[Mb-civic] Potemkin World Š or the President in the Zone

[Michael Butler]

a project of the Nation Institute
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Potemkin WorldŠ or the President in the Zone

"The great motorcade," wrote Canadian correspondent Don Murray, "swept
through the streets of the cityŠ The crowds Š but there were no crowds.
George W. Bush's imperial procession through Europe took place in a
hermetically sealed environment. In Brussels it was, at times, eerie. The
procession containing the great, armour-plated limousine (flown in from
Washington) rolled through streets denuded of human beings except for riot
police. Whole areas of the Belgian capital were sealed off before the
American president passed."

Murray doesn't mention the 19 American escort vehicles in that procession
with the President's car (known to insiders as "the beast"), or the 200
secret service agents, or the 15 sniffer dogs, or the Blackhawk helicopter,
or the 5 cooks, or the 50 White House aides, all of which added up to only
part of the President's vast traveling entourage. Nor does he mention the
huge press contingent tailing along inside the president's security
"bubble," many of them evidently with their passports not in their own
possession but in the hands of White House officials, or the more than
10,000 policemen and the various frogmen the Germans mustered for the
President's brief visit to the depopulated German town of Mainz to shake
hands with Prime Minister Gerhard Schroeder.

This image of cities emptied of normal life (like those atomically
depopulated ones of 1950s sci-fi films) is not exactly something Americans
would have carried away from last week's enthusiastic TV news reports about
the bonhomie between European and American leaders, as our President went on
his four-day "charm offensive" to repair first-term damage to the
transatlantic alliance. But two letters came into the Tomdispatch e-mailbox
-- one from a young chemist in Germany, the other from a middle-aged
engineer in Baghdad -- that reminded me of how differently many in the rest
of the world view the offshore bubbles we continually set up, whether in
Belgium, Germany, or the Green Zone in Baghdad. (Both letters are reproduced
at the end of this dispatch.)

Here's one of the strangest things about our President: He travels often
enough, but in some sense he never goes anywhere. As I wrote back in
November 2003, as George and party were preparing to descend on London
(central areas of which were being closed down for the "visit"):


"American presidential trips abroad increasingly remind me of the vast,
completely ritualized dynastic processionals by which ancient emperors and
potentates once crossed their domains and those of their satraps. Our
President's processionals are enormous moving bubbles (even when he visits
alien places closer to home like the Big Apple) that shut cities, close down
institutions, turn off life itself. Essentially, when the President moves
abroad, like some vast turtle, he carries his shell with him."



Back then, I was less aware that, for Bush & Co., all life is lived inside a
bubble carefully wiped clean of any traces of recalcitrant, unpredictable,
roiling humanity, of anything that might throw their dream world into
question. On the electoral campaign trail in 2004, George probably never
attended an event in which his audience wasn't carefully vetted for, and
often quite literally pledged to, eternal friendliness, not to say utter
adoration. (Anyone who somehow managed to slip by with, say, a Kerry T-shirt
on, was summarily ejected or even arrested.)

In a sense, our President's world has increasingly been filled with nothing
but James Guckert clones. Guckert is, of course, the "journalist" who, using
the alias Jeff Gannon, regularly attended presidential news conferences and
lobbed softball questions George's way. The Gannon case, or "Gannongate,"
has -- are you surprised? -- hardly been touched on by most of the
mainstream media despite its lurid trail leading to internet porn sites and
a seamy underside of gay culture -- issues that normally would glue eyes to
TV sets and sell gazillions of papers (and that in the Clinton era would
have rocked the administration). On the other hand, it did cause an uproar
in the world of the political Internet, where, if we were to be honest --
and stop claiming to be shocked, shocked -- we would quickly admit that
almost all of George's world has essentially filled up with Gannons (though
not necessarily with! the the porn connections).