The North Coast times-eagle., January 01, 2007, Page 16, Image 16

PAGE 16
NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE, JA B R U A R Y & M AR PRIL 2007
SUE AM Y (FROM ‘THE ECONOM IST’)
NOSE PUNCH
FROM PAGE ONE
hypocrisy of continuing the war to sanctify the dead, the last
refuge of most failed wars; a perpetual cycle of killing and dying
to avenge already dead soldiers.
Bush not only lied to get us into war, he also lied to
Congress to obtain authorization for it — he made false promises
to Congress that he would use the war powers granted to him to
keep the peace and would invade Iraq as a last resort, and only
after returning UN weapons inspectors to prove or disprove the
presence of WMDs. But he unilaterally terminated those inspect­
ions and reneged on his promise to seek a peaceful resolution.
Instead he trumped up unsubstantiated evidence of WMDs to
the UN and insisted the U S. was justified invading a nation that
threatened it with nuclear devastation, all of which have been
shown to be fraudulent.
Now many members of Congress who voted for Bush's
war powers, Republicans as well as Democrats, are expressing
mea culpa. It must be hammered to them that they should have
been aware of exactly what they were unconstitutionally handing
over to the President (which they also did with the Patriot Act a
year earlier, most of them having not read any of it). They should
have questioned the administration’s false claims of Iraqi WMDs
and that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
The country was lied into the war and Congress must
refuse to grant Bush his supplement budget for war costs, which
will only expand and escalate the war. Any member of Congress
who votes to continue funding for the war is complicit. As one
letter writer to The Oregonian put it, “defunding the war is not
abandoning our troops — leaving them in Iraq is.”
The Bushites treat separation of powers as a struggle
for supremacy with the executive branch, in a Darwinian view
of the Constitution, as the superior. Although Cheney believes
the War Powers Resolution is an infringement on Presidential
authority (which he insists is absolute in all matters, including
war), Congress must reiterate that no President can go to war
without receiving a formal declaration of war, which this Presi­
dent persistently disregards.
Neocons wish to remain players in Washington and
are frantic to avoid blame for the Iraq War, which they did so
much to start and into which they wish to keep surging soldiers.
If Democrats in Congress cut off money to the war, neocons
can claim their party caused “the shameful defeat” and might
ride that theme right up through the 2008 election.
The descent into permanent war can only be stopped
by vigorous public and political opposition and not allow the
President's assertions that not doing things his way is unpatriotic
and selling out the troops. If he is not resisted there should be no
surprise if air attacks begin in Iran. Rather than allocate money
for the so-called surge in Iraq, Congress should instead find a
plan for withdrawal from Iraq as well as set a ceiling for the
number of troops who are there. The sooner American troops
leave Iraq the quicker insurgents will lose their rationale for
terrorism, which is, obviously, the U.S. occupation. The U S.
presence does not quell sectarian violence but instead incites
it, and will continue to escalate it no matter how many surges
are flung at Iraq. Although withdrawal of American soldiers will
not end the explosive civil war, Iraqis are more likely to settle it
among themselves. Their least consideration would be America's
approval.
Election of a President in the USA has always been
choosing a wartime dictator. The most important role of the
Presidency is as commander-in-chief, which is decorous in
peacetime but Caesarian in wartime. “In time of war it's all
power to the President," a newspaper headline declared just
after 9/11.
Yet, as Garry Wills wrote in The New York Times, the
President is not commander-in-chief of the American people
but of military matters regarding the “defense" of the country.
He does not command ordinary citizens in the manner a military
officer does subordinates.
Presidents are given great powers during crises not
covered in the Constitution Abraham Lincoln, the first Repub­
lican President, suspended habeus corpus during the Civil War,
which allowed military arrest of persons without formally charging
them with violating the law (unlike G W.'s suppression of habeus
corpus, Lincoln's suspension was meant to be temporary).
During World War 2, the U.S. interned thousands of Japanese-
Americans, FDR's infamous Executive Order 9066, which was
repealed before the war ended (and half a century later an
official apology was made to surviving internees by the federal
government). Bush (who was not elected but "selected" as
President) has imprisoned so-called terrorist suspects captured
either in war or kidnapped from all over the world and held them
for years without charges — which includes Afghan and Iraqi
captives whom he refuses to grant POW status, and especially
immigrants to the U.S. of Middle Eastern origin, not unlike the
Alien & Sedition Acts of 1798-1799, and the McCarren Act
of 1950 (also against “aliens"). During the present emergency,
Muslim individuals and organizations are particular targets
of surveillance, wiretaps and inquiry as well as imprisonment
for even the remotest links to terrorist groups. Bush's docile
Republican Congress last year suspended both habeus corpus
and the Possee Comitatus Act, overturning the Supreme Court’s
objection to military tribunals without proper legal defense for
internees at Guantanimo.
Presidents do indeed consolidate and expand their
power during wartime and their impulse is to quell dissent, which
is barely tolerated during normal times and harshly repudiated
in times of national crisis when it is especially necessary. In this
period of alleged perpetual war, the prudence shown by public
officials disinclined to dissent is concerned with opposing a
President during wartime — but, as in this instance when the
President has falsely cooked up a war, that discretion is close
to aiding and abetting the treachery of a criminally despotic
President.
With the Bush administration's preemptive invasion
of Iraq and its escalating threats against Iran (and Syria), its
gutting of environmental and public policy laws, granting virtual
SPLIT CREEK
A REVIEW BY DAVID HOLLOWAY
V.O. Blum’s Split Creek has a perfectly adequate title,
but an intriguing subtitle: War Novel of the Deep West." Really,
one might ask, was the ‘Deep West’ ever the scene of a John
Wayne-worthy ‘War’? Of course not, unless, well, you want to
count destroying “Indians" or maybe the Atom Bomb, or progress
vs. ecological degradation.
And the Deep West? You mean Arizona, Utah, or even
Nevada? ...surely not Berlin! Yet deep in the heart of West-ern
Europe in the 1940s, Martin Heidegger was making his own
evasively but “deeply” complex accommodation with the Nazis.
And Stalin was at war with Germany, the contents of his gulags,
and even the “communism" he usurped and destroyed. And
in the U.S. there were both Nazis and apocalyptic Christian
militants, who might at times be one and the same.
It s all in this audacious, challenging, often outrageous
novel. Blum's hero/anti-hero named Dassen travels (of fellow-
travels) through all of it. He is a good German with a Marxist
mother, who joins Hitler's Youth, then...well, let me not give
away the plot, and just say he gets to think about and even “be”
a Nazi, a Marxist, a German, An American, a POW, an instructor
of POWs, a Spy (single and double-agent), a philosopher, and
even, admirably, a liberal.
H.G. Wells once said his great novel Tono-Bungay was
planned “extensively,” not “intensively”: that is, for all its precise
realism, character psychologies, and story-telling skill, it ends up
closer to Voltaire’s Candide than to a Henry James novel. Wells’
central character George, plausible and engaging on his own
terms, is a focal point for the strata and scope of the crumbling
culture he lives in.
Blum’s Dassen functions similarly. But Dassen is a
Candide-with-a-difference: it is indeed absurd to say ours is
“the best of all possible worlds," but we cannot — must not —
think we can just tend our own gardens However fumbling our
efforts, we've got to get through this mess together and at least
try to understand how we got here
I found Split Creek a good read. Okay, I would like a
little more detailed atmosphere for the suspense scenes, plus
more vivid character details. Something called “Atemporal Cos­
mology" pops in as a bit of Blum-ian proselytizing — fascinating,
but there needed to be less of it or a huge reconstruction of the
novel to make place for it. But the various plot climaxes, if some­
what skeletally set up, are exciting. Dassen is quite plausible
enough to carry us through the utterly implausible but all-too-real
paroxysms of the real 20th century — an odd sort of Everyman.
So if you want probing psychological revelations, read
James; if you want gunfire, suspense, and gore — go to the
movies. If you want a book that makes you laugh, weep, and
especially think — try Candide, Catch-22, Tono-Bungay and
Split Creek War Novel o f the Deep West
David Holloway is associate professor of English
at Portland State University. Split Creek War Novel of the
Deep West (first edition ppbck, 2007: 225 pgs / $11.95) by
V O Blum is published by Times Eagle Books, a coequal
division of Times Eagle Inc., Astoria, Oregon V O. Blum
is Author of Equator The Story & The Letters, and Sunbelt
Stories
autonomy to double-dipping corporations consecrated with
government welfare as well as large military contracts (not to
mention subsidizing mercenaries) paid for by taxes, blatantly
refusing fuel and oil conservation while putting American troops
in harm’s way to exploit and guard world oil reserves for our
national consumption (blood is cheap, oil is expensive); and
collaterally killing innocents whose only misconduct is to be
where they are — it is now more than ever necessary to follow
the constitutional mandate of investigating the legitimacy of the
Bush presidency
A regime that makes war on the basis of lies, that terror
bombs civilians and tortures captives is capable of nearly any­
thing and everything, even subverting the rights and liberties
of its own people whom it deceives, corrupts and impoverishes,
and spies upon anyone who openly dissents or is merely suspect
of dissenting or disapproving, by using extra-legal police and
surveillance powers it contemptuously arrogates for itself. If it
can be imagined that the same type of people who had the
Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated are now in
control of the government, then it might also be imagined that
9/11, the invasion of Iraq and ambitions of global dominance of
everything if not everyone, might not be beyond their aspirations
if not quite their capacities.
The assertion that the newly Democratic Congress is
creating a Constitutional crisis by challenging Bush’s war powers
is opposite the truth: the President provoked the crisis by usurp­
ing nearly-absolute powers not granted him by the Constitution,
proclaiming his now infamous (and ludicrously defined) “unitary
executive" supremacy over the American government and
people. Congress is finally responding to the Bush adminis­
tration's wanton attempt to overthrow constitutional democracy
in favor of a militant theolitical plutocracy.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks
says that every American should put his or name on the line and
come up with a solution for the Iraq War. He is right, although
he might not agree with a majority opinion of what the U.S. ought
to do; “cut and run” is no longer a minority option. Wars are
scrambled; each side considers the other an evil force motivated
by greed and conquest, and each claims its God is on their side.
War sorts things out, even if it proves to be different from what
started a w a r— and the integrity of a perceived enemy must
at least be considered.
One of the most enduring myths is that civilizations or
nations collapse when they have become permissive, immoral
and lacking the will to fight perceived enemies. That is simply
untrue — nations and states fall when they have lost faith and
trust with their peoples, when they no longer even pretend to
address or respect the most basic material and philosophic
needs of their citizenry, when they have lied and used their
peoples badly, when they have become repressive and over­
extend their oppression to satisfy the empirical aspirations of
an insatiably privileged minority.
Faced with social chaos and the break down of order,
ordinary people grasp desperately at repression simply because
it purports to be a base of stability and order. But the history they
think they know betrays them. The chaos during times of change
is not from the new and rising ideas and reforms but comes
directly from the decaying institutions committing fratricide to
stay alive through absolute repression.
Yet when so many demand change, there is obviously
a compelling need for it, and it must ultimately be met. This is a
dark time but the eye is beginning to see. The fog of deception
and corruption is starting to tatter and the contours of betrayal
are taking shape despite increasing and frenzied velocity of the
fog machine. The sinister figures who have fogged our sight are
revealed for the snarling bullies they truly are.
Lights do go out in history. Some other civilization or
culture some other time or place might have to revive freedom
and liberty if we show ourselves unable to recover from the
grievous wounds upon our democracy by the Bush adminis­
tration.
Don Reichert of Portland wrote about something other
than the subject of this article in a letter to The Oregonian, but
he made this point: “If power is bestowed without checks and
balances, it is all but inevitable that someone without it will
become its victim. And powerless victims, seeing their power­
lessness, become angry and cynical and lose faith in their
system of justice, which otherwise, they would expect to protect
them from the abuses of power."
If G.W. Bush truly wishes to emulate Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, he might take to heart the fact of human rights, that
no matter what else occurs in history everything reverts back
to the most ancient struggles of rich against poor; whatever
masks or complexities surround ideologies, their design is either
to protect privilege and power or to establish and extend rights
and liberties to the powerless. “The test of our progress is not
whether we add more to the abundance of those who have
much, it is whether we provide enough to those who have too
little," FDR said.
If Bush does not understand that, impeach him (and
Cheney) and replace him with someone, man or woman, black,
white, brown, yellow or red, who does.
Thanx & a tip of the hat (as oldtime cartoonist Jimmy
Hatlo used to say) to letter writers to newspapers, including The
Oregonian and The New York Times, who provided insight and
inspiration for this article.
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON
757 27TH STREET 97103
MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
t
t