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A trace of humility might serve America better than Texas diplomacy. There are moments in history when loving your country means deploring the individuals who represent and purport to lead it. After a depressing burlesque of an election in 2000 -- its result now declared in error by the New York Times --I held my fire and hoped for the best from George W. Bush. And his first act as president was a huge tax break for the same filthy-rich one percent who had just picked our pockets clean.
Kevin Phillips' new book Wealth and Democracy confirms our worst fears about the most outrageous flow of wealth from the poor to the rich that ever occurred under a democratic government. In the past 20 years, the 400 wealthiest Americans increased their average net worth from $230 million to $2.6 billion, while Middle America actually lost ground in adjusted income. The 500 largest corporations tripled their assets and profits while eliminating five million jobs. The average pay of the 10 best-compensated CEOs rose from $3.5 million to $154 million -- 4,300 percent.
It's hard to isolate the most devastating statistic. How about the harvest of 1983-1989, when 60 percent of America's $6.7 trillion in added wealth -- $3.9 million per household -- went to the wealthiest half of one percent? Revelations about the tactics and accounting practices that created this wealth indicate that they literally mugged us, some of these moguls and CEOs, and drove away laughing while America stood in the road in its underwear. And the apparent illegitimacy of the president's ascension, the manner of it, the indecent cost of it in corporate dollars and corporate media -- it feels, for many of us, as if a coup has occurred, as if the puppet is in place and the ravenous one percent have succeeded at last in becoming the feudal overlords our ancestors came to this country to avoid.
War, as Lewis Mumford always said, is a cynical government's favorite stratagem for keeping us loyal and otherwise occupied while they rob us blind. In America it works like magic. Pinhead patriots revile Saddam or lost Osama or whomever the White House designates. Right-wing fundamentalists form our own Al Quaeda, armchair terrorists without the courage to become human bombs and hurl themselves at the towers of Baghdad or Tehran or wherever they imagine their own Great Satan to reside. My stomach churns when I read that war in the Middle East is supported by Apocalyptic Christians sniffing Armageddon. I'm with British novelist Zadie Smith, who writes in White Teeth: "The Book of Revelation is the last stop on the nutso express."Shame on every "Christian" bigot who stoops to defame and suppress Islam. Shame especially on Franklin Graham, and on the dismal morons in the North Carolina legislature who think our university freshmen are too impressionable to study the Koran -- will they become Taliban fighters instead of orthodontists?
What does it mean to be an American? It's only in America, they remind me, that I can say these things with little fear of a knock on my door in the middle of the night. If this were Colombia, the editor of the New York Times, which torments the president mercilessly, would rest on the bottom of the Hudson River. This is all very true -- but keep your eye on Attorney General John Ashcroft, who believes that the Final Solution for internal security is to suspend the US Constitution and tear up the Bill of Rights. The man entrusted with enforcing our laws is so ignorant of their spirit, it's improbable that he's an American at all. A double agent perhaps, or an alien. Are there any photographs of this dangerous man as a child?
Many of the people whose judgment I trust most feel deceived, disenfranchised, peripheral as they've rarely felt before. I've even heard tortured liberals talk about emigrating to New Zealand, as if it were some kind of Anglo-Saxon Shangri-La. The year of 9-ll was not a great, proud time to be an American. But it isn't post-traumatic hysteria that ails us. With its belief that no wealth is excessive and that scruples are for yokels, with its disdain for the weak and unfortunate, with its sagging health care system held hostage by heartless profiteers and its media culture sliding toward the unspeakable, the United States acts like a country with its id permanently detached from its superego. (Culture bulletin, New York City: A couple was arrested for having sex in a side entrance to St. Patrick's Cathedral, while a man with a microphone recorded them live for an FM radio program.)