...questions of power...

Having kept the secret a secret for thirty-three years, W. Mark Felt at the age of ninety-one emerged on May 31 into the sunlight of network television to say that it was he, Felt, employed in the summer of 1972 as associate director of the FBI but operating undercover as the notorious "Deep Throat", who had set up the hit on the Nixon Administration.

...Felt's return to a world far different from the one in which he had tipped the Washington Post to the criminal modus operandi of President Richard Nixon's Praetorian Guard, furnished Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with lines of inquiry that led from a burglary at the Watergate complex to a congressional investigation, to the arrest of twenty-seven federal bagmen, and eventually, in August 1974, to the president's resignation. The story unfolded over a period of two years, the nonpartisan anger of an aroused, citizenry sustained by the boisterous freedoms of a not yet muzzled press, supported by the actions of the Justice Department and by a ruling from the Supreme Court, grounded in the belief that a democratic republic could defend itself against the arbitrary abuse of power.

But that was long ago and in another country, and who now can imagine, much less pay to see, a politician (any politician, Democrat or Republican) coming into Congress, as did Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina in the winter of 1974, to speak for three hours on the topic of the Constitution; or an attorney general resigning his office, as did Elliot Richardson in the autumn of 1973, rather than carry out an unethical order from the White House...

President Nixon was forced from office in 1974 because democratic government was thought worth the trouble of preserving...Thirty-one years later, the Bush Administration commits crimes of a much larger magnitude - tampering with the last two presidential elections, a war of imperial conquest in Iraq marketed under the labels of holy crusade, America's civil liberties systematically disassembled or destroyed - but it doesn't occur to anybody to suggest that maybe the president should be impeached. The American people might know (on their own reconnaissance if not from court documents) that their government is both incompetent and corrupt, but who among them wishes to be reminded of the fact? The story of a democratic republic confronted with a mortal threat to both the letter and the spirit of its laws doesn't draw a crowd, gets in the way of the regularly scheduled programming, doesn't sell the high-end soap.

The television anchorpeople knew that the Watergate story once had been important, but they were hard-pressed to remember why. The cable news channels rounded up opinions from Nixon's prominent and still surviving associates, among them Henry Kissinger ("I don't think it's heroic to act as a spy on your president when you're in high office") and Charles W Colson, who wanted "kids to look up to heroes" and thought it shameful that Nixon (that wise prophet and noble statesman) had been airlifted out of Washington in a cloud of undeserved disgrace...Nobody cared to make the point that Kissinger in his capacity as Nixon's national security adviser routinely tapped Nixon's phone, or that Colson, as a White House special counsel, once proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and served seven months in prison for his work as a moonlighting thug.

The newsweeklies approached the story from the perspective of film critics. Time [Magazine]observed that Deep Throat as played by Hal Holbrook in the movie All the President's Men was more impressive than the theatrically impaired Felt...Newsweek questioned the movie's integrity, describing it as a far too simple tale told with a too sentimental emphasis on right triumphant over wrong. What the story really had been about was Washington office politics, ambiguous and sly, a run-of-the-mill bureaucratic intrigue blown out of proportion by a "Great Scandal Machine", giving rise to "antiauthoritarian excesses" that undermined everybody's faith in the wisdom of the White House, the fair-mindedness of the intelligence agencies, the good judgment of the Pentagon. President Bush, thank God, was doing his best to restore the people's trust in government. If sometimes he didn't succeed in his efforts (occasionally careless with the facts, often "too cocky", almost arrogant in his attitude toward nettlesome subordinates), at least he knew the right direction in which to steer the ship of state.

...from an appropriately anonymous source identified as "a senior advisor" to president George W. Bush and quoted last October in the New York Times Magazine..."That's not the way the world really works anymore ... we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

The second observation, borrowed from Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, I came across (as one of the texts cited in a book proposal submitted by two scholars at the University of Illinois):"Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying ... The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labour of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge ... [marks] the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power".

Joseph Goebbels [of] Nazi Germany taught the same lesson in what we've since come to know and love under the headings of aggressive marketing and corporate knowledge management. The propaganda minister understood that arguments must be crude and emotional, instinctual rather than intellectual, endlessly repeated...The language facilitates the transformation of a democratic republic into a military empire, moving on from a world in which words once were held accountable for their meanings, to a land of make-believe, securely defended, as is customary with empires, by "the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power".

Excepted from the article, Moving on
by Lewis H Lapham
Harper's Magazine (August 2005)