FLOTSAM & JETSAM

Sam Smith is the editor of The Progressive Review..................PEACE.................Scott

Potomac playground

Sam Smith

Phil Hart said the Senate was a place that did things 20 years after it
should have. The same could be said of much of the rest of Washington.
In fact the yet-to-be accomplished U.S.-Iranian negotiations are now at
27 years and still counting.

The common presumption is that such tardiness is a function of politics.
In fact, it is more a product of culture, a culture founded on infantile
presumptions about the proper image one should present. Thus you find
grown men walking around the Pentagon with rows of ribbons on their
uniformed chests to remind everyone of their purported accomplishments.
You have ex-preppies plotting invasions against small countries to prove
their machismo. You have graduates of Yale and Princeton, whose daddies
- as LBJ said - wouldn't let them into the stock brokerage firm -
figuring out the best way to torture people for the CIA. You have drones
from business and law schools trained to think that certainty is an
adequate substitute for competence. You have journalists getting big
bucks for the privilege of sitting through endless, newsless White House
briefings and flying off with the president to his ranch. And you have
experts at think tanks trading arcane knowledge apparently unaware that
their resulting decisions might affect real people.

Although there are far more women engaged in this charade than was
formerly the case, the culture is primarily based on childish male
notions of strength and prowess. The women who get to the top in such a
culture often do so because they emulate its values rather than offering
an alternative, witness the cruel capitalism of Margaret Thatcher, the
indifference of Madeleine Albright to the deaths caused by Iraqi
sanctions, or the heartless aggression of Condoleezza Rice.

We don't read about this or hear about it because the mass media is a
fulltime participant in this never consummated ritual of manhood that
our politics have become. In tribal times, the ritual would have been
followed by manhood. In Washington, the ritual never ends.

The costs can be enormous. The Vietnam War, for example, was driven in
part by Harvard faculty members trying to prove their virility. Over the
last fifty years, a narcissistic establishment absorbed in its
self-image and indifferent to its consequences, has destroyed
constitutional government, made the United States hated around the world
and done so much damage to the environment that two major scientists
recently suggested that we better plan to find ourselves another planet.


The immediate problem is Iraq, now so much a mess that they had to call
in a commission, which is to say some adults. As Representative Frank
Wolfe put it, "there's almost a biblical thing about wise elderly
people. . . I mean, Sandra Day O'Connor is not looking for another job.
So they can speak truth."

In other words, to do in Washington what you're supposed to do, you have
to be retired.

What's missing here is rational adulthood. What's lacking is a town that
attracts those still full of energy but mature enough to put way
childish things and moral enough to serve their land ahead of
themselves. Instead we have a city overflowing with those whose egos and
ambitions trapped in almost teenage garb.

And so we have to wait 27 years for anyone to dare to suggest that it
might be wise to talk with Iran. That's not a thoughtful issue for
discussion on NPR or the News Hour. That's a matter for a therapist.

If George Bush has done one service he has brought the capital's
destructive childishness out of the closet. What has still to be
recognized, however, is that he is not an exception but merely a sadly
extreme example how the place really works.

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