Three Senators Gore

For Americans in general, history is most notable for teaching no useful lessons. Thanks to a haphazard educational system and a media that reflects the fantasies of whatever governing clique happens to control opinion through publicity, we often behave like new-minted amnesiacs, with no sense of a national past. Today only the dwindling company of those of us who served in World War II seems to have a sort of generational memory of another America drastically different from the one that we are marooned in today. For us there was, first, the relative prosperity and sense of the modern that we were born into during the 1920s and then the shock of how fragile it all was when Depression struck. Meanwhile, upstairs in the attic there were the picture books of World War I, a war in which our fathers had gone overseas to fight to no apparent good end. For ghoulishly inclined boys, certain books hidden in the attic were irresistibly fascinating: photos of dead soldiers--ours and theirs on the European western front, like an ongoing real life/death Halloween. My own father was a pilot in the original U.S. Army Air Force. Movies of the period testified not only to the glamour of flight but to chivalric knightly duels in the air, all of which left my grandfather (the first Senator Gore, 1907--1921, 1931--1937) cold. Of course, he was blind; more to the point, in the Senate he had fought President Wilson's efforts to get the United States into what Gore presciently called World War One, a European affair whose deep roots were of perfect irrelevance to American interests: After all, what was it to us whether the German kaiser or the French republic dominated western Europe?

In 1912 Gore had been in charge of much of Wilson's successful campaign for the presidency. Once Wilson was elected, Gore pressed for domestic reforms, particularly in agriculture. But Wilson, an Anglophile, was ever more concerned with the European war. By 1916 the two men were less than congenial. Since Gore suspected that Wilson was eager for us to go to war against Germany, he decided to sit out the 1916 presidential election. But he was needed to campaign for the party. Gore said he would help out only if the slogan were "He kept us out of war." Wilson agreed; Gore stumped California. Election night the California vote, thanks to the continental time difference, had not yet come in, and Wilson went to bed convinced that Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate, had won. Then Gore telegraphed from California, predicting Wilson's margin of victory in the state and in the nation. Safely reelected, Wilson forgot his pledge to keep us out of war and broke with the first Senator Gore as he set about his weird plan to make the world "safe for democracy," a notion as batty as wanting to make the world safe from greed or bad temper or terrorism. Thanks to a flood of hypocritical rhetoric this odd schoolteacher was the uncomprehending director of what was to be a modern age in which the political climate everywhere changed as nationalism replaced patriotism or, to quote the faith-based historian John Lukacs, "Nationalism, rather than patriotism; the nation rather than the state; populism rather than liberal democracy, to be sure." After Wilson successfully remade the map of Europe, a new spirit was abroad. Baron Frankenstein's monster "nationalism" came to life with a number of bolts of lightning in history's lab. The monster then metamorphosed into a veteran of World War I, Adolf Hitler, who confessed that despite his German Iron Cross, "I was not a patriot; I was a nationalist." Though his natural fatherland was Austria and his adoptive homeland, as our heel-clicking neocons would say, Germany, his primary loyalty was to der Volk, the whole Germanic tribe, a Wagnerian concept, a bit heavy on the percussion side, and so a dreadful new game was now afoot.

But back in 1914 our fathers' generation was simply faced with the rise of nationalism, sometimes known as nativism. The clans were only starting to gather, as they are doing today in the Mideast: Sunni, Kurd, Shia. As of 1939 Hitler was conducting Europe's nationalist orchestra. Lukacs usefully writes, "Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a people, and is often a political and ideological substitute for religion both modern and populist."

Arguably the Age of Modernism gave us the nation-state in which we can all be reduced to administrative numbers, while nationalism and its first cousin racism are on the rise. That is the background to our somewhat incoherent American present: a sort of replay of 1914. During the ill-omened year 2006 the sky god (no populist he) has subjected us to every sort of trial by weather. We now face the midterm election, when a feckless media will tell us nothing we need to know about either politics or the weather. Similarities to 1914? The principal world currency of that era, the British pound sterling, had been barely rescued from collapse by the American banker J.P. Morgan, who had also been aware that no single banker could for long sustain a world currency, a role best played by a wealthy allied state at war alongside Britain. Wilson, reelected in 1916 with the Gore slogan, "He kept us out of war," brilliantly spun us into a war to make the world safe for democracy.

In 1914, as now, war clouds cast great shadows across the land, and the dollar, like the pound before it, is weakening.

Today, as the American republic crumbles at home and stumbles abroad, we face two crucial elections: one to decide whether or not the gas-oil junta will continue to control the legislative branch, and a second election (2008), which will reveal whether or not we have drifted into a nationalist dictatorship with a chief executive who claims to have inherent rights to spy on us the people while imprisoning, without due process of law, anyone suspected of past, present or future terrorism--this last category the dream of every dictatorship. Amnesiacs in chorus can now be heard chanting "It can't happen here," but, dear Virginia, it is happening here. Read the extraordinary Professor Yoo, whose bulletins from the Justice Department admitted that, although the Constitution does enumerate the actual powers of the president in both war and peace, it also somehow leaves room for great brutal inherent powers of the sort that Professor Yoo, now retired to academe, would like to see codified as additional powers for the leader of the homeland. G.W. Bush, whose Attorney General Gonzales regards the Bill of Rights as a negligible barrier to an omnipotent unitary executive shorn of every check and balance the founding fathers put in place to preserve for us those liberties we had won from our royal master, England's king--rights later to be enshrined in the national psyche by civil war at home and by two foreign wars against totalitarian governments.

Had we the good luck to possess a patriotic rather than nationalist media the alert part of the dozing populace might have understood a most revealing exchange on just how we are governed when C-Span showed us a Senate committee coping with Attorney General Gonzales's evasions. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-Cal.) quizzed Gonzales on why the administration preferred to wiretap American citizens without a federal warrant as law required. Gonzales simpered adorably, saying, in effect, what, after all, did it matter? The war on terrorism is the most vicious war in human history. And we are confronting Satan himself. The Lord of the Flies. If a few rules and regulations get broken, you can't break eggs without making an omelet or something. I'm not, of course, reproducing the great lawman's actual winged words. For those curious, here is the actual exchange:

Feinstein: Congress did not leave the question open. FISA explicitly says that warrantless surveillance can only continue for 15 days after a declaration of (continued on page 176) Gore (continued from page 78) war. Now that you've had an opportunity to examine Hamdan, is it still the Department of Justice's opinion that it does not affect the legality of the Terrorist Surveillance Program?

Gonzales: Of course there's been no declaration of war here, so we can't take advantage of that particular provision. Our judgment is that it does not affect the legality of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, but let me explain--

Feinstein: Whoa, but if I might just interrupt you. Then you're saying clearly that the Authorization for Use of Military Force does not carry the full constitutional weight of a declaration of war? [Pregnant pause]

Gonzales: Yes, that is corr--. When you declare war--well, when you declare war--

Feinstein: I understand that--

Gonzales: That triggers diplomatic relations that maybe nullify treaties, so there's a big difference. There's a reason why Congress hasn't declared war in 60 years. But they, they, they've authorized the use of force several times. Clearly there's a difference, yes.

Feinstein: But you're creating a caveat now and saying that the 15 days does not extend to the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

Gonzales: No, what I said was, was we can't take advantage of that provision under FISA because there's been no declaration of war. Maybe I misunderstood your question. I'm sorry, Senator.

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And thus it was that Gonzales gave the game away. We are not at war except for the one Bush has unconstitutionally declared on his own so that he can keep quacking, "I'm a wartime president," while Gonzales has been inspired to justify the illegal Iraq war by involving all sorts of Yoo-esque "inherent" powers that accrue magically to a wartime president even, apparently, in the absence of such a war.

Now let's shift the angle of our ongoing narrative.

In an earlier America we could, at the polls, rid ourselves of a Congress and president so at odds with the Constitution and the decent opinion of the American people. Unfortunately, even if a clear majority should vote against the junta in November and again in 2008, certain interested managers can electronically reverse the vote and continue the totalitarians in office. Already stories have begun to appear that there had been talk of suspending the 2004 presidential election as potentially divisive (one would hope so!); 2008 will be even more so. Historically, most republics tend to turn imperial, thus stimulating presidents or their heirs to become hereditary royals: Julius Caesar, Napoleon (I and III), the Genius of North Korea. And now the Family Bush. The first royal dynasty of England, as readers of Shakespeare well know, was the family known as Plantagenet. Has W, the first or last, noted the similarity in name between the Bush dynasty of Kennebunkport, Texas (yes, I've moved it) and the Plantagenets, who were a Norman French family that had taken its name from the golden flower of a plant known as genet, or broom--a shrub or (!) a bush?

I am striking the imperial note because some journalists are beginning to take seriously the pretension of various Bush family courtiers. The word dynasty is often used ironically in dealing with American families that go into politics and often get lost there. But this is a father-to-son presidency each in his way incompetent, so unlike the Adams family--which produced two of our most brilliant presidents--or the two presidents Roosevelt, who were distant cousins. The proudly undistinguished Bush family is in place only because vast corporate interests placed them there to exempt the very rich from fair taxation, while quietly giving the knife to those socially meliorating policies of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, two emperors that did well by the people at large as each was highly alert to the intricacies of empire management. Those innocents who still think that our electoral processes will presently produce the best man or woman to rule over us must realize the fix is probably already in. Even without hackers changing the tallies of electronic voting machines, corporate money spent in great quantities will determine the succession. Unless, of course, we the people focus both on a wise leader and a coherent cause, we will never again decide an election. So, can such a person be found? Or be elected?

As I write, the presidential field is teeming with me-too nullities. In addition there is the intelligent Mrs. Clinton, who somehow managed not to grasp that the war and all that it stands for is only the second most important issue before us. If she has been edgy on the subject, she has herself been the victim of so many smear campaigns by a Republican machine that has no other politics than energetic libel and slander on a monumental scale. Why is war the second great issue? Because in back of it are great financial forces whose outriders are neocons, preaching perpetual war for other Americans to fight and a handful to profit from.

What then is the most important issue? The preservation of a poisoned planet. Here a member of the Gore cousinage, Albert, a former vice president as well as himself Senator Gore the third, has taken his stand with apparently no scrutiny of recent polls--or even significant support from those who like to call themselves progressives. Not unlike Senator Gore the first, he has taken an original if somewhat lonely course based upon intelligent conviction and years of study, which has now caused him to tell us "inconvenient truths" about our shaky environmental estate--much as the first Senator Gore warned us in 1917 about the folly of joining in a European war. Thomas Pryor Gore was no pacifist, but when Wilson proposed conscription of free Americans to fight his war for him Senator Gore the first warned of Wilson's "unique attempt to substitute democracy for military despotism in Germany." Installing Wilson's conscription, the senator noted, "would incur the risk of substituting military despotism for democracy in America." Also, in his opposition to the approaching World War, he introduced a joint resolution in the Senate proposing an amendment to the Constitution that would require a popular vote before a declaration of war could be made by Congress. Had such an amendment passed we would have been spared Vietnam and the Bushite wars for oil and profit. Gore the second was very much school of Gore the first in constitutional matters. And now his son, the third Gore, proves to be willing to go to the root of what is ailing us: corporate America in its joyous stripping of the world of any barrier or safeguard to obtain fossil fuel.

Senator Gore the first knew he risked his Senate seat by taking on President Wilson's dreams of glory through war. Senator Gore the third emphasizes that his father, Albert Sr. (Senator Gore the second), "was ultimately defeated by the Nixon-Agnew team," a cabal up to no good, "because [Gore II] opposed its onslaught on the constitutional principles" that each of the three senators had sworn to defend and uphold. Politicians who back such positions against our corporate rulers then and now usually suffer. Gore the second was smeared and defeated for the Senate, and his son felt that politics had no more appeal to him personally. Gore the first, when ordered by the Chamber of Commerce of Oklahoma City to vote for war or face political oblivion, wired them back: "How many of your membership are of draft age?" After three terms in the Senate he was defeated in the Democratic primary of 1920. In 2000 Gore the third was defeated for president despite a strong majority of the popular vote in an election of great corruption, as yet uninves-tigated. He can take comfort that his predecessor, Gore the first, was reelected in 1930 on exactly the same platform that he lost on in 1920. The voice of the people is not the voice of God, but when they are relatively unpropagandized they will declare and vote their interests. Yes, the third Senator Gore, in his campaign to save the planet for everyone, could easily prove to be the winning candidate for 2008. Corruption has had its lush innings. Now it is the patriots' duty to rebuild the republic and--well, why not?--save the world at the same time.