[Mb-civic] Not the Sun King after all - Andrew J. Bacevich - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Not the Sun King after all

By Andrew J. Bacevich  |  September 15, 2005

ON THREE occasions in the past four years the United States has suffered 
catastrophic failure. Since each of these disasters -- 9/11, the Iraq 
quagmire, and now Hurricane Katrina -- occurred on George W. Bush's 
watch, many Americans hold the president personally responsible.

But hammering Bush amounts to an exercise in scapegoating that lets 
others -- starting with ourselves -- off the hook.

In fact, the underlying explanation for these calamities lies in the 
delusions to which Americans in recent years have readily subscribed. 
The defining ''truths" of the age have turned out to be anything but true.

When communism collapsed in 1989, Americans naively believed the world 
had been transformed, profoundly and irrevocably. History itself had 
supposedly ended. Democratic capitalism had triumphed, settling the last 
really big questions. With nothing left to fight about, inhabitants of 
the ''new world order" would tend to more mundane concerns: for some, 
the creation of wealth; for others, consumption.

The Cold War segued into the so-called Information Age. Thanks to the 
computer and the Internet, knowledge was ostensibly empowering the 
individual as never before. Americans were told and naively believed 
that in a networked world risk, uncertainty, and surprise were becoming 
obsolete. At long last, man controlled his own destiny.

Furthermore, as it entered this Information Age, the United States 
occupied a position of unrivaled preeminence. Economically, 
technologically, and above all militarily dominant, the United States 
claimed for itself the mantle of ''indispensable nation." Americans were 
told and naively believed that permanent and unquestioned global primacy 
was theirs for the taking. The Unipolar Moment was at hand.

Embodying this claim to supremacy was the presidency itself. By the 
1990s, the only office that mattered was the Oval Office. Surrounded by 
courtiers and sycophants, his every gesture recorded, his every word 
parsed, the president became a cyber-age version of the Sun King. 
However naively, Americans attributed to ''the most powerful man in the 
world" something approaching omnipotence.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/15/not_the_sun_king_after_all/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050915/79a8412b/attachment-0001.htm