This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 6:31 pm and is filed under News, Authority, Extremism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Heretical Thought for a Conservative
Last week on NPR’s All Things Considered, a conservative commentator said some amazing things. Listening to his commentary, I was surprised how easily he had simply swallowed the prevailing conservative stories of his (and my) youth. If you doubt the power of our narratives about ourselves, consider that it took this man 27 years to question his approach–the even question his approach.
He was embarrassed by Jimmy Carter’s words during the Iran hostage crisis. He was soothed by Ronald Reagan’s victory speech. He accepted the simplistic notions of weak Democrats and strong Republicans. It took years after 9/11 for him to see George Bush as shameful, weak, and incompetant.
Rather than saying, “No kidding, dumbass,” I offer his astonishing turnaround as an example of what might happen if we take a nonviolent approach to telling conservatives why we make the choices we do.
As President Bush marched the country toward war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President, for whom I voted twice, has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this, not under a Republican President. Not after Reagan.
I turn 40 next month. Middle age at last. A time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. What I did not expect was to live to see the limits and finitude of American power revealed so painfully. I did not expect Vietnam.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative: that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word; that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot; that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
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