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What America Has Become Under Bush

Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman on How Bush Makes Fiction of us All - January 17, 2006

Ariel Dorfman is an American author. In this essay he fabricates a situation in which he is persecuted in the police state that America has become. He then delivers a speech to academics featuring this fabricated police state persecution. Many in his audience believed him. He uses this to illustrate the essential truths behind his fictional speech.

The following is an excerpt from his essay on what America has become under George Bush and why his audience believed him.

"And yet there could be no denying the paranoia my story had tapped into. If arguably rational academics believed me, it was because in some profound recess of their psyches they had already imagined such a possible world, had already inflicted that nightmare scenario upon themselves in the shadows of their own dread. Perhaps that's why, no matter how much I assured everyone I met that my tribulations had been a hoax, rumours of my ordeal continued to spread at an alarming rate. A former student told me she was writing a letter to the Washington Post to complain about my mistreatment. E-mails began to arrive, commiserating with my plight.

Everybody seemed absolutely ready to credit my absurd story as perfectly real, as not, in fact, at all absurd. When I lamented the naiveté of such a sophisticated audience to friends at the MLA, when I declared my amazement at the reaction I had gotten, the answer was unanimous: I was the naïve one.

Amazed? Why should I be amazed? Of course, people had found my version of events -- to use an Aristotelian category -- a paragon of verisimilitude. Isn't art, according to my master Picasso, a lie that always tells the truth? To those friends, my fraudulent story was terrifyingly plausible, all-too-unfortunately representative of a country where citizens and non-citizens can indeed be kept forever and a day in custody without charges, where illegal wiretapping is rampant, where that obscene word "rendition" (or the even more perverse "extraordinary rendition") has crawled into our everyday vocabulary, where the Vice President insists that certain suspects may have to be tortured in order to defeat terrorism, where the President lies and invades another country under sham pretences and is not impeached, where polls indicate that a majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties in order to be "secure." Had I not proclaimed in my own essays that anything can happen in the United States, that anything can happen anywhere if ordinary citizens are afraid enough to accept the slow destruction of democracy, to justify the worst crimes against humanity if they feel their lives are imperiled? And wasn't I as responsible as my gullible audience? Wasn't I also labouring under the anxiety that this could truly befall me? Wasn't my story, my telling of it, filled with an underlying panic? Wasn't that what had made it so credible? "

Dorfman ends his essay with an epilogue of a hypothetical situation he created, as follows:

".....Let us suppose that the United States suffers another terrorist attack of even more devastating consequences than the last one, as assault where maybe, who knows, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children die..."

But What if it Really Happened?

Comment by Larry Ross, January 17, 2006

The American people and Congress would give the Bush Administration a 'carte blanche' to wage war against any nation he chose to blame for the 'terrorist attack'. Remember how Bush invented a pack of lies and blamed Saddam Hussein for supporting the 9/11 attack, to justify invading Iraq and killing over 100,000 people?. Remember how the people and Congress believed him, opened up the US Treasury for his war-making? Amazing as it may seem, Congress and many other Americans still support Bush's war? Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and other top Democrats are good examples of a supposedly opposition party, that has sold out to Bush. They support his lies and war, even though there has been a great number of top level exposures and revelations.

Bush's declining popularity shows that many Americans are beginning to see through his lies, and realise they have been conned into the phoney Iraq war. But there is not enough of them, and they don't know enough about the extent of Bush's crimes and fraud, to become very active and committed.
A new alleged 'terrorist attack' will cause his popularity to zoom up again, as Americans turn to him as they did after 9/11, to save them from the terrorist threat. Critics and doubters will be suppressed much more than before..

Remember that the Iraq war was carefully planned well before the 9/11 attack.

The Internet is full of authoritative articles that the Bush Administration is planning a war against Iran - even a nuclear war. As with Iraq, the reasons are oil and power. Will there be a new, larger terrorist attack on the U.S. that Bush can use to justify a larger war against Iran?

Will Americans believe it? Unfortunately, if there is a larger terrorist attack on the U.S., a majority will believe anything their President and media tell them. The crime may be so big, that Bush's past lies will be forgotten or set aside. Americans will support another war, just as they supported the Iraq war.