Christopher Lydon Interviews…

NEW YORK: There’s more than a whiff of Caesarism in mid-town this week, and a lot of the convention Republicans are high on it.  
     You catch some of it on TV: the rigid scripting, the air of reverence around Bushes young and old, the endless strumming of war themes, the laugh-out-loud foolishness of the rhetorical over-reaching–First Lady Laura Bush’s remark, for example, that her husband had liberated 50-million people around the world… that the happy schoolgirls of Afghanistan are now safely back at their desks.
 
     What you don’t see on TV is the first impression on the street: the militarization of Manhattan.  Cops as far as the eye can see; cops in riot gear, truncheons at the ready; cops in cars; cops on horseback; Jersey barriers blocking the great avenues; all-night floodlighting around Madison Square Garden; anti-riot orange plastic police netting in which even I got wrapped briefly on my first casual stroll through Times Square last Sunday afternoon.  One of the safest cities in the world seems to revel in the notion that it is under siege.

     Which brings me to the theme: is it too late to frame this election game of 2004 as a choice: Empire or Republic? 

My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.”  My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.”

     http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/CJohnson/cjohnson-con4.html” target=”undefined”>Chalmers Johnson

     Three key points, please, to get started. 

     First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate. 

     Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms.  Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan.  On the empire issue, http://www.amconmag.com/12_2/mailer.html” target=”undefined”>Norman Mailerhttp://www.americandynasty.net/excerpts.htm” target=”undefined”>Kevin Phillipshttp://www.nrbookservice.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6480” target=”undefined”>Niall Ferguson

     http://slate.msn.com/id/2099751/” target=”undefined”>”The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.”

     And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy.

     American imperial adventure is not, of course, brand new.  What is eternally new about empire, however, is the erasure of memory, the air of innocence, the self-deception that says the emergency or the opportunity at hand is unique and inescapable.  In http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=134603” target=”undefined”>The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

     “Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'”

     http://www.americanempireproject.com/bookpage.asp?ISBN=0805070044” target=”undefined”>Chalmers Johnson’s list

     In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection.  We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth.  And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

     Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda. 

     Empire commits us to the continual violation of our own standards.  It enshrines hypocrisy as the norm.  Here is the http://amconmag.com/2004_05_10/buchanan.html” target=”undefined”>Pat Buchanan

     “Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031011.wsont1011/BNStory/Entertainment/” target=”undefined”> Susan Sontag

     In his new book, the rightist http://www.drudgereport.com/flashpb.htm” target=”undefined”>Pat Buchanan

     First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002.  It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan

     Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.” 

     And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

     In a remarkable feat of newspaper journalism, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRinIraq.html” target=”undefined”>Jay Bookman

     In the Nation magazine’s GOP convention issue, http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1709” target=”undefined”>Jonathan Schell

     “…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.”

     Schell continues:

     “In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen.

     “In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke.

     “Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?”

     We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election.  At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power.  It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment.   So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.”  My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.”

     http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/CJohnson/cjohnson-con4.html” target=”undefined”>Chalmers Johnson

     Three key points, please, to get started. 

     First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate. 

     Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms.  Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan.  On the empire issue, http://www.amconmag.com/12_2/mailer.html” target=”undefined”>Norman Mailerhttp://www.americandynasty.net/excerpts.htm” target=”undefined”>Kevin Phillipshttp://www.nrbookservice.com/bookpage.asp?prod_cd=c6480” target=”undefined”>Niall Ferguson

     http://slate.msn.com/id/2099751/” target=”undefined”>”The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.”

     And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy.

     American imperial adventure is not, of course, brand new.  What is eternally new about empire, however, is the erasure of memory, the air of innocence, the self-deception that says the emergency or the opportunity at hand is unique and inescapable.  In http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=134603” target=”undefined”>The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

     “Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'”

     http://www.americanempireproject.com/bookpage.asp?ISBN=0805070044” target=”undefined”>Chalmers Johnson’s list

     In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection.  We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth.  And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

     Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda. 

     Empire commits us to the continual violation of our own standards.  It enshrines hypocrisy as the norm.  Here is the http://amconmag.com/2004_05_10/buchanan.html” target=”undefined”>Pat Buchanan

     “Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20031011.wsont1011/BNStory/Entertainment/” target=”undefined”> Susan Sontag

     In his new book, the rightist http://www.drudgereport.com/flashpb.htm” target=”undefined”>Pat Buchanan

     First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002.  It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan

     Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.” 

     And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

     In a remarkable feat of newspaper journalism, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRinIraq.html” target=”undefined”>Jay Bookman

     In the Nation magazine’s GOP convention issue, http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1709” target=”undefined”>Jonathan Schell

     “…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.”

     Schell continues:

     “In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen.

     “In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke.

     “Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?”

     We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election.  At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power.  It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment.   So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?

     NEW YORK: There’s more than a whiff of Caesarism in mid-town this week, and a lot of the convention Republicans are high on it.

     You catch some of it on TV: the rigid scripting, the air of reverence around Bushes young and old, the endless strumming of war themes, the laugh-out-loud foolishness of the rhetorical over-reaching–First Lady Laura Bush’s remark, for example, that her husband had liberated 50-million people around the world… that the happy schoolgirls of Afghanistan are now safely back at their desks.

     What you don’t see on TV is the first impression on the street: the militarization of Manhattan. Cops as far as the eye can see; cops in riot gear, truncheons at the ready; cops in cars; cops on horseback; Jersey barriers blocking the great avenues; all-night floodlighting around Madison Square Garden; anti-riot orange plastic police netting in which even I got wrapped briefly on my first casual stroll through Times Square last Sunday afternoon. One of the safest cities in the world seems to revel in the notion that it is under siege.

     Which brings me to the theme: is it too late to frame this election game of 2004 as a choice: Empire or Republic?

     These Republicans in convention assembled are unabashedly the party of empire. The grand old party of Main Street–of “church ushers, undertakers… surgeons, Pullman porters, head nurses and the fat sons of rich fathers” in Norman Mailer’s 1960 account–is now the party of enthusiastic imperialists, and probably ought to be renamed.

     The Democrats under John Kerry’s charge have cast themselves as more cautious, more responsible, more reluctant stewards of the same universal, earth-and-space empire.

     Yet most of the people I know would just like to get our country back–“a republic,” as Ben Franklin said, “if you can keep it.” My commonsense definition of a republic is a free society that is, and feels itself to be, “of the people, by the people, for the people.” My definition of the modern American condition is the enthronement “of the foreign oil, by the military, for the corporate class.”

     The deep dread among all sorts of people I know is quite simply that “since 9/11, our country has undergone a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible,” as Chalmers Johnson summed it up in The Sorrows of Empire. “As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America’s democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear that we will lose our country.”

     Three key points, please, to get started.

     First, these symptoms and sorrows of empire are out there in plain sight, and easy to enumerate.

     Second, plain-speaking thinkers well to the right and others well to the left describe the crisis in almost exactly the same terms. Susan Sontag sounds shockingly like Pat Buchanan. On the empire issue, Norman Mailer, who calls himself a left-conservative these days, which seems to mean he’s been drifting to the right, resonates with the ex-Republican Kevin Phillips, heading left. Stranger still, the Scots historian and champion of empire, Niall Ferguson, now meets himself head-on in the ruins of our imperial overstretch in Iraq. Ferguson’s hubris confronts Ferguson’s nemesis. He writes:

     “The American empire has a big problem. Not only do Americans not recognize the true character of their own predicament—that un-splendid isolation against which Lord Salisbury warned the Victorian imperialists. The rest of the world now regards the United States as not just an empire but now an evil empire.”

     And third, it’s only the vast, increasingly mindless middle of our media and our politics that refuses to engage the empire question–which refuses, that is, to acknowledge the sad, sore, sinking, pit-of-the-stomach sense that the best of our old American birthright is in jeopardy.

     American imperial adventure is not, of course, brand new. What is eternally new about empire, however, is the erasure of memory, the air of innocence, the self-deception that says the emergency or the opportunity at hand is unique and inescapable. In The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the widely respected journalist John Judis writes:

     “Only a president deeply ignorant of the past and what it teaches could journey to the Philippines in 2003 and declare that a century ago Americans had ‘liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.’ America’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn’t, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the administration’s leading neoconservative, had been aware of the brutal war America had fought in the Philippines, or of Wilson’s misadventures in Mexico, or of the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Mideast, they might still have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second or even third or fourth thoughts about what Bush, echoing… the imperialists of a century ago, would call ‘a historic opportunity to change the world.'”

      So what are the critical symptoms of the imperial affliction? Chalmers Johnson’s list starts from the decision not to demobilize at the end of the Cold War. In the Bush I and Clinton administrations, he writes, we managed to stick ourselves with a permanent force of a million soldiers and agents overseas, 12 carrier groups at sea, and more than 700 American bases outside the United States, including 234 military golf courses and the Gulfstream jets to get the generals to the tee on time. In Bush II we have declared ourselves a New Rome, unbound by law, allies or constraints on military force. We have claimed to legitimize “preventive war” and normalized Orwellian phrases like “regime change,” “collateral damage” and “illegal combatants.”

     In blatant violation of the United States Constitution, Johnson continues, we have allowed vast appropriations for the Pentagon and the CIA to be hidden from public inspection. We have tolerated the presidential preemption of Congress in the declaration of war–not just the war on Iraq but the eternal war to nail the last terrorist on earth. And we seem to have abandoned Thomas Jefferson’s “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”

     Because empire always expresses itself in culture as well as politics, I would add to my list of current symptoms: a public psychology of domination and humiliation, made visible in the pictures from Abu Ghraib; a political pretense of permanent emergency; a quasi-official theology of sectarian militancy, starting at home; a popular culture of witless borrowing and vulgarity; and a popular journalism (in the radio rant style) of hysteria, commercialism and partisan propaganda.

     Empire commits us to the continual violation of our own standards. It enshrines hypocrisy as the norm. Here is the Pat Buchanan version:

     “Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of one’s own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples. We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

     Susan Sontag renders her own grim judgment and warning: “It’s really the end of the republic and the beginning of the empire,” she says, likening former president Bill Clinton to Julius Caesar (who crossed the Rubicon in defiance of the Roman Senate) and Bush to Augustus. “I think as long as the U.S.A. has only one political party — the Republican party, a branch of which calls itself the Democratic party — we aren’t going to see a change of the current policy.”

     In his new book, the rightist Pat Buchanan hones what sounds to me like the unspoken leftist critique:

     First, on the unilateralist Bush Doctrine issued in September, 2002. It is “a prescription for permanent war for permanent peace, though wars are the death of republics,” Buchanan writes. “This is democratic imperialism. This will bleed, bankrupt and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about.”

     Second, on the war on Iraq: “…listening to the neoconservatives, Bush invaded Iraq, united the Arab world against us, isolated us from Europe, and fulfilled to the letter bin Laden’s prophecy as to what we were about. We won the war in three weeks — and we may have lost the Islamic world for a generation.”

     And third, on the war on terrorism: “U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here… Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.”

     In a remarkable feat of newspaper journalism, Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution saw the imperial design in the Bush invasion of Iraq six months before it happened. They didn’t have an exit strategy, he concluded, because they didn’t intend to leave!

     In the Nation magazine’s GOP convention issue, Jonathan Schell wonders if what we’ve come to is an imperial policy without an empire in fact:

     “…the recent fortunes of the United States have been anything but triumphal. The President’s policies have failed to check the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The entire ‘axis of evil,’ consisting, according to the President, of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, continues to defy his administration in one way or another. In Iraq, the Marines are now at war with the Shiite community the United States supposedly came to save. North Korea has allegedly become a nuclear power, and Iran seems to be heading that way. The traditional alliances of the United States have been shaken. After 9/11, editorialists asked, ‘Why do they hate us?’ Whatever the reasons, ‘they’ have multiplied to include most of the world.”

     Schell continues:

     “In the twentieth century, the peoples of the earth insisted on taking charge of their own countries. Their rebellions were successful against all empires, from the British to the Soviet, every one of which has fallen.

     “In the face of nuclear stalemate at the apex of the global system and universal rebellion at the base, can any imperial project now succeed? What we may in fact be witnessing is not just a contest between an American empire and its particular colonial targets but a final showdown between the imperial idea and what I like to call an unconquerable world, meaning a world that has the will and the means to reject any imperial yoke.

     “Is the United States possibly an imperial power that does not quite possess an empire? Is the American ’empire’ a colossal leftover from a vanishing age?”

     We all seem to know somehow that our country stands in the valley of the shadow of something awful in this 2004 election. At the heart of our anxiety is not our vulnerability in the world but our power. It’s this threshhold of empire, which may only be crossed once, that makes this perhaps a world-historical moment. So how do we put the empire question at the center of the presidential debate?

     Listen up. It’s not for the squeamish, this business of looking closely at the Bush family definition of “what it takes” to succeed in politics. “You know, the family is ferocious from start to finish,” says my foremost living authority. Richard Ben Cramer is the author of the classic What It Takes about the candidates who did and didn’t have it in 1988: especially Richard Gephardt, Bob Dole, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush.

     Ben Cramer is a reporter like no other I know. A sponge of nuance and off-hand remarks, he seemed to have the run of the Bush estate in that ’88 campaign, and he put it all in the book, with the bark on. The Bush family model, he recalls, was “Poppy” Bush’s maternal grandfather, George Herbert “Pop” Walker, who gave the H. W. and then the W. to the Presidents Bush. Pop Walker was “as hard a chunk of iron as ever came out of the Midwest,” Ben Cramer reminds me in conversation. “They were a family of strivers,” he says. “The whole image that the Washington press corps came down with about the Bushes–of New England gentility–doesn’t quite fit. The joke in the family was about those genteel New Englanders. The ethic of the family was: ‘we’re not like them.'”

     George W. Bush was nicknamed “Junior,” not “Dubya,” in that ’88 campaign, in Richard Ben Cramer’s peerless account. He was the beloved bad boy in the family, nasty with the vice presidential staff, and ever in league with attack dog Lee Atwater among the campaign tacticians. The “Senator Straddle” ad against Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary of 1988 was a tarbrush tipping point for the Bushes. The candidate winced at what he knew was borderline unscrupulousness in the ad, but Roger Ailes & Co. told him it was precisely what was required to undo Bush’s defeat in Iowa and to croak Bob Dole, all of which it did. The “what it takes” question had been answered, once and for all.

     Richard Ben Cramer segues to the 2004 campaign: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” he chuckles. “George W. will do what it takes, and ‘Senator Straddle’ is an ad that may well show up against Kerry. They’re going to take him to the cleaners if they possibly can.” Expect more Swift Boat ads. “Yes, you’ll see more of this,” Ben Cramer says.

     “W is a wonderful guy to sit with,” Ben Cramer observes, “but he’s very decided. He’s not working out his plans. He’s executing them. He is a man of execution. He will order his world to exactly what the plan is, and he doesn’t cavil about executing it.”

     Richard Ben Cramer has more than presidential races in his notebook. He caught the roaring fishing genius of Ted Williams in an Esquire profile a decade ago, and wrote a heartbreaking biography of Joe DiMaggio. More to the point, his new book this summer, How Israel Lost: The Four Questions, is a densely reported cri de coeur about the country Ben Cramer thought he understood, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting in 1979. “I went to do the book about Israel and the Palestinians,” he tells me, “because I was reading stories I couldn’t reconcile with the country I knew.” What had happened to Israel, he found, was that the occupation of Arab lands won in the 1967 war had “subsumed the country” over 37 years. “Israel’s preoccupation is the occupation,” he says. “The whole society is organized around it.” It’s a process and a mentality, Ben Cramer feels, that is engulfing American politics as well.

     “I think there are a lot of dots to be connected,” Ben Cramer continues eagerly. “Let me tell you a little about W,” he says. “He’s a guy who gets his information face to face. He listens to the people he can sit down with. He listens to people he likes. And the only guy in the entire Middle East conflict that he does like and he does listen to is Sharon.” Ben Cramer does not hold that Sharon talked Bush into the Iraq war–only that the two leaders (who love to banter, Ben Cramer says, like a couple of old farmers about calving and rain on their respective ranches) are both desperately deep in comparable quagmires. We are seeing, Ben Cramer says, that “American troops will do things we never thought we would see them do. Just as in Israel, the occupation has its own momentum and its own ethic, and it’s an ethic that inevitably corrupts the occupiers as well as the occupied.”

     Connecting some more dots, back to our US presidential decision. Neither George Bush nor John Kerry, Ben Cramer says, “has distinguished himself for clarity or toughness” on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. “They seem to be in a contest as to who can woo the established Jewish organizations with more bloodthirsty rhetoric about Arafat.” Bush’s view is more or less Sharon’s view, going back to 1948. John Kerry has at least a chance to start fresh. Ben Cramer says: “I think that bitter experience will have to teach [Kerry] that he cannot equate being a friend of Israel with being a friend of Sharon. The current politics of Israel is so twisted, the country is unable to act in its own interest. So if you are trying to put the US on a policy of agreeing with Israeli policy, it’s a dead end for the US and for Israel.”

     Here, then, in Richard Ben Cramer’s resonant, nicotine-stained delivery that I’ve always found compelling, is the hard judgment that makes our conventional wisemen and politicians quiver. “The president who’s going to get something done,” Ben Cramer concludes, “is probably going to be regarded, at least at first, as some kind of terrible anti-Semite or terrible enemy of the Jewish people and of Israel. He’s going to have to take a lot of heat,” a lot more heat even than Richard Ben Cramer has taken for his new book.

     “Chris,” he says, “there’s only one way this story in Palestine can come out. There are two people. There are going to be two countries… It’s not going to work otherwise. It will never finish otherwise. And that’s not good for them. That’s not good for us. And that’s not good for the world as a whole.” Listen here.

The literature of our party conventions is not Mencken. It’s Mailer.

Starting with his still-breathtaking Esquire account of the 1960 Democratic convention that nominated John F. Kennedy in Los Angeles (Superman Comes to the Supermarket), Norman Mailer’s is an astonishing record of observation, invective, prophecy and lyricism–something of each mixed all together in one of many unforgettabable lines about JFK:

“Yes, this candidate,” Mailer wrote, “for all his record, his good, sound, conventional liberal record, has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.”

This was the magazine piece that first filled out the vision of JFK as existential hero. On newsstands three weeks before election day, it probably rallied as many votes to the vaporous Kennedy margin as Mayor Daley’s graveyard precincts in Chicago did. It made a difference, and it is still must reading about American politics.

I’ve got a wicked new crush on this blue-eyed handsome shark forty-four years later. Mailer received me and nonpareil producer Mary McGrath at home in Provincetown last week to talk about the Bush Republicans in Madison Square Garden, where his rickety knees won’t let him track the story in person. The fruits of our conversation are here in five fat slices.

Here’s a taste: “I think the Republicans are going to have a very successful, by their lights, convention. The fact that they’re going to be beleaguered–there are going to be protesters outside–will give them a sense of mission. They’ve always had a cock-eyed sense of mission, ’cause they believe they’re God’s people and they square that with the idea that they’re also greedbags. I mean, one of the fascinating things about the Republican Party is the way, on the one hand, they believe in Christ and love and selflessness, and, on the other, they’re the most selfish people in America and they love to amass money and power. So given that divide in them, they always need a crusade. They need some sense that they’re terribly important and that they’re beleaguered, and if they fail everything goes down with them…

“The Democrats decided not to play their trump card, which is to play to the 50 percent of America that hates Bush. I think they may be saving it for later. I hope they are. If they ignore it, they’re losing their strength. But you can always count on the Democrats to do something anemic. Clinton did it. Jimmy Carter, with all his decency, did it. Democrats find a way to lose, even though they’re the majority party. They tend to listen too much to wonks. And wonks say to them: the thing to do is attack the center, get those center votes; prove to America you’re almost as conservative as George Bush. Allright, I don’t disagree with that as a strategy. But to pretend that he’s going to be more pro-war in Iraq than Bush–I found astonishing.”

Listen here:

First, the risky New York setting; the dramatis personae on Bush’s stage (only Donald Rumsfeld gets Mailer’s respect); the great expectations set on the independent players–Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudoph Giuliani and John McCain; and the political value of stupidity.

Second, the “what it takes” question about Bushes in national politics, and Mailer’s take on the “loutish, low” son’s struggle with the father who couldn’t get himself reelected.

Third, a Mailer summing-up on “what had happened to American politics;” the wounds of the Cold War and the rise of corporations; and the very perishable grace of democracy itself.

Fourth, the prophetic novelist’s vision of the coming clash between Republican “crusade and mission” and the Democratic inclination to “do something anemic.”

Fifth, John Kerry, the Windsurfer, who learned to navigate the faintest breezes of politics without finding a cause he’d fight and die for. And, finally Mailer’s rueful speculation about the route that may have led from Hipdom in the 1950s to Abu Ghraib in a new century.

Or, if you like, listen to an edited 20-minute version of the whole conversation.

And hear, please, why we must honor this man. What Norman Mailer has written through the years (I have been wolfing down his 1280-page auto-anthology, The Time of Our Time) is an episodic history of misgivings about the free society we live in. To put it another way, we seem all to have arrived in this Bush-bedeviled summer of 2004 at what is for Norman Mailer a chronic nightmare. “A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve,” he wrote in his famous hipster essay, “The White Negro,” back in the halcyon days of 1959.

Some other timeless Mailer crystallizations along the way:

1960, on the Kennedy nomination: “Panic was the largest single sentiment in the breast of the collective delegates as they came to convene in Los Angeles… [Kennedy] looks young enough to be coach of the Freshman team, and that is not comfortable at all… So the boss is depressed, profoundly depressed. He comes to this convention resigned to nominating a man he does not understand, or let us say that, so far as he understands the candidate who is to be nominated, he is not happy about the secrets of his appeal, not so far as he divines these secrets; they seem to have little to do with politics and all too much to do with the private madnesses of the nation…”

1962, on the early rise of Conservatism, in a debate with William F. Buckley: “I think somewhere, at some debatable point in history, it is possible man caught some unspeakable illness of the psyche, that he betrayed some secret of his being and so betrayed the future of his species. I could not begin to trace the beginning of this plague, but whether it began early or late, I think it is accelerating now at the most incredible speed, and I would go so far as to think that many of the men and women who belong to the Right Wing are more sensitive to the disease than virtually any other people in this country. I think it is precisely this sensitivity that gives power to the Right Wing’s passions.”

1966, on LBJ at war in Vietnam: “The great fear that lies upon America is not that Lyndon Johnson is privately close to insanity so much as that he is the expression of the near insanity of most of us, and his need for action is America’s need for action–not brave action, but action, any kind of action, any move to get the motors going. A future death of the spirit lies close and heavy upon American life, a cancerous emptiness at the center which calls for a circus.”

1991, on the campaign politics of George H. W. Bush in 1988: “George Bush was keen, lean, competitive, and wanted the presidency as much as any vice president before him. Without it, he had nothing to anticipate but an enduring reputation as the ex-vice presidential wimp. Male pride is insufficiently appreciated. It can approach earthquake force. George Bush was not to be stopped by the likes of Dole or Dukakis; George Bush knew that you win elections by kissing the great American electorate on the mouth–‘I want a kinder, gentler nation’–and by kicking the opposition in the nuts.”

1996, on the unsatisfying choice between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, and on discovering that the ballot in Provincetown did not list Ralph Nader as an alternative: “Would America never have a major candidate to give again some promise that politics could become as great and exciting as our dream? There was something immeasurably insolent in the way politicians patronized the American heart. Marilyn Monroe once commented on the way strangers could be awfully rude to her. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘when they say those things, they think they’re only doing it to your clothing.'”

1998, in his Foreword to The Time of Our Time: “So, yes, the question was alive–would greed and the hegemony of the mediocre–the media!–triumph over democracy?”

So, yes, Mailer is alive–a fearless shark indeed, tearing through the pretty pretenses of our public scene, bursting through the surface of his own words. Norman Mailer has been a celebrity since his mid-twenties, with the success of his war novel, The Naked and the Dead. Yet remarkably he has somehow remained a citizen, one of us, a dreamer, an idealist, a visionary and a regular genius in conversation at the bar. Listen in.