Something Has Snapped

Pondering Pol Pot and others

by Alan Bisbort

Source: American Politics Journal, March 10, 2005.

I had William T. Vollman wrong.

While most of the experimental novelist's work (Whores for Gloria, "Seven Dreams" series) seems indecipherably weedy to me, his review of Philip Short's new biography of Pol Pot was as sculpted as an ornamental garden. It was, in fact, one of the most informed and impassioned I've read in the New York Times Book Review (2/27/05) in a long time. If one is understandably hesitant to wade into Short's 537-page biography of the monstrous Khmer Rouge leader, Vollman's review makes for essential reading.

One sentence in the review in particular hit me with the force of a harpoon:

"Here [in Cambodia] the incremental buildup of harshness in the revolution differed from its Russian analogue, where, as Trotsky famously put it, ‘something snapped in the heart of the revolution' after the assassination attempt on Lenin in 1918."

This drew me up short, giving me, as Edmund Wilson famously put it, "a shock of recognition." Indeed, it called to mind exactly what has happened to America after the terror attacks of 9/11. With a shock, I recognized an indisputable truth: Something has snapped in the heart of America's experiment in democracy.

Born as it was in bloody revolution and forged by one of the deadliest civil wars in world history, the nation's democratic institutions are strong, but strength alone won't assure their survival. The Bill of Rights is comprised of words on paper; we do not really know if they exist unless we exercise them. And we must exercise them now, more so than at any time in our history.

Why? Because we are fighting against the darkest instincts of the human mind and spirit. We are battling a cult of fear and violence that has lorded over human action since our species emerged from the caves. We are fighting people who hate with a clarity that they believe is dictated to them by their god — a god of exclusion, not inclusion. These are people who would take money away from the young, homeless, elderly and infirm and give it to those who have too much on their plates already. We are fighting racists, misogynists, pathological liars and sociopaths who have a license to kill and torture in our name with impunity. We have placed the wheel of state in the hands of a driver whose mind and body are both impaired, and he's traveling at warp speed in the wrong direction. We have met the enemy and he is one of us. We are, in short, fighting Pol Pot on our own soil.

And while it would be wrong to suggest that 230 years of American democracy could disappear overnight — or even after 8 years of rule by George W. Bush, as hard as he has worked to undermine it — the ivy covering our democratic edifice has suffered some serious thinning. Think of our democratic "way of life" as a mighty oak tree with a number of dead limbs in its canopy and a spreading splotch of blight on its bark; though the root structure appears to still be intact, it's anyone's guess as to how it will grow from here.

First, a clarification about the above, and what is to follow. To those of you who feel my intention is to trash my country — that I'm an "America hater" — I respectfully echo the words of the Vice President: Go f$#@ yourself.

That said, we're in deep trouble, brothers and sisters. It is time for many thousands more of us to speak up and speak out and, if needs be, make a spectacle and a nuisance of ourselves. Power does not exclusively exist in a gated luxury highrise or a fake ranch in Texas; it is yours and ours, by inalienable rights, for the taking.

What good will it do, you ask? It will do incalculable good. That is, you cannot calculate the good until you've taken the first step, even if that first step is to tell your sibling or spouse or parent that you do not share their right-wing views and, furthermore, that you feel it is your duty as a patriotic American to tell them exactly why this is so. And then do so every time they voice some talking point from Messrs. Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and Rove. Perhaps it will do no more "good" than to shut them up, to stop them from sending out their toxic (and wrong) ditto-headed opinions, in your presence. And, that is a good start.

My case in point is Norman Sommer.

Two years ago, Norman — a retired salesman living on a fixed income in a modest Florida condo unit — sent me an earnest, impassioned and what I thought at the time was a quixotic "plan of action to take back our country." This was his one-man campaign to counterbalance the right wing. Norman remembers well the warnings of Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. He has seen too many non-fictional echoes Lewis' contention, in the person of Joseph Coughlin, the anti-Semite "radio priest" who ruled the airwaves in the 1930s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon, George Lincoln Rockwell, John Birch, Kenneth Starr, Henry Hyde, Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Though he's physically slowed by health problems, Norman is mentally and spiritually alive like few other people I've ever met. Starting with nothing more than his initial mass blind mailing, Norman has, two years later, already convened the inaugural convention of his Umbrella Movement, at which Ed Asner was the keynote speaker, and he has just completed his first Leader's Conference in Miami.

Norman Sommer makes me proud to be an American. He, like so many thousands of others of patriotic Americans, never flinched from speaking the truth following the events of 9/11, no matter what threats or curses were laid upon him.

Howard Dean is another one who has never given into fear or hatred. Two years ago, he was a veritable nobody, holding the first meeting of his own "umbrella" presidential campaign, at which about 20 people showed. No one gave him a snowball's chance in hell to make a ripple outside of Vermont. But, two years later, he is the face, heart and soul of a rejuvenated Democratic Party.

For those of us who love our democracy and history — with all of its checks and balances, formerly diverse opinions, occasional sidetrips into lunacy and decency — it sometimes feels as though we're down to our monuments in Washington D.C., the wishful thinking of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Given the precarious state of the nation's financial health — the U.S. dollar in free fall against other major world currency and the national debt requiring $2 billion in foreign currency per week simply to service the interest — we may be down to our skivvies by the time this all plays out.

Consider the following, then, a message of tough love: Get your head out of your collective ass, America, before it's too late. George W. Bush and his neoconservative henchmen are taking the rest of us down the slippery slopes of history with them.

Speak up and speak out and don't stop until the ghost of Pol Pot cries "uncle."

© 2005, 1996-2004, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc.
reprinted from American Politics Journal