“The cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had VERY long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
Over a decade later, it is now difficult to recall the level of disunity and uncertainty in the United States preceding the Gulf War. After the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, President George Bush (41) declared, “this aggression shall not stand.” The country was not so sure.
It took Bush the entire six months from the invasion to the build up of forces in the Middle East to swing US public and world opinion behind him. The Democratic leadership argued strongly against armed invasion and wanted to rely only on sanctions to persuade Saddam Hussein to give up the land and oil wealth he had conquered. Then Senator Al Gore was one of the few Democratic Senators who sided with the Republican Administration. In the final Congressional vote authorizing military action, not a single member of the Congressional Democratic leadership supported George Bush.
The Democratic Party and much of the country were still in the lingering grip of the Vietnam syndrome: the extreme reluctance to employ military force and the belief that the United States could not not do so effectively. Robert McNamera, the Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, proved how it was possible to be extremely intelligent and radically wrong in two separate decades by testified before Congress that thousands of American soldiers would be lost in an armed conflict with Iraq.
It would have been possible for Senator George Mitchell, the Democratic leader in the Senate, with a 56 to 44 Democrat to Republican margin, to marshal the necessary 40 votes to prevent the authorizing legislation from ever reaching the Senate floor for an up or down vote. However, cooperation from the Democrats could not be purchased in the coin of appeals to patriotism. The Congressional leadership insisted on forcing Bush to jettison his “No New Taxes” pledge and agree to a tax increase. In exchange for acquiescence to Bush’s military effort against Iraq, the Democrats received a tax increase, the ability to rightly accuse Bush of breaking a campaign pledge, and the position to criticize Bush’s military actions if they failed. Bush won the Gulf War and then lost the election. A recession and the loss of Bush’s credibility due to the revocation of a pledge both contributed to the election defeat.
Republicans remember the smiling and soft-spoken George Mitchell who managed to politically corner a president without Democrats ever paying a political price for the lack of support for the war. They see reflections of Mitchell’s smile in the demure smirk of current Senate leader Tom Daschle and are determined to not make the same mistake the first George Bush made.
Senator Daschle thought he had President George Bush(43) in a politcal box. If there is no economic stimulus package and if the economy continues to worsen, Republicans would be blamed. The House passed a stimulus heavy in tax cuts. The Senate wants one heavier in spending and extension of unemployment benefits. Given the narrow majorities in both Congressional Houses, any stimulus package would have to be a compromise. Perhaps, over eager for a package, any package, so it would not seem that Republicans were insensitive to the economic situation, Republicans kept steadily moving toward the Democrats. This despite an NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, that shows by a 50 to 43 percent margin, Americans preferred tax cut to extended benefits and increases in public works. Daschle, however, needed the issue and refused to compromise.
Bush managed to garner enough Democratic Senators to sign on to a compromise package acceptable to the House and the Senate. If Daschle permitted the package to be brought to the floor, it would pass in the Senate. In a desperate effort to keep a campaign issue, Daschle scuttled the stimulus package by not allowing a vote.
Perhaps the economy is picking up by itself. Given the rate reductions by the Federal Reserve and the drastic drop in energy prices, no stimulus will be needed. Nonetheless, Daschle is walking away from $30 billion of additional unemployment benefits and tax rebates for those who make less than $31,200 a year. But, it seems that it is more important to get Democrats elected in the 2002 Congressional elections.
The smile is still there, but the cat has disappeared.
Celsius 233
Sunday, December 23rd, 2001It is more than a little unfair to reach back and judge a science fiction novel armed with the perspective of almost half-a-century. Tough, life is rarely fair. In 1953, Ray Bradbury published one of his most famous novels, Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s view of the future was radically wrong, except in two important ways.
The fundamental theme of the book is censorship in the not too distant future. Books are outlawed and in Bradbury’s world the role of firemen is not to prevent fires but to incinerate books. Firemen implement the censorship by rushing, sirens screeching, to houses where books are secretly hidden; piling the books up on the front lawns; igniting the piles; and watching as the pages crumble to ashes. Whole houses are sometimes burned to make sure that no books escape detection. The title refers to the temperature at which paper spontaneously bursts into flames.
The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman who develops a conscience. On one book burning expedition, a woman decides to sit with her books while flames consume them all. Montag wonders what could be so important about books that someone would elect to die for them. This, and conversations with an insightful teenage girl next-door, convince Montag to steal books during a book-burning episode and actually read them. This decision radically redirects Montag’s future, eventually pitting him against the forces of censorship.
The modern reader is, of course, struck by many incongruities between the Bradbury’s future and the one that we know. Smoking is popular, cars fly down the road at incredible speeds unobstructed by traffic jams, most women stay at home while their husbands go to work, and nuclear war is relatively common. These are the sorts of simple extrapolations one might have glibly made in the early 1950s. Simple extrapolations of social or even technological trends are rarely correct. There are too many feedback mechanisms.
However, Bradbury accurately foresaw two important cultural phenomena. First, even over fifty years, we would not be able to switch away from the Fahrenheit to Celsius temperature scales. People, at least in the United States, still think in terms of Fahrenheit; and given American stubbornness, this is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. One might have expected a future switch to a more rational temperature scale. The book could have been named Celsius 233.
More importantly, Bradbury accurately foresaw that many will be distracted beyond consciousness by trifling activities. Some are totally occupied, but not active; busy while accomplishing anything. The rapid increase of mind-occupying distractions keeps people from reading and serious thought. The action on Bradbury’s wall-sized televisions substitute for lived lives, much a present day video games become addictive and time consuming. People are pummeled with so much visual and audio information or useless data, that it is impossible to sort out ideas.
As Bradbury explains:
Bradbury believes as people are weaned from the disciplines of attention, thought, and patience required to read, that books would first loose currency and ultimately be thought dangerous and banned. In truth, if a society grows so preoccupied that it avoids the serious questions posed by serious books, there would probably be little reason to bother outlawing books. They would fall into disuse spontaneously.
If the popularity of Amazon.com is any indication, despite the growth in distractions, there still seems to be enough time for reading books; well, at least for buying them.
It may have been unfair to judge Fahrenheit 451 too harshly, but unlike many novels, people still read it half-a-century later. This alone should be sufficient consolation to Bradbury.
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