Was I
a good American in the time of George
Bush?
Too many of us have done too little to stop the crimes of this
White House. We are waking up but what took us so long?
By
Rebecca Solnit
03/15/07 "The
Guardian" -- - 03/14/07 --- -Was I a good
American? How good an American was I? Did I do what I could to
resist the takeover of my country and the brutalisation of my
fellow human beings? How much further could I have gone? Were
the crimes of the Bush administration those that demand you give
up your life and everyday commitments to throw yourself into
maximum resistance? If not, then what were we waiting for? The
questions have troubled me regularly these last five years,
because I was one of the millions of American citizens who did
not shut down Guantánamo Bay and stop the other atrocities of
the administration.
I wrote. I gave money, sometimes in large chunks. I went to
anti-war marches. I demonstrated. I also planted a garden,
cooked dinners, played with children, wandered around aimlessly,
and did lots of other things you do when the world is not
crashing down around you. And maybe when it is. Was it? It was
for the men in our gulag. And the boys there. And the rule of
law in my native land.
Before the current administration, it had always been easy to
condemn the "good Germans" who did nothing while Jews, Gypsies
and others were rounded up for extermination. One likes to
believe that one will be different, will harbour Anne Frank in
one's secret annex, smuggle people across the border, defy the
authorities who do evil. Those we scornfully call good Germans
merely did little while the mouth of hell opened up.
I now know the way that everyday life can be so absorbing,
survival so demanding, that it seems impossible to do more on
top of it or to drop the routine altogether and begin a totally
different life. There is the garden to be watered, the aged
parent in crisis, the deadline looming; but there are also the
crimes against humanity waiting to be stopped. Ordinary
obligations tug one way even when extraordinary ones tug the
other way. The Bush administration is by no means the Third
Reich, but it produced an extraordinary time that made
extraordinary demands on US citizens, demands that some of us
rose to - and too many did not.
Periodically, I would speculate on what was the most extreme and
radical thing I could do to stop the illegal prison camp at
Guantánamo; picture chaining myself to the gates of the Senate,
becoming one of those activists who takes up residence outside
the White House or takes over a TV station to get a message out.
I wanted to do something so epic that it would turn the tide,
stop the crime. Then I would consider that the best approaches
were probably already being taken, by the heroic lawyers at the
Centre for Constitutional Rights and other human rights
organisations, and I would write another cheque and some more
letters and feel a little futile and a little corrupt.
These days Americans seem to be waking up one at a time, groggy
and embittered, from the hypnotic nightmare that was the Bush
administration's one great success - spreading a miasma of fear
and patriotic submissiveness that made it possible to mount an
illegal and immoral war, piss on the bill of rights, burn the
constitution and violate international charters on human rights
and prisoners of war with widespread torture. None of the
sleepers seems to remember that they were part of the legions
who obeyed the orders to fear and hate - but we welcome the
latecomers into our ranks anyway.
What took them so long? How could people believe that a fairly
defanged country, one we had been bombing since the first Gulf
war, was an apocalyptic menace in a world where most nations
were well-equipped for mass civilian murder? A year ago, the
turning point was marked by the comedian Stephen Colbert's
volley of (accurate) insults delivered to Bush's face, in the
guise of giving the keynote address at the Washington press
corps' annual dinner. He was just aggressively ignored by the
mainstream media. Perhaps Katrina turned the tide: the
indifference, incompetence, and obliviousness of the federal
government was so gross that its pedestal melted.
And there were others who were in resistance all along. I
remember with admiration the Japanese-Americans who came out in
the months after 9/11 to testify that they had been incarcerated
en masse during the second world war, not for what they did but
for who they were, and they were not going to remain silent as
the same treatment was meted out to Arabs and Muslims. I
remember the way that 20,000 of us in San Francisco came out to
shut down the business district the day the war broke out, and
the huge marches before and after. I remember the few
congresspeople - mostly African-American - who dared to stand in
opposition early on. I went to Camp Casey outside Bush's
vacation home in Texas and spent a day with Cindy Sheehan, who
gave her life over to stopping the war after it took her soldier
son. Others did as she did. Some of them are my friends.
There is resistance. But if it were enough, the crimes would
have stopped, the war would have ended. When it does and they
do, some will have been heroes. Some will have been honourable
but moderate, in times that did not call for moderation. And
some will have consented, through inaction, to crimes against
humanity.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark: The Untold
History of People Power, and Wanderlust: A history of walking -
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