When I started writing “2005” on things last week, I had a surreal feeling: this isn’t the future I was expecting.
The turn of the 21st century was such a big deal for my generation, a longed-for milestone. When I was a child in the fifties, we thought that by the year 2000 people would be flying around in personal aircraft like the Jetsons. Instead of eating ordinary food, we’d push a button to instantly deliver pills and pastes in any flavor we desired. There would be so many labor-saving devices, we might not need our legs anymore, evolving into big brains perched on tiny bodies, able to commune without talking. War would be obsolete. By now, of course, the fifties’ imagined future has given way to something simultaneously more humane (organic food and alternative energy) and more terrifying (war for oil, government-sanctioned torture).
Here we are, halfway through the century’s first decade and we still don’t know what to call it. My husband suggests “The Oh-Ohs,” because we’ve scared ourselves senseless. The “War on Terror” has been devised to bully us into compliance, and mostly, our reptile brains are in charge.
Consider the Senate confirmation hearing for Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales. I listened to quite a bit of Gonzales’ testimony on Thursday. As a result, I now have an infallible way to tell when the nominee is lying: if he prefaces his comment with “quite frankly,” or “to be honest,” we can be certain that what we are hearing has no more than a passing acquaintance with the truth. As far as substance goes, all of Gonzales’ replies that were not prefaced with these pseudo-frank phrases were versions of “I don’t recall,” “I would need to review that before answering,” or “I don’t know.” The most nauseating comments came from Republican senators who put carefully crafted apologetics into Gonzales’ mouth, like this random sample from Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama:
SEN. SESSIONS: Judge Gonzales, I’d like to get a few things straight here. I spent 15 years in the Department of Justice and several years as an attorney general of the state of Alabama and I have some appreciation for the different roles that are involved here. You are counsel to the president of the United States, is that correct?
MR. GONZALES: That is correct, Senator.
SEN. SESSIONS: You didn’t supervise the Department of Justice, did you?
MR. GONZALES: That is correct, Senator.
SEN. SESSIONS: You were not senatorially confirmed.
MR. GONZALES: That is correct, Senator.
And so on and on and on, with the aim of positioning Gonzales as anything but responsible for the repulsive pro-torture memos we know he prepared for the president.
Senators Kennedy and Leahy asked some real questions, but even their testimony seemed to treat Gonzales’ comfirmation as a foregone conclusion. Democrats offered as many verbal obeisances as Republicans, and committee chair Arlen Spector seemed terrified he might lose the job he almost didn’t get in the first place. All of this gave the hearings a formal, symbolic character, something like a Noh play or Chinese opera. Everyone observes decorum; the stock characters behave exactly as anticipated; and the conclusion is entirely foregone.
What happens to a society in which our public servants have a bad case of the Oh-Ohs? In which truth ceases to matter? In which, by participating in the pretense that this stylized enactment is the authentic practice of democracy, we normalize evil? What will be confirmed along with Alberto Gonzales — as it was with John Ashcroft — is deception, torture, and cruel indifference to moral and ethical principles, and many of our elected representatives seem too scared to notice.
Thank goodness not everyone is scared senseless. All hail California Senator Barbara Boxer and Ohio Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who actually had the chutzpah to stand up and offer the second congressional challenge to an election since the current rules for counting electoral votes were passed in 1877! “This is my opening shot to be able to focus the light of truth on these terrible problems in the electoral system,” said Boxer. “While we have men and women dying to bring democracy abroad, we’ve got to make it the best it can be here at home, and that’s why I’m doing this….In the coming months I will present a national proposal to ensure transparency and accountability in our voting process.”
So what should we expect of the 21st century now? I find great consolation in the fact that our expectations are bound to be as far from the actuality as they were in the fifties. Not knowing seems by far the best position, not least because it suggests that our own actions matter: we can help shape the future. Remember that scene in \Fahrenheit 9/11\ when no senator would step up and contest the much closer, highly flawed electoral contest between Bush and Gore? Well, it seems at least one senator has grown a spine. They say that courage is contagious. Oh-oh.
If you live in either one’s district, you can thank Barbara Boxer here and Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones here.