Here's a thought: \War on Terror"" as the best ""get out of jail free"" card you've ever seen, redeemable for one re-election. Pass go. Green light on another four years.
To a remarkable degree, our nation's current war on terror will be a fantastic insurance policy for President Bush in the 2004 presidential election. It's the treasure chest from which our incumbent candidate will be able to leisurely plunder a battery of national security anecdotes in order to oust any upstart challenger.
A presidential election, after all, is really just the process of selecting a leader who will threaten the smallest share of the body politic's interests (like evolution, American politics is a pretty conservative affair). At a very basic'which is to say superficial'level, Bush will come across as threatening no American's interests thanks to his enthusiastic campaign to destroy terrorism the world over.
Which, it must be said, is a lot like trying to destroy Mickey Mouse. Even if one were to succeed in burning every image of Mickey ever created, the idea of Mickey would still exist. Some hapless little child in Sri Lanka could draw him again based on the memory of a cartoon seen last Sunday. Even the American president cannot destroy something so enduring as an idea.
That said, the president still comes across as a swell guy to many. This is because Bush has made it his mantra that he will shield Americans from death at the hands of evil men, and expertly cultivated for himself a particular image. He's practically a living work of art'that of the earnest goalkeeper, doggedly striving to deflect anthrax soccer balls and nuclear briefcase bombs from the verdant pastures of innocent America. Never mind that the businessmen playing mid-field are mired in the embarrassing revelations of their own greed and corruption, that the team is blithely spending itself into its first deficits in years, or that the very grass upon which they play is wilted and slowly disappearing because, well, environmental complacency makes sense right now'it's a time of national crisis, after all.
Now, it's true that the higher functions of a society such as ours'bustling commerce, creative endeavor, the simple pursuit of an unafraid life'a Constitutional right, by Jove'can only be successful when a basic level of security exists; that is to say, when the nation's populace takes its own safety for granted. Therefore, I am enthusiastically in favor of ensuring that the United States is a safe place to live.
Unfortunately, the laudable goal of homeland security seems to be Bush's only priority for the remainder of his political life.
The current administration has shown its talent for defense (setting aside, for the moment, its failure to prevent the terrorist attacks in the first place). As we speak, it courageously protects American lives by taking the fight to Afghanistan and hatching plans to boil up a cauldron of hurt to rain down upon Saddam at a future date, so long as the United Nations supports such an action (read: regardless of whether or not the United Nations supports such an action); it promptly slapped tariffs on foreign steel when American steel corporations faced economic hardship. Of course, the administration is masterful in protecting its own image when it's threatened, or when its less noble side is accidentally unveiled.
The problem is, nobody ever achieved anything insightful, beautiful or meaningful through sheer damage control or by simple self-preservation. I see a staggering number of opportunities to change the nature of our country by improving public education or re-considering our environmental outlook'to ask, in short, the questions which desperately need asking'that have been virtually ignored since the events of Sept. 11. Progress may well have been the greatest casualty of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
For now, it looks like we're going to have to settle into a few more comfortable years with Bush playing the role of political panacea to our collective insecurities, stepping up in front of television cameras every now and again and reassuring us that things will be OK as long as we get the bad guys. If I didn't know better, I'd say that in tolerating such single-minded politics, our country seems to actually enjoy elevating terrorists up on a plinth of evil so that we can deal them a thousand deaths and then bask in the apotheosis of our own goodness. But I'll leave the philosophy at the door. After all, there is a war on.
