Press Action ::: Hyperbole and Anti-Bush Activism

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Hyperbole and Anti-Bush Activism

Beyond Regime Change in November

By Mark Hand

Scott Ritter, the former United Nations weapons inspector, wants to know how the American people will respond to President Bush’s lies about Iraq.

“The president lied. What are you going to do about it?” Ritter asks rhetorically. “That is the question.”

Ritter tells his audience that “regime change” is the answer. And how does Ritter envision deposing the current regime in power in Washington Regime change must occur by voting for a Democrat at the ballot box in November.

Speaking at a Martin Luther King 75th birthday ceremony on the campus of the University of the District Columbia on Jan. 19, Ritter talked tough about the lies of President Bush and Congress. His suggested penalty for these crimes, however, was surprisingly lenient: replace the current Republican occupant of the White House with a Democratic one.

Is that it? Vote for a Democrat? There must be additional things the UDC students and others in attendance could do to curtail the thuggish behavior of Washington’s ruling class.

During his speech, Ritter also warned the audience that the United States faces the “gravest threat” in its history. “The threat comes from the president of the United States who resides in Washington, D.C.,” he explained. And what should we do about this? Once again, Ritter issued a call to vote Bush out of office in November.

The United States is facing the “gravest threat” in its history, according to Ritter, and all that’s required of us is to vote for a Democrat 10 months from now?

To his credit, Ritter didn’t just blame the Bush administration for America’s extremely reckless foreign policy. There is plenty of blame to go around, he argued. “The Congress is culpable” because it has neglected to force the president to account for his actions. “They abrogated their constitutional responsibility,” Ritter said.

The press also must be held accountable, he told the audience. “The American media never once stood up and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. President, How do you know those weapons exist?’”

Perhaps the greatest blame, according to Ritter, must be leveled against the American people who have failed to derail the Bush administration’s radically interventionist agenda. “We are an ignorant population,” he explained. “We know nothing of the world around us. We have become good consumers. We are people who have wrapped ourselves in a cocoon of comfort.”

And this ignorance yields fear, he said. “We do nothing to defend our freedoms. … This president has disgraced the office that he has been given by ‘We the people.’”

If the actions of the Bush administration really are the “gravest threat” to Americans in the history of our country, you’d think Ritter would offer a wide array of proposals for diminishing this threat. “Gravest threat” sounds serious, to say the least, and should require immediate action instead of waiting until November to address it.

You’d think that having a “gravest threat” in our midst would mean that our comfortable lives lay in the balance if we don’t do something right away. Yet, in a call similar in tone to Bush’s post-9/11 insistence that Americans help fight the “war on terrorism” by going about their daily lives—“working and shopping and playing”—Ritter confidently reassures his audience that the “gravest threat” can be neutralized by voting Bush out of office in November.

If the threat is as grave as Ritter says it is, though, shouldn’t we be taking other action in the meantime, such as organizing mass tax resistance in order to divest the federal government of its means to wage war on people around the world and its own citizens? What about creating organizations that will confront our representatives in Congress—on a daily, non-stop basis—in order to compel them to use their positions of power to reverse the damage their criminal acts have done? What about targeting U.S. multinational companies that are doing business in Iraq by working to “shut them down,” as Arundhati Roy suggested at this week’s World Social Forum in India?

The list of possibilities for countering the ruling class in Washington is endless and a lot of the ideas, thankfully, are already being implemented by various groups and individuals.

What one encounters in the speeches of many critics of the Bush administration is hyperbole that proves counterproductive. If the Bush administration is enacting policies that represent the “gravest threat” in American history, then Ritter, I hope, would be promoting actions other than just voting for a Democrat in November. But his “gravest threat” comment appears to have served as a rhetorical device to manipulate the listener into interpreting his comments as being more important than they really are. By employing hyperbole, Ritter wants to draw attention to himself. “Look at me, I’m the Paul Revere of the early 21st century, warning ignorant Americans, ‘The Bush administration is coming, the Bush administration is coming.’”

In the end, though, Ritter does not appear to be prepared to take other stands against the groups of people he calls “liars” and “criminals.” Voting is only one part, albeit an important one, in the foundation of a vibrant democracy. (Here in the United States, though, we can’t even make our election process fair, given the stranglehold on the system by the two major parties.) A government run by the people must allow the people to be involved in all aspects of the governing process. But what we see at all levels of government in the United States, particularly at the federal level, is a system that invites citizens to vote in extremely unfair election processes and then encourages them to go home and keep quiet until the next round of elections.

By presenting participation in a presidential election as the only viable remedy to the “grave danger” posed by Bush, Ritter and other anti-Bush activists are doing their part to perpetuate our emaciated form of democracy.

Richard Oxman, writing in Press Action, emphasized that author Stan Goff’s conventional strategies for change are at odds with his “radical” critique of the U.S. government and society. “It’s strange but Stan’s own public declarations about the dire straits we’re in seem to be at variance with his summit statements regarding the electoral process ... and recommended strategies,” Oxman said in reference to comments Goff made at last week’s OneDance Summit in Santa Cruz, Calif.

At the summit, Goff spoke of the coming crisis in the United States brought on by the dwindling supply of fossil fuels. Furthermore, in his new book, Full Spectrum Disorder, Goff shares with his readers some attention-grabbing ideas about the future of liberal democracy. For starters, he sees no future for the current U.S. political system. “I have not one iota of doubt that America -as it is now politically constituted -will self-destruct,” Goff writes.

What are his proposals for avoiding this “self-destruction”? Goff conceded that his primary strategy, as far as electoral politics are concerned, is to support the Democratic Party. In his home state of North Carolina, Goff said the state’s large black population has too much to lose if Republicans remain in power.

The Democratic Party may be taking us down the same path toward self-destruction. Unlike the Republicans, though, the Democrats offer crumbs to the working class along this path that keep them slightly more comfortable in the short-term than the policies enacted by the Republicans.

Every political and social activist has their own way of dealing with adversity. Creating change in established government systems is an evolutionary process. There should be no illusions about the U.S. empire crumbling overnight. But when one speaks of the United States facing the “gravest threat in its history” and heading down the “path to destruction,” that person should be prepared to provide ideas available to groups and individuals in our democratic society, beyond the inherently detached act of voting, for avoiding the predicted disaster.

Mark Hand is editor of Press Action.

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