[Mb-civic] Jonathan Schell Has Something To Say

[Michael Butler]

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compiled and edited by Tom Engelhardt
        
      

Tomgram: Jonathan Schell, Goodbye to All That

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=60579

Jonathan Schell, who lives in downtown New York City, began writing his
"Letter from Ground Zero" column -- still unnamed -- almost before the white
dust storm of 9/11 had settled. The first of what would become almost
four-and-a-half years of such columns -- piercing, questioning, thoughtful
-- appeared the next week in the Nation magazine. In those early days, as
the country and Congress were being panicked into every sort of folly,
Jonathan stuck -- as calmly as possible -- to his most basic beliefs; and,
at a time when so many were ducking for cover, he never hesitated to express
them as strongly (and eloquently) as possible. To my mind, he has been a
model of intelligent analysis and resistance in this strange, unhinged
moment of ours.

Tomdispatch was far slower to start up. I began it only after two post-9/11
months of media coverage had driven me to despair, only after I couldn't
bear the thought of leaving such a degraded world to my children without
having done a thing in response. And then, of course, I had nothing as lofty
as the Nation in mind for my first tentative thoughts. An e-list of twelve
friends and relatives seemed ambitious enough. It would be another year-plus
before my still-unnamed dispatches, now heading out to hundreds of
e-readers, became (thanks to Hamilton Fish of the Nation Institute) the
Tomdispatch website. Only months after that did I post the first "Letter
from Ground Zero" at the site (through the kindness of the Nation's Katrina
van den Heuvel). As all of you know, I've proudly posted many of Jonathan's
pieces since then.

This was hardly the first time his path and mine had intersected. His
remarkable Vietnam writings, The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half,
as well as his classic Watergate book, The Time of Illusion, had helped
shape my worldview in the late 1960s and 1970s, though at the time I knew
him (the way any reader would) only on the page. In 1980, in the wake of the
Three Mile Island nuclear near-catastrophe in Pennsylvania -- I was by then
an editor at Pantheon Books -- I decided to publish Unforgettable Fire, a
volume of drawings and brief descriptions of the Hiroshima A-bomb experience
by some of its survivors -- the first such book, I believe, to take
mainstream Americans under the mushroom cloud since John Hersey's Hiroshima
in 1946. Jonathan plucked an unforgettably strange and indomitable image
from that book -- of a professor standing in his shorts in a sea of fire,
holding only a rice ball in his fist -- and, having translated it into
words, made it central to the first part of The Fate of the Earth, his
bestselling book about the superpower nuclear conundrum that, even without
the USSR, still has us in its grip. That book -- and so the image I had
published -- was one spark helping to set ablaze the vast antinuclear
movement that, in the early 1980s, all-too-briefly challenged the Reagan
administration.

Some years later, I became Jonathan's editor, leaving Pantheon Books in
1990, only to be reunited with him years later at Metropolitan Books where I
edited his post-9/11 work, The Unconquerable World. (Anyone who bothered to
read that account of several centuries of state violence and popular
resistance would have known, without a scintilla of doubt, that the Bush
"cakewalk" into Iraq would prove anything but.)

Now, in a final "Letter from Ground Zero" column, Jonathan is saying goodbye
to all that, only to offer the promise of an even deeper plunge into the
American crisis of our moment. I have no doubt that our paths will cross
again -- and soon, I hope -- at Tomdispatch. In the meantime, here (with my
thanks yet again to the editors of the Nation magazine) is his final column.
Tom

    Farewell to Ground Zero
    By Jonathan Schell

    [This column, which will appear in the March 6th issue of the Nation, is
posted here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]

    This column will be my last "Letter From Ground Zero." The series will
be succeeded by another, "Crisis of the Republic." Until recently it seemed
possible to trace the main developments in the Bush administration's
policies back to that horrible, fantastical day in September 2001, as if
following an unbroken chain of causes and effects. Now it no longer does.
The chain is too entangled with other chains, of newer and older origin.

    The war against Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had his headquarters
and support from the ruling Taliban, was, for better or worse, a clear
response to the attack on the United States. The Patriot Act and the
reorganization of the national security apparatus likewise were responses to
September 11. But with the launch of the Iraq War, the subject was already
beginning to change. The political support for the war still flowed from
9/11, but the administration was already veering toward other objectives.
For one thing, we know that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others
had wanted to attack Iraq since their first days in office, and, for that
matter, even before. For another, the war proved to be a kind of test case
of a far more sweeping revolution in American foreign policy, soon outlined
in the White House document of 2002, the National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, which set forth American ambitions for nothing
less than global hegemony based on military superiority, absolute and
perpetual, over all other nations. Many friends of this policy frankly and
rightly called it imperial.

    The Iraq test case has failed; in doing so it has tied down forces that
otherwise might have been given further aggressive missions. The imperial
plan stalled -- as the nuclearization of North Korea without an effective
American response, among other things, attests. Nevertheless, the
administration's international ambitions had a scarcely less sweeping
domestic corollary, for which no master strategic document was supplied: a
profound transformation of the American state, in which, in the name of the
"war on terror," the President rises above the law and the Republican Party
permanently dominates all three branches of government. That project had
even less to do with 9/11 than did the Iraq War. Its roots can be traced at
least as far back as the election of 2000, when the Supreme Court improperly
interjected itself into the electoral dispute in Florida and a majority
consisting of Republican-appointed Justices awarded the presidency to the
man of their own party. Or perhaps we need to look back even further, to the
attempt by the Republican-dominated Congress to knock a Democratic President
out of office by impeaching him for personal misbehavior accompanied by a
minor legal infraction. (If those standards were still in force, President
Bush would have been impeached eleven times over by now.) Obviously, these
events had nothing to do with 9/11 or the Iraq War. Their roots are older
and deeper. To arrange all the new developments, domestic and international,
under the heading "Letter From Ground Zero," as if it all began with Osama
bin Laden, would therefore be misleading. It would be a kind of lie.

    For the series' new title, I want to acknowledge a debt to Hannah
Arendt, who in 1972 published a book of essays titled Crises of the
Republic. My single-letter change in her title reflects a belief that today
the many disparate crises of the past have combined into one general
systemic crisis, placing the basic structure of the Republic at mortal risk.
At the forefront of concern must be the question: Will the Constitution of
the United States survive? Is the American state now in the midst of a
transmutation in which the 217-year-old provisions for a balance of powers
and popular freedoms are being overridden and canceled? Or will defenders of
the Constitution step forward, as has happened in constitutional crises of
the past, to save the system and restore its integrity?

    The obvious precedent is Watergate. Then as now, the presidency became
"imperial." Then as now, a misconceived and misbegotten war led to
presidential law-breaking at home. Then as now, a quixotic crusade for
freedom abroad really menaced freedom at home. Then as now, the law-breaking
President was re-elected to a second term. Then as now, the systemic rot
went so deep that only a drastic cure could be effectual. Then as now,
opposition at the outset consisted not of any great public outrage but the
lonely courage of a few bureaucrats, legislators, and reporters. Then it was
the war in Vietnam; now it is the war in Iraq and the wider and more lasting
"war on terror." Then it was secret break-ins and illegal wiretapping; now
it is arbitrary imprisonment, torture and, again, illegal wiretapping. Then
it was presidential assertion of "executive privilege"; now it is a
full-scale reinterpretation of the Constitution to give the "unitary
executive" power to do anything it likes in "wartime."

    Of course, there are obvious differences. In the early 1970s, the
opposition party controlled both houses of the legislature, which launched
vigorous investigations and, eventually, impeachment proceedings. Now of
course the President's party controls the legislative branch and possibly
(it's still too early to say, given the traditional independence of the
judiciary and its consequent unpredictability) the judicial branch as well.
Then, the movement against the war had forced a decision to withdraw; now
the anti-war movement is much weaker. On the other hand, when the crisis
began back then, the President's popularity was high; now it is low.

    Yet what remains most striking and most surprising is the degree of
continuity of the systemic disorder in the face of radical, galloping change
in almost every other area of political life. After all, the cold war, which
seemed at the time to be the seedbed of the Watergate crisis, ended sixteen
years ago, in the greatest upheaval of the international system since the
end of World War II. How is it, then, that the United States has returned to
a systemic crisis so profoundly similar to the one in the early 1970s? By
looking at external foes, are we looking in the wrong place for the origins
of the illness? Is this transformation what a more "conservative" public now
wants? Or is there instead something in the dominant institutions of
American life that push the country in this direction? Those are some of the
questions that will be taken up in "Crisis of the Republic."

    Jonathan Schell is The Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow.
He is the author of The Unconquerable World, among many other books.

Copyright 2005 Jonathan Schell

This article will appear in the March 6th issue of The Nation Magazine.
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posted February 16, 2006 at 11:09 am
     
             
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