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Paris to Provence, 2006
Waynesville, North Carolina, October 15, 2004
John Kerry has what could almost be described as rugged good looks. Almost. He is tall, he is confident, he is Lincolnesque. But his face is just a little too long for modern times. In the age of television he fails. Oh, he is better looking than, say, Jay Leno who also has a famously too long chin. But he isn’t as funny as Leno. So, for-get-about-it. How can this guy be president? He is not that good looking and he isn’t funny.
What the hell are we talking about here? Good looks? A sense of humor? Yeah, we all love that in a man (and in a woman, too). But we are talking about the presidency of the United States here and there is really only one other major contender besides Kerry in these times (though we love Nader of course, he’s not a contender). Kerry’s only real opponent would be the President himself, George W. Bush, who no one could ever describe—no one in fact, has ever even attempted to describe-- as handsome. “Cute” was used when he was a young draft dodger—sort of the way homely dogs are thought of as cute by giggly girls. But no one has ever even attempted to describe the physical features that if slightly altered might make George W. Bush handsome (as they do repeatedly for the almost handsome Kerry). Why? Because the comics, the columnists, the commentators and people like myself are too busy trying to think of solemn non-hurtful ways of talking about the importance of George W. Bush’s complete lack of intellectual curiosity and moral integrity to waste time on what are his irrelevant physical shortcomings.
Now that we have that part out of the way, let’s talk about the things that matter in a president. George W. Bush does not read. He doesn’t even read the newspaper. He says he gets his news from his advisors so that it isn’t filtered.!? He likes to watch TV. He particularly likes the sports programs. His response to the social issues of the 60’s like civil rights and the war in Vietnam was to smoke a lot of pot, snort a lot of cocaine, chase a lot of you know what and drink himself into oblivion until his 40th birthday. As a businessman trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, Bush, jr. couldn’t find oil in Texas.!? His company failed and he had to be bailed out by the Saudi Royal family who were of course very closely tied to his hapless father. The bail-out included enough seed money to get himself a piece of the Texas Rangers baseball team where he became the front man in a ponzi scheme to get a free baseball stadium on the public dole. Long before those fiascos, in more dangerous times, he had managed to use his family connections to leap frog over hundreds of applicants already on the waiting list to get into the Texas Air National Guard despite a 25th percentile rating on the flight aptitude portion of the Armed Forces Qualifying Test. His floundering around during his draft-dodging guard duty years was so pathetic that he was unable (even with a degree from Yale and his family connections) to get into the University of Texas Law School.!? The paper trail of his dereliction of National Guard duty during that period was so convoluted and mystifying that it tripped up even the legendary Texas journalist and CBS anchorman, Dan Rather. We can only guess how Bush eventually got into the Harvard Business School, the place where he presumably learned how to run a Texas energy company into the ground and escape as a millionaire (Gee! It sounds like a low rent practice run for the Enron scandal without the scandal!). Presumably it was in the Harvard Business School that Bush perfected his style as a non-hands-on leader which he tried out successfully as the lackluster governor of Texas and now has achieved total plausible deniability for his own government’s colossal mistakes by denying any problems and expressing complete confidence in his “people.”
But what do we know about John Kerry other than that he fails the handsome thing? One of the goody goody things we talk about in civics class, at PTA meetings and graduation awards nights is that the greatness of America lies in the fact that any child can become the president of the United States if he or she just works hard enough. The idea that having as a personal ambition at age ten to become the president of the United States might be a little creepy is never discussed. At least not back there when a child is at the age 10 level. The discussion goes underground until someone actually arrives at the stage on which the presidency of the United States is at stake. Only then do the arrows start to fly. And they fly back into the deep past. John Kerry grew up in a career diplomatic family in which he viewed public service as a natural progression in his father’s footsteps (so did George W. Bush for that matter, but look what he did with his youth). It is reported that Kerry’s high school friends knew of his presidential ambitions. They teased him but they took him seriously. Since Kerry has been running against George Bush, this Kerry history has somehow been turned against him in a way that seems to say that the idea of wanting to be president from a young age is not something a child should take seriously. It’s just a metaphor for getting ahead or whatever. A lifelong desire to become the president of the United States must indicate some sort of megalomania. Much better to squander the first 40 years of your life on sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as Bush did, and then get religion. Well, I don’t know which is right. But there is ample evidence to indicate that John Kerry’s presidential ambitions shaped his life early on in a serious and responsible way.
By the time Kerry was in his final years of college, the Vietnam War was influencing everything that every young man did. Those with political or at least public goals, like Kerry, Bush, Cheney and Clinton (and me, too, for that matter) were trying to decide how best to take a stand on the war. The options seemed fairly clear: Go fight in Vietnam, work to maintain draft deferments, or take one of the many options of resistance. The political climate in America in the 60’s was such that any kind of resistance or anti-war stance by a draft age man with any future political ambitions, especially if those ambitions included the presidency was a minefield. I, myself, had never had anything more than an occasional fantasy of ever running for political office. But as the early chapters of my essay, “What did you do in the War, Daddy?” indicate, I did have a sense that whatever your plans for the future, what you did about the war would always be one of the most important moments in your personal history and so you better do it right, that is, according to the dictates of your conscience, or it might come back to haunt you. The intricate genius of Bill Clinton’s mind is never more evident than in his own poignant statement on the draft (now posted on my web site) or in his accounts in his autobiography of his Hamlet like ruminations on the draft while at Oxford.
The public record seems to indicate that George W. Bush certainly never took presidential ambition seriously until after he was 50 years old (though despite his profligacy he may have been secretly planning his ascendancy to power all along). I first began to learn about him, after he had already become the governor of Texas. I met Bush face to face while he was governor in 1996 at a photo opportunity when I chaperoned a state wide group of high school student council representatives to visit the governor in his office at the state capitol in Austin. I remember that Bush reminded me of the “PK’s,” the preacher’s kids, of my childhood. They were always the wildest kids in school and somehow frequently the most disingenuous, the least trustworthy, the loosest cannons. Bush’s two-bit Napoleonic pretensions impressed me even then. What has since emerged about Bush in the 60’s is not that he was so much like a preacher’s kid or even a would-be emperor as just a dissolute child of privilege. He cleverly used that sense of entitlement to arrange for himself what was effectively a deferment from the dangers of war while still allowing himself to play dress-up in a military uniform and claim that he was serving his country. Had he not maintained the character of a dissolute child of privilege throughout his National Guard service, and instead actually distinguished himself in that service (a feat that wouldn’t have been any more dangerous or any harder than being a good cheerleader at Yale had been), Bush might even be viewed today as a man of substance instead of the hollow pretender and dim bulb that so many view him as.
Kerry’s Vietnam War era story on the other hand is far more interesting than any other I have known, including my own. Knowing, it seems, in the old school way, that if you were going to be a politician—knowing that if your career was going to be about statesmanship and patriotic cohesion—Kerry recognized early on that he would need a real war record. There is some evidence (from an interview, for example, he gave this summer to Peter Jennings of ABC news) that his sense of being a child of the 60’s (an older child, admittedly, but a 60’s child no less) may have been enough to give him pause about the morality of military service (as it did Clinton and me). I seem to have read that he tried to get a deferment to study in France where the Paris Peace Talks were soon to begin. But when denied that, he turned straight into the storm and joined the Navy, volunteering on his second tour to go to Vietnam and command a swift boat, one of the most dangerous assignments in the war. In these hyper-reactionary times, I heard a sad young demagogue, named Mark Hyman somberly declare on my local Sinclair owned ABC television affiliate that the fact that Kerry joined the Navy (instead of just going straight into the army) was proof that his patriotism was disingenuous. A product of the right-wing Sinclair television conglomerate famous for blacking out Ted Koppel’s Nightline listing of the American soldiers killed in Iraq, Hyman ( vice-president for corporate relations at Sinclair and a Naval Academy graduate with no combat experience) failed to discuss whether he himself was less of a patriot for having joined the navy or whether Bush’s declaring in his application for admission into the “wink, wink” Texas Air National Guard, that he “did not wish to serve overseas,” had anything to do with Bush’s patriotism.
You can look at this story a thousand ways and it always comes back at you with the same logic. John Kerry paid his “go to war” dues. George Bush didn’t. But that fact, as substantial and important as it is, would not be enough for me to vote for Kerry over Bush. I am after all against all wars on principle. No! what has put me forever in the Kerry camp is the fact that he publicly and actively spent the most crucial years of his life, his post Vietnam military years, the beginning of his political career, defining publicly what was wrong about war in general and what was horrific about the Vietnam War in particular. I know from my own experience that we were all conflicted back then about what to do about the war and about the draft. Kerry was a man of action. He lived through the same watershed in American history that I did and his choices proved more heroic than mine, and certainly more heroic than George W. Bush’s.
Make no mistake here. I do not equate heroism with militarism. I equate heroism with moral courage. John Kerry has a record of moral courage with regard to the Vietnam War (both serving in it and later working to end it) that is superior to mine, to Bill Clinton’s, to Dick Cheney’s and to George W. Bush’s.
People have said to me that what happened 30 years ago during the Vietnam War has no bearing on us here and now. I could not disagree more. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. George W. Bush lived through the Vietnam war with no documented acts of conviction for or against the war, made no effort to fight for his country if he believed in the war and no effort to protest the war if he didn’t and now that he is president of the United States (and out of all personal harms way) lives in a fantasy world of post World War II self righteous military recklessness sending a new generation of young men and women from state national guard units (not to mention trusting, loyal military regulars) to their deaths in a senseless war that he himself would surely have tried to weasel his way out of in 1968. The greatest disasters in the post world war II era have been the artificial nation building of North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, and the artificial establishments of Israel and Iraq. There will likely never be a pacifist president of the United States. But John Kerry is the closest thing we have ever had. 35 years ago, knowing that his anti-war activities would always be there to haunt him if he ever ran for public office (and they have) wore his anti-war efforts as a badge of honor. In fact he considered (and still considers) those efforts instrumental in bringing the war to a close. The combat he saw in the Vietnam War and the combat he saw in the Vietnam peace efforts he lead make him far more qualified to negotiate a peaceful end to the mess George Bush has made in Iraq than Bush or Clinton or even Ralph Nader for that matter.
And finally, it is important to understand this point about Kerry’s so called flip-flopping. The long profiles that I have read in the New Yorker and the New York Times, and viewed on PBS’s Frontline, among other sources, indicate to me that John Kerry is anything but a flip-flopper. We live in a strange time when a man like George W. Bush (with no international expertise or military combat experience) can become the president, lie to the U.S. Congress and the American people in order to get them into an unnecessary war he didn’t even bother to think about how to get out of, can be seen as decisive, while John Kerry with a long and distinguished career of diplomacy in the internecine halls of Congress an acknowledged expert on foreign relations, a decorated war hero and a celebrated anti-war activist can be seen as indecisive because he weighs every point of view before taking action. Only in America, sad to say, can a nation with such a high standard of living abide a president like George W. Bush with such a low standard of intellectual curiosity and moral courage. His phony educational reforms, his utter disregard for the environment, for the rights of the poor and the middle class, for civil rights and civil liberties, for the United Nations, for his European allies (perhaps former allies) and his reckless and feckless economic policies have made George W. Bush’s America a dangerous Leviathan, a reptilian monster, feared and despised around the world and by at least half of us here at home.
“But everybody wants to come to America,” you say. I don’t think everybody does. Many want to come, sure. But for what? Peace? Freedom? Prosperity? Of course they do. Don’t misunderstand me. I believe that here in the U.S. we have more peace, freedom and prosperity than just about anywhere else on earth. But do you believe that we have more or less than we did before George W. Bush took office? Oh, well, that’s because of 9/11, you say? Surely that horror gives George W. Bush an alibi. But an alibi for what? For incompetence? For greed? For reckless endangerment of his military forces and his own citizens? For the wholesale slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afganistan? Remember the Saudi Arabian, Osama bin Laden? He was responsible for 9/11. Until George W. Bush invaded Iraq against the advice of the UN Security Counsel, against the pleas of millions of protestors here at home and around the world, even against the eloquent protests of the Senate’s senior statesmen like Robert Byrd and, yes, even John Kerry, the enemy was Osama bin Laden and his lunatics who committed the 9/11 slaughter. Now the enemy is…well…hell. Who is the enemy now? Is it the terrorists responsible for 9/11 or just terrorists in general? Or just terrorists in the abstract? Who are we spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting in Iraq? Is it terrorists? Or is it insurgents? Journalists and military analysts are calling them insurgents these days. The President still calls them all terrorists. Who are we fighting here? I mean who are we fighting there? And what is an insurgent anyway? The old fashioned word for insurgent is just “rebel.” But as anyone who has ever lived in the southern United States knows, “rebel” can be either a term of endearment if you are a white racist or another word for “terrorist” if you are the black victim of white racism. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out in his book, “9-11”, “terrorism” is a term applied these days to the violent acts committed against your country’s civilians by your enemies. Under that definition the U.S. itself has been defined as a terrorist state not only by our enemies but in, for example, the case of Nicaragua in 1986, by the World Court, to which the United States itself (as a member of the UN Security Council) is a charter subscriber, but to which it responded to the Court’s order to stop terrorizing the tiny country of Nicaragua (and killing thousands of its civilians) with contemptuous disregard.
John Kerry has to bear some responsibility for voting to give this particular president the power to do anything that involves war (or for that matter anything that involves handling sharp objects!). But it is clear when you read Kerry’s speech on the Senate floor just before the vote in 2002 to authorize Bush to go to war if he had to, that though he (Kerry) despised Saddam Hussein, that though he felt that the intelligence he had been given by the President suggested that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he must be removed from power, Kerry made it clear over and over again in that speech that in voting to give the President the power to go to war if war was a last resort, he did not believe that anything like a last resort had yet presented itself. He made clear that any resort to force must involve the United Nations and a broad coalition of America’s allies. He made it clear that he was not endorsing any unilateral military action by the U.S. unless there was an undeniable imminent threat to American security. When Bush rushed headlong into Iraq against the caveats of Kerry and others, against the best advice of his Secretary of State, Colin Powell (the military man in charge of the last war against Iraq), against the advice of his own father and his father’s close friend and former national security advisor, General Brent Scowcroft (in an eloquent and heart rending plea in the Wall Street Journal six months prior to the American invasion of Iraq), and a chorus of America’s closest European and Middle Eastern allies, it became clear once and for all what most of us, including, I suspect, John Kerry, had felt in our guts ever since George W. Bush emerged on the national stage in the 2000 presidential campaign: (Sorry, but now is the time to use my father’s favorite expression of derision for swaggering drugstore cowboys) George W. Bush simply did not and still does not seem to have “sense enough to pour piss out of a boot with the directions written on the heel!”
Many are perplexed by how a man with such an apparently low IQ could have become the president of the United States (unless of course those who voted for him have even lower IQ’s). Well, the irony is that George W. Bush’s IQ is evidently not that low. Studies that have analyzed public records of standardized tests that George Bush has taken seem to indicate that his IQ is about average for an American president. One psychologist, University of California professor Dean Simonton, acknowledges that Bush’s IQ is probably around 120-- about the same as what is believed to be the IQ of John Kennedy (and me too for that matter). But in a UPI article published in January of 2004 Simonton stated that unlike Kennedy and other “average IQ” presidents he had studied he was unable to find much evidence that Bush tries hard to use the brains he has. “He has very little intellectual energy or curiosity,” Simonton is quoted as saying, “relatively few interests, and a dearth of bona fide aesthetic or cultural tastes.” Simonton’s diagnosis was that Bush seemed to have a low level of “openness to experience.” As for the 25th percentile rating Bush reportedly received on the flying aptitude portion of the Air Force qualifying test, intelligence expert Linda Gottfredson is quoted in the same UPI article and in the Dallas Morning News as pointing out that Bush scored in the 95th percentile on the leadership skills portion of the Air Force test. The flying aptitude portion of the test was essentially a spatial ability test (such as figuring out which way a wheel in a machine would turn when in contact with another wheel or as my father might have put it, which way to turn the boot to get the piss out), whereas the leadership portion of the test in which Bush did so well was for more intangible qualities like, well, leadership. And therein lies the key to Bush’s true intellectual incompetence as demonstrated by his performance in the presidential debates with John Kerry. Gottfredson tried six months ago to put the best spin on her analysis of Bush’s brain by saying, “What do you want in a president—spatial ability or leadership?” I think I know what my father (a depression era farm boy, barely literate who nevertheless as quarterback led his high school football team many times to victory and who went on to become an accomplished military aircraft mechanic) would answer if he were alive. Without understanding the “spatial” mechanics of the ship of state and the properties of the troubling waters through which the ship must be steered, a man with leadership qualities alone might be able to lead (that is to say, to fool) all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but some would always be wondering, “Where the hell is this cheerleader we’re following leading us?”
Once Bush’s foolish adventurism in Iraq began in earnest, all of us, including John Kerry, were trapped in a quagmire that makes Vietnam look like déjà vu all over again. It sounds a little dramatic to say it but I see John Kerry as having the potential moment in history (potential moment, I say) that Abraham Lincoln had in the election of 1860-- that is, of saving the union. The only way we are going to get beyond terrorism, beyond international derision, beyond the implosion of internal civil liberties caused by social paranoia and xenophobia, and refocus our attention on our national dream of being the world’s beacon of justice and democracy is for someone to step forward as Lincoln did and appeal to “the better angels of our nature.” Though I believe George W. Bush has the kind of determination that Lincoln displayed throughout America’s long and bloody civil war, I don’t believe he would be able to understand (or maybe I should say, be curious enough to understand), much less articulate, the subtle historical nuances those few words Lincoln delivered in his first inaugural address have for us today. I believe John Kerry has the physical and moral stamina and the intellectual understanding and courage to take up Lincoln’s mantle. What his Republican detractors call “flip-flopping” seems to me to be a kind of intellectual triangulation (spatial ability, if you will, that Bush lacks) of political consensus, practical reality and moral courage. And that is why I’m going to vote for Kerry even if his chin is a little too long, his positions a little too centrist and his arguments at times tediously deliberative. Kerry is not a left-wing liberal which I would have preferred that he be. And though his right-wing detractors led by George W. Bush have sought to label him a “liberal” (a code word of the right that now carries the same force as the word “communist” had during the McCarthy era), Kerry doesn’t even meet that test. He is a centrist like Bill Clinton and most of his democratic presidential predecessors. His left-wing critics have a role to play and as Robert Jensen of the University of Texas has suggested, on the day after the election they need to start playing it. The anti-war, anti-imperialist and social justice and environmental movements must remain strong no matter who is elected. But the tired old left-wing argument that the worst possible right-wing president will wake the country up and move it to the left is no longer an argument, it is a reality. Kerry might not be able to move the country as far to the left as the left would like, but right now, to borrow another Lincoln phrase, Kerry is our “last, best hope” to end the carnage of the George W. Bush administration.
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