In With 2007
Happy New Year, everyone. Here's hoping the commencent of 2007—that has a nicer ring than 2006, don't you think?—finds you happy and healthy and not too embarrassed by whatever you did last night.
The deaths of James Brown, Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein close 2006 on an odd and slightly unpleasant note; I was struck by this Washington Post piece on how many Washingtonians, including the President and House speaker Nancy Pelosi, blew off Ford's funeral. Tacky. Organizers had to haul in staff members to fill the seats—and there were only 77 seats. As for Hussein's death, now we learn (from the great John Burns) that even our government was concerned about the speed and manner in which Hussein was hanged.
The cacophony from those gathered before the gallows included a shout of “Go to hell!” as the former ruler stood with the noose around his neck in the final moments, and his riposte, barely audible above the bedlam, which included the words “gallows of shame.” It continued despite appeals from an official-sounding voice, possibly Munir Haddad, the judge who presided at the hanging, saying, “Please no! The man is about to die.”
The Shiites who predominated at the hanging began a refrain at one point of “Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!”— the name of a volatile cleric whose private militia has spawned death squads that have made an indiscriminate industry of killing Sunnis — appending it to a Muslim imprecation for blessings on the Prophet Muhammad. “Moktada,” Mr. Hussein replied, smiling contemptuously. “Is this how real men behave?”
You know that things are FUBAR when Saddam Hussein has a point.
Meanwhile, New Year's newspapers greet us with the headline that in Iraq the 3,000th American soldier was killed. His name was Jordan W. Hess.
I saw the film "Children of Men" not long ago. It tells a grim story of a world in which attempts to crack down on immigration have led to concentration camps and civil wars, and for reasons no one understands, the human race has stopped reproducing. The year is 2027—not so far off. Nothing about the film felt particularly implausible.
It struck me that we're seeing a similar apocalyptic tone in much of our culture these days, a sense that the world isn't getting better but is instead on the verge of slipping out of control. (And what's remarkable is that the villains in these portrayals are not just terrorists, but also governments, whose response to terrorism seems as bad or worse than the original provocations.)
Part of this mood of cultural grimness is surely due to terrorism and the madness of radical Islam. The rest of it is essentially the fault of President Bush, who more and more strikes me as exactly the wrong man for such a pivotal point in history. Not just the wrong man, but perhaps the worst man. His action in Iraq and his inaction on global warming create a double sense that we are destroying the order and stability of the man-made world—the very raison d'etre for government—and simply destroying the natural world. The man-made is not working; the natural is dying. Not dying—being killed.
Bush still has two years in office. It seems an awfully long time.
So 2007 will be interesting and important. At Harvard, there'll be a new president (the safe bet is still Drew Faust). Let us hope that whoever the next president is, he or she can restore the sense of values and idealism to that university.
In the country at large, our own president seems to have checked out; he does nothing on Iraq, and has abandoned any domestic policy initiatives altogether. (The biggest reason, in my opinion, why the Republicans lost control of Congress last November.) Is he paralyzed? It is hard to imagine that the White House can continue in this vein for another two years. Something must change.
The change, I think, will have to come from us—from bloggers, from activists, from voters, from citizens. From Americans. We began to try to take our country back by registering our frustration and discontent at the polls, casting out politicians who had failed the country in myriad ways.
I'm not sure what the means of protest will be in 2007, but I do believe that the people of this nation, though slow to rouse, are fed up with the leadership of George Bush, and, somehow, will fill the vacuum of his inertia, apathy, ignorance and stupidity.
"Our long national nightmare is over," Gerald Ford said, speaking of Watergate.
Our national nightmare is not; it won't be till January 2009. But in the time between then and now, we can act to ameliorate the worst of its consequences and hasten its essential end.
Happy New Year, everyone. Now let's get started.
