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	Make-Believe Democracy by Lewis Lapham   ..Given a good or necessary reason to deploy the military virtues of courage and self-sacrifice, we can rise to the occasion of Bastione or Guadalcanal but as a general rule we don’t poke around in the cannon’s mouth for the Easter eggs of fame and fortune. And that given any choice in the matter, we prefer the civilian virtues, the fast shuffle, the smooth angle, the safe bet. The shortage of patriots during the Revolutionary war obliged the continental army to reward its seasonal help with a 160 acre gift of land. The troops who crossed the Delaware River with George Washington on Christmas Eve, 1776, completed their terms of service on New Year’s Day, 1777. And they refused to march north to the battle of Princeton on January 3rd, until each of them had been paid $10, and $10 in gold. They were not accepting the scrip being passed around by the continental congress. $10 in gold before they would perform another six weeks of labour on the fields of honour.   President James Madison encountered similar difficulties in July, 1814, when a British Army arrived in Maryland, intent upon laying waste to the countryside. Madison issued a requisition for 93,500 militiamen from what were then eighteen American states. Approximately 6,000 volunteers showed up for the Battle of Bladensburg where they were promptly dispersed, in the words of a correspondent for a Philadelphia newspaper, ‘like a flock of birds rising on the sound of a single gunshot.’ In my own family I have some experience with this. My great-grandmother’s grandfather was a man named Henry Dearborn and he was the Secretary of War in both Jefferson Administrations, and when Madison was elected President and became President in 1809, Dearborn was given the greatest gift in the patronage of a federal government and he was made, at the age of sixty five, the collector of customs in the port of Boston, a truly magnificent opportunity for self-improvement, and he conducted his office from a tavern on Milk Street, one block from the docks, at a round table. And in the centre of the round table there was an upturned top-hat. Top-hats were very much in fashion in the early part of the 19th century and he sat at the table in summer with a glass of madeira, in winter with a warming pot of rum. And arriving and departing ship captains placed in the top-hat tokens of their appreciation and esteem. And this wonderful state of affairs lasted until an awful day in June of 1812 when a letter arrived from Madison and paragraph one appointed Dearborn Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army and paragraph two instructed him to move north and take Canada by September 10th.   There was no United States Army in 1812; there were various state militia. Although he had been a very fine middle-ranking officer in the Revolutionary war, Dearborn had no particular skill as a general, and in the long list of incompetent American generals, Dearborn’s name stands well near the top of the list. He lost, or failed to appear at, every skirmish throughout the Fall, and finally managed to get to the southern shore of the St Lawrence River in February of 1813 in command of 2,000 New York militiamen. And he drew his sword and pointed north and gave the order to steer for victory and Montreal. Nobody moved. And after an awkward silence, a Captain stepped forward and said, ‘General, I wish to make four points that perhaps you have overlooked. One: It is very cold and a bad day for boating. Two: The people on the other side of the river are our friends; it is they upon whom we depend for our livelihood and trade, and beside that, they have guns. Three: We are members of the New York State Militia, not the United States Army which as you know, General, does not exist, and therefore Four: In a word, we are not going. But you, Sir, are welcome to do so, you may cross at your leisure and if you do, goodbye, good luck and God speed.’   And Dearborn, who was not by any means a born imperialist, saw the wisdom in each of these four points and turned sharply around, pointed his sword at Boston, resigned his commission and went back to the table, the top-hat and the warming pot of rum.   That is the American attitude, and it was true in the Civil War. The Sons of Liberty were as wary of the Civil War as they had been careful to avoid enlistment in the Revolutionary war and in the war of 1812. Once it was understood that the march on Richmond wasn’t the holiday jaunt anticipated by the orators north of the Potomac, the federal government was hard-pressed to find soldiers willing to trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath were stored. Between July 1863 and April 1865, the Lincoln administration sent draft notices to a total of 776,000 men. 161,000 failed to report; 86,000 paid commutation fees (which is hiring a substitute), which in today’s money would have been about $3700; 73,000 provided substitutes, and 315,000 were examined and ruled exempt. And only 46,000 were herded into uniform.   The notion of a citizen army enthusiastically assembled under the flags of honour, duty, country emerged from the circumstances of the Second World War. America had been attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbour and by Germany in the Atlantic Ocean. Peace was not an option and the American people didn’t need to be reminded by a clucking of newspaper columns that our enemies possessed weapons of mass destruction. They understood that the objectives were murderous, and the sense of a common purpose and a national identity bound together in a nucleus of war sustained the government’s demand for 10 million conscripts in the years 1941-1945. But this forced structure collapsed under the weight of the lies told to the American people by three American presidents trying to find a decent reason for the expedition to Vietnam. Our victory was declared inoperative in April 1975 and for the next quarter of a century when mustering the role of the all-volunteer army the recruiting officers took pains to liken it to a reality television show. Not the kind of outfit that takes casualties, a vocational school, a summer camp, a means of self-improvement for young men and women lacking the advantages of a decent education and health care, and foreign travel.   It had come to be understood that the Pentagon was in the advertising business projecting images of supreme power in sufficiently heavy calibres to shock a French intellectual and awe an American president. Nobody on the production staff was supposed to get hurt. That was a stated policy that is the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. And that recent events in Iraq have wrecked the sales pitch, which is why the Bush Administration is having a great deal of trouble finding recruits for the American supremacy. I have somewhere here a piece of paper that will say what we are now doing is offering prospective, boots-on-the-ground bonuses of $90,000 over three years, $20,000 in cash, $70,000 in supplemental benefits. Also the forgiveness of college loans, the promise of citizenship to foreign nationals, who now comprise three per cent of the American army, the acceptance of older recruits, now eligible to the age of 39, a general lowering of the intellectual and physical requirements, wavers granted for poor test scores, for chronic illness, in some instances for the disability of a criminal record; the chance of a generous pension and an opportunity to study the art of restaurant management.   And yet despite the inducements and the Army’s annual $300,000 appropriation for a seductive advertising campaign, the ranks continue to dwindle and thin; the generals speak of exhausted, degenerating, broken force levels, and recruiting officers give way to unmanly bouts of depression when they fail to enlist more than one soldier for every 120 prospects to whom they show the promotional brochures. And we now have a desertion rate that stands at 31 per cent – or 3.1 per cent of the active inductions and of the new recruits coming into camp, 30 per cent depart within six months of their arrival.   The point of going through that is to explain, is a gloss on the Bush second and inaugural remark ‘All the living tyranny and hopelessness can know’ and so on, that the United States will. But the United States will, with what? It is a question that the Administration simply passes over in silence.   As to the religious superstition and the numbers of people who believe in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation – at a press conference briefing in Washington last March, the National Association of Evangelicals declared its intent to lend a hand in the making of an American politics faithful to the will and abundant wisdom of God.   The pastors handed around a twelve-page manifesto for a Bible-based public policy entitled An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility. And the first few sentences of their joint statements stand as fair indicators of the tone in which they describe the rest of the program. As follows: We engage in public life because God created our first parents in his image and gave them dominion over the earth. We also engage in public life because Jesus is lord over every area of life. To restrict our stewardship to the private sphere would be to deny an important part of this dominion, and to functionally abandon it to the evil one. To restrict our political concerns to matters that touch only on the private and domestic spheres is to deny the all-encompassing lordship of Jesus.   And that is the kind of thinking that we have in Washington. I don’t know whether I mentioned this already but Bush is a born-again Christian, so is Tom De Lay, the majority leader in the House of Representatives; so is Condoleezza Rice; so are one hundred and thirty members of the House of Representatives. And by and large they take the point of view that we are all, or they are all, on God’s side, as is the United States of America. And the guarantee of terrible punishment for God’s enemies combined with the assurance and the ending both happy and profitable for God’s business associates provides the plaque for the left behind series of neo-Christian fables, thirteen volumes, sixty-two-million copies sold that have risen in popularity over the last ten years, in concert with the spread of fundamentalist religious beliefs, and the resurrection of the militant Christ.   The co-authors of the books, Tim La Hay, and Jerry P Jenkins, tell the story of the rapture on that marvellous and forthcoming day when the sage shall be lifted suddenly to heaven and the damned shall writhe in pain. Like most of the prophets who have preceded them, they express their love of God by rejoicing in their hatred of man. Just as the Old Testament devotes many finely wrought phrases to the extermination of the Midionite, also to the butchering of all the people and fatted calves in Moab, La Hay and Jenkins give upward of eighty pages to the wholesale slaughter of apostates in Boston and Los Angeles. And you read the book and these are gays, blacks, secular humanists, liberals, New York newspaper columnists and so forth.   And the twelfth book in the series delights in the spectacle of divine retribution at the battle of Armageddon and I quote: ‘Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.’   So we have people, quite a few people, wandering around the United States with those notions in mind and the faith-based initiative descends upon the multitude in the glorious cloud of unknowing that over the last twenty years has engulfed vast tracts of the American mind in the fogs of superstition. It isn’t only the fundamentalist crowd, it’s also the challenges and the teaching of evolution mounted in forty-three states, attested to by the – Bush himself is reserving judgment as to whether evolution is a sound theory.   There was a report actually by the Committee of Concerned Scientists last year about this time; it’s sixty people, very eminent men and women in the United States of all scientific disciplines, physics, biology, medicine, the environment and so on, and the twenty Nobel prizewinners among the signatories, and what they were saying was that when they were called to Washington to testify before a Congressional Committee or agency of government on scientific questions – environment, stem-cell research, climate change, the possibility of developing a miraculous cruise missile that can intercept incoming missiles in outer space, which is an entire fantasy, and on which we’ve already spent $150-billion; it doesn’t work and it can’t work, but it is a faith-based initiative – but when they come to testify, and if their testimony doesn’t meet the ideological expectation on the other side of the microphone, they are dismissed. The Bush Administration doesn’t really want to hear it.   We have another condition – which refers back to the sentences I read at the beginning of this talk about the history of Western Civilisations told in American schools – is a general dumbing-down of the American citizenry, and this is not an accident, and it is not a mistake. It’s most of what passes for education in the United States deadens the desire for learning, the miserable results accurately reflect the miserable intent. And Woodrow Wilson was very clear on this in 1909; he was then the president of Princeton University, and he gave the annual speech in Trenton, to a federation of high school teachers, and he says that what we want is one class of persons deserving of a liberal education, and a much larger class of persons fit to perform specific manual tasks.   That was the intention in 1909 and that is still the practice. I mean the attempt is to bring into being a contented labour force that will not ask impertinent questions and will not learn how to think, because if you learn how to think and ask impertinent questions, then what would happen to the consumer market? What would happen to the political discourse? And ignorance is viewed as a natural resource, far more valuable to the prosperity of America than oil or timber.   Finally we have the media, and the media is content to tell fairytales. It considers itself – I’m talking about the large mainstream media – and it looks upon itself as a function or servant of the government. There’s less and less of a distinction between news and entertainment. Media doesn’t see how it serves any purpose to vilify President Bush as an ignorant lout forwarding freight for a rapacious oligarchy, when, if you think carefully, it’s just as easy to see in him almost the entire catalogue of virtue, listed in the Boy Scout law: helpful, cheerful, courteous, friendly, obedient and clean.   I mean where is the profit in vain regret? And where is the joy to be gained by selling America short? This is the attitude. Somewhere the sun is shining and only a blind man doesn’t look for the silver lining when clouds appear in skies of blue.   A month ago, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that among the anti-terrorism devices it acquired at a cost of $4.5 billion since September 11, few have proved effective. The radiation monitors of ship terminals can’t differentiate between radiation emitted by a nuclear bomb and radiation seeping out of cat litter, ceramic tile, or a crate of bananas. The metal detectors at airports can’t be trusted to notice a hand gun. Now when this news story comes out, the media does not indulge in the vice of sarcasm, simply nods wisely, says the country is in a moment of great peril and we must give the Homeland Security another $4.5 billion and hope that next time they’ll get it right.   It’s our glory as a people to prefer the word to the deed, and the image of the thing in place of the thing itself. and we had a very fine example of that again within the last month, in the pages of Newsweek. On May 9th the magazine had published a brief bulletin anonymously sourced but government-sponsored, to the effect that the interrogators in the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed down the toilet a copy of the Qu’ran. The report provoked riots in Pakistan, Afghanistan and killed at least seventeen people. And by May 18th Newsweek was accepting the blame for any damage that might have been done to America’s good name and reputation in the world.   Now this is to me an instance of great timidity on the part of the press, because the item had been given to Newsweek by the government, and then Newsweek is so nervous that it’s only two sentences, they typed up the two sentences and then carried it back to the Pentagon and showed the Pentagon what they had written, and the Pentagon made no objection. That this kind of thing goes on has been known for over a year. I mean Harper’s Magazine four months ago had a story coming our of London to the same effect. That here was suddenly a government official was responsible for the news, and the government changed its mind after seeing what happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And so did the editors stand on their right to free expression, did they observe that it was the American military occupation in Iraq, not Newsweek that was stirring up trouble among the Arabs? No. Never in life, the editors followed orders, fell on the grenade and took one for the team, which is the proper way to behave in a make-believe democracy: show the flag, blow the bugle, learn to see what isn’t there.   (There were also questions from the audience. The first was about what Lewis Lapham thought it would take to reinvigorate debate and dissent and political consciousness in the USA).   Lewis Lapham: For the last thirty-odd years we’ve had the belief that all the important decisions are made by the market, and your freedom comes to you from the market and from money. And the truth is that freedom is made by men, and it’s made with politics. And we have been largely politically demobilised, I think, since the Reagan administration.   If there is another terrorist attack on the United States, if we have another – if somebody poisons a reservoir or sets off a bomb, or shoots down an airplane or assassinates a foreign politician, then I am afraid that the opposite would happen and would have an even more frightened, more punitive, less discussion. So I hope something happens first that will energise the store political consciousness in large numbers of people, but it’s very, very hard to do with the electronic media, the bread and circuses that we are now amusing ourselves to death with.   Questioner: Referring to something which Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Saturday Evening Post a long time ago, at the end of 1929 in an essay: he was talking in terms of the Americas and Europe and he made the observation that while France was a land, England was a people, but he said of the United States it was harder to utter because it was an idea. Is America still an idea?   Lewis Lapham: I think it’s losing that, I think Fitzgerald’s right, but I think under the pressures of the last, say, fifty-odd years, which is when we begin to build the National Security State after the victory of World War II, we become more and more like our enemy, the Russians. People get more afraid to speak their minds, to laugh out loud, to laugh at themselves, the humour, if you read back through Harper’s Magazine, which is one hundred and fifty years old and occasionally we do anthologies, where I read back through the writing of past years and you can see that there’s a sense of humour that shows up in the ‘20s and in the ‘30s, even in the ‘40s, begins to change. And the voice becomes more frightened, not as willing to laugh at itself, not as generous. The jokes used to be the have-nots making the jokes about the haves, and now the jokes are the haves making fun of the have-nots as a paltry form of satire, I think. And the idea also requires education. I mean where do you find the idea, part of it you find in the study of American history and the teaching of American history as a creed, or as an idea, as a very courageous story, they don’t teach it that way any more.   The other problem of course is television, because television tends to isolate people within their own niche of sensibility. You can sit there with your magic wand of a remote and only look at people just like yourself. So there’s a loss of social capital.   (Lewis Lapham has been the editor of Harpers Magazine for the last 30 years). Visit the related web page
	European Plea for Democracy by Leo Cendrowicz The Guardian / Telegraph European Union   Brussels. October 15, 2005   The European Union has been the work of the political elites and needs radical change to become democratic, the European Commission's vice-president has warned.   Margot Wallstrom said the union needed dramatic reforms to gain popular support. She said the EU had to transform itself economically: 20 million unemployed in the EU was a "totally unacceptable" figure.   "This has been a project for a small elite, a political elite," she said. "That has worked until now. Has it ever been alive, European democracy? That is a very good question."   Mrs Wallstrom was speaking at the launch of the EU's communications strategy — dubbed Plan D for representing democracy and debate. It comes in response to surveys showing that public trust in the EU has fallen, from 50 per cent late last year to 44 per cent this northern spring.   "It's clear that to convince Europeans to the European idea, the institutions have to change," she said."The institutions must lead by example in their ability to reform and to be more transparent and more efficient."   Mrs Wallstrom, a devoted European federalist, announced plans to set up national debates across Europe on what citizens want from the union. Commissioners and senior EU officials will go to the Continent debating students, young people, politicians, trade unions, academics and business groups.   The commission also hopes to recruit celebrities and sports stars to tour the Continent as "goodwill ambassadors" for Europe. Mrs Wallstrom said that after the no votes in the Dutch and French EU constitution referendums earlier this year, she thought European governments appeared to be afraid of public opinion.   Mrs Wallstrom, a former Swedish social affairs minister, is noted in Brussels for her outspoken views. Last year she became the first senior member of the commission to write a weblog, which attracted attention for mixing descriptions of her family life with often controversial thoughts on EU politics.   She believes EU institutions should connect with people through TV, radio and the internet, using celebrities and public figures as UN-style goodwill ambassadors.   She noted that globalisation had created uncertainty, with people asking tough questions about job security, pensions, migration and living standards. The EU needed to grasp these opportunities rather than use globalisation as a scapegoat, she said.   But Plan D was not about resuscitating the EU constitution. "This is not a rescue operation," she said. "It is very difficult to see how it can be brought to life, so it will remain on the backburner. Constitutional engineering" to make the document more palatable would be insulting".
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