ot paying enough attention. And it’s the fault of the government. Everyone is to blame.’
Hmm, so we should sit down with Osama, see if we can work something out. Maybe return of the caliphate if we can keep Andalucia. After, that is, we’ve sorted out the Israeli-Palestine problem and found alternative sources of energy. It’s all so obvious when someone with Auster’s clear-eyed vision points it out.
And Richard Ford:
Ford watched Bush’s response to the first hostilities on American soil since the war of independence with frank dismay. Ford is a maverick, an instinctive independent who rides a Harley Davidson, loves to shoot and fish, and to roam at will. But to Ford, Bush is essentially a pawn. ‘If you asked him, “What is this that you’re doing?” he wouldn’t know. Maybe the people who pull his strings know it very well. But it’s a totally unsatisfactory policy. It won’t work. It’s wrong in conservative terms. It’s wrong in humanistic terms. [He has] an impulse that always makes him on the side of rich landowners and petroleum interests.’ Ford believes that the Republican gang in charge of the White House is wrecking his country and all it stands for.
Standing by the ocean in front of his summer house in Maine, Ford reflects that ‘this is the most important election that’s occurred in my life, including the election of JFK. It’s a much more significant election for the future of this republic than any other election we’ve ever had.’ Like Auster, Ford cannot forgive Bush for making political capital out of the War on Terror. For Ford, it’s a failure of leadership. ‘A better leader would sit down in front of the American people and not go on waving the bloody shirt of 9/11. He’d say: “We have to look at ourselves. We have to ask, Why do these people hate us?” But Bush will not admit a mistake. Will not admit doubt. Disastrous. Disastrous.’ Shaking his head, he says sadly, ‘I cannot stop thinking about all those young lives. Those kid soldiers. And all for what?’
Personally I don’t think phrases like “maverick” and “instinctive independent” should go anywhere near “rides a Harley Davidson”.
Now let’s hear from Wallace Shawn (who has “wrestled with a liberal conscience in a succession of avant-garde dramas”):
Shawn described to me how, having offered an article about 9/11 to several East Coast publications, his opinions were so comprehensively rejected at home that he was obliged to publish in Britain, in The Guardian. ‘It’s brainwashing,’ he says. ‘The fact is that a certain percentage of Americans completely buys the [Republican] brainwashing.’ Unsurprisingly, Shawn believes what many Democrats accept as an article of faith: ‘Of course there has been a right-wing conspiracy – the extreme right has acted in a very disciplined and ruthless and successful manner for 25 years.’ Shawn says he has found it difficult to write about Bush’s America: ‘Part of the problem presented by Bush and his gang is that they are so crude … When you are confronted with things that are so crudely brutal, the writer’s task of elucidating what lies beneath the surface is redundant. These people believe in cruelty, vengeance and brutality. I think Shakespeare would have done very well with these characters.’
These people believe in cruelty, vengeance and brutality. Well so do I. It exists. We saw it on 9/11, and we’ve just seen it again in Beslan. But perhaps that’s not what Shawn means.
Finally, Safran Foer sums up the case for the anti-Bushies:
‘I actually don’t think,’ he remarked, ‘that Bush is pure evil, but he responded [to 9/11] in the worst way, [and has] surrounded himself with such vile people that in a way it doesn’t matter.’ Safran Foer also concedes that he’s a metropolitan, a natural Democrat, but speaking for his generation, he says: ‘I don’t know anybody who supports the war. I don’t know anybody who voted for Bush [in 2000], and I certainly don’t know any one who’s going to vote for him this time.’
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