to block Bush's interrogation law. Who can say? What we can say
is that if torture today remains a "scandal," a "crisis," it is a crisis
in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are
crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.
Perhaps the commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric at the
University of California at Berkeley is not the worst of places to call
for a halt to this spinning merry-go-round. I know it will brand me
forever a member of the reality-based community if I suggest that the
one invaluable service the new Democratic Congress can provide all
Americans is a clear accounting of how we came to find ourselves in this
present time of war: an authorized version, as it were, which is, I
know, the most pathetically retrograde of ideas.
This would require that people like Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld, and
many others be called before a select, bipartisan committee of Congress
to tell us what, in their view, really happened. I squirm with
embarrassment putting forward such a pathetically unsophisticated
notion, but failing at least the minimally authorized version that
Congress could provide, we will find ourselves forever striving - by
chasing down byways like the revelation of the identity of Valerie Plame,
or the question of whether or not George Tenet bolstered his slam-dunk
exclamation in the Oval Office with an accompanying Michael Jordan-like
leap - to understand how precisely decisions were made between Sept. 11,
2001, and the invasion of Iraq 18 months later.
Don't worry, though, Rhetoric graduates: such a proposal has about it
the dusty feel of past decades; it is as "reality-based" as can be and
we are unlikely to see it in our time. What we are likely to see is the
ongoing collapse of our first Rhetoric-Major President, who, with fewer
than one American in three now willing to say they approve of the job he
is doing, is seeing his power ebb by the day. Tempting as it is, I will
urge you not to draw too many overarching conclusions from his fate. He
has had, after all, a very long run - and I say this with the wonder
that perhaps can only come from having covered both the 2000 and 2004
election campaigns, from Florida, and the Iraq war.
I last visited that war in December, when Baghdad was cold and gray and
I spent a good deal of time drawing black X's through the sources listed
in my address book, finding them, one after another, either departed or
dead. Baghdad seemed a sad and empty place, with even its customary
traffic jams gone, and the periodic, resonating explosions attracting
barely glances from those few Iraqis to be found on the streets.
How, in these "Words in a Time of War," can I convey to you the reality
of that place at this time? Let me read to you a bit of an account from
a young Iraqi woman of how that war has touched her and her family,
drawn from a newsroom blog. The words may be terrible and hard to bear,
but - for those of you who have made such a determined effort to learn
to read and understand - this is the most reality I could find to tell
you. This is what lies behind the headlines and the news reports and it
is as it is.
"We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew,
killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over.
...
"So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I. ...
"When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were.
From the waist down was all they could give us. We identified him by
the cell phone in his pants' pocket. If you want the rest, you will just
have to look for yourselves. We don't know what he looks like.'
"We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I
retched. With no more warning, we came to a clearing that was probably
an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with
large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for.
But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all
around were human bodies. On this side, complete bodies; on that side,
halves; and everywhere, body parts.
"We were asked what we were looking for. 'Upper half,' replied my
companion, for I was rendered speechless. 'Over there.' We looked for
our boy's broken body between tens of other boys' remains, with our bare
hands sifting them and turning them.
"Millennia later we found him, took both parts home, and began the
mourning ceremony."
The foregoing were words from an Iraqi family, who find themselves as
far as they can possibly be from the idea that, when they act, they
create their own reality - that they are, as Bush's Brain put it,
"history's actors." The voices you heard come from history's objects and
we must ponder who the subjects are, who exactly is acting upon them.
The car bomb that so changed their lives was not set by Americans;
indeed, young Americans even now are dying to prevent such things. I
have known a few of these young Americans. Perhaps you have as well;
perhaps they are in the circles of your family or of your friends. I
remember one of them, a young lieutenant, a beautiful young man with a
puffy, sleepy face, looking at me when I asked whether or not he was
scared when he went out on patrol - this was October 2003, as the
insurgency was exploding. I remember him smiling a moment and then
saying with evident pity for a reporter's lack of understanding: "This
is war. We shoot, they shoot. We shoot, they shoot. Some days they shoot
better than we do." He was patient in his answer, smiling sleepily in
his young beauty, and I could tell he regarded me as from another world,
a man who could never understand the world in which he lived. Three days
after our interview, an explosion near Fallujah killed him.
Contingency, accidents, the metaphysical ironies that seem to stitch
history together like a lopsided quilt - all these have no place in the
imperial vision. A perception of one's self as "history's actor" leaves
no place for them. But they exist and it is invariably others, closer to
the ground, who see them, know them, and suffer their consequences.
You have chosen a path that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that
you have studied and into the heart of those consequences. Of all
people, you have chosen to learn how to see the gaps and the loose
stitches and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this Age of
Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams. You
have made your study in a propitious time, oh graduates, and that bold
choice may well bring you pain, for you have devoted yourselves to
seeing what it is that stands before you. If clear sight were not so
painful, many more would elect to have it. Today, you do not conclude,
but begin: today you commence. My blessings upon you, and my gratitude
to you for training yourself to see. Reality, it seems, has caught up
with you.
Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two
decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War; Torture and Truth; and
The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is professor of
journalism at UC Berkeley and Henry R. Luce professor at Bard College.
His writing on Iraq and other subjects appears regularly in The New York
Review of Books. His work is archived at MarkDanner.com.
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