Das Leben des Anderes

"The Lives of Others" deserved to win Best Foreign Picture, if you ask me (and you didn't). Set mainly in the pre-Glasnost days of East Germany, the movie tells the chilling story of Stasi (State Security) instrusion into the lives of a group of talented artists and intellectuals in an unnamed East German city before the fall of the Wall, and of the destructive effect of surveillance on sanity and human happiness. A fascinating character study, and a timely reminder of the dangers of trading freedom of speech and association for an illusory "state security."

Which brings me, as so often, to the question of America's move to the Right. Joe Conason is out with a book called "It Can Happen Here," a play on the title of Sinclair Lewis's (unreadable) old novel "It Can't Happen Here," (meaning also that It Can Happen Here), which is about the slide toward Fascism under Bush. I think we're at the point, actually, where we can say with some confidence that American liberal democracy will outlast Bush, and the "photo finish" I talked about the other day (liberal democracy versus January 2009) comes out of my own despair over the unnecessary destruction of American institutions that Bush introduced as part of a disorganized and hapless approach to seizing power for the "Unitary Executive."

Conason organizes familiar material using a Sinclair Lewis outline, trotting out the Lewis line about "Fascism coming to America wrapped in a flag and bearing a cross." I think books like his are part of a vital and healthy dissent, and essential to preserving the ideas of the Founding Fathers so that when Bush at long last leaves town, we can remember what we used to be about. It's interesting, however, to contrast what a finished totalitarian state, as depicted in "Das Leben," looks like compared to Bush's fumbling attempt to undermine American liberty. In the GDR (East Germany) an astonishing 200,000 citizens were offical informants for the Stasi, out of a population of about 15 million. That's penetration; that's serious intrusion. People were routinely arrested and imprisoned for saying things that sounded anti-state. The East German apparatus grew, naturally, out of Nazi practices as supplemented and made more "humane" by Soviet security techniques. These people were deadly serious about repression.

Bush is sometimes compared to Fascist leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini, and this is of course the most immediate historical parallel that comes to mind. The situations are distinguishable, however. Hitler came to power out of an intense, personal and monomaniacal desire to rule supreme. He had unquestionable gifts of organization and motivation, and he was animated by a malignant ideology of hate and violence. He had been imprisoned; he had been debased and made a political pariah after the Beer Hall Putsch; he had fought and been wounded in World War I; he had come out of a difficult Austrian background of failure and marginalization, and was attempting to seize power on the big stage of German resurgence.

Bush, on the other hand (and it's our saving grace), is not really like that at all. Instead of a fire-breathing, highly ambitious ideologue armed with ruthless motivation, he's a homegrown product of America's decadent period. He came out of privilege and limitless money. He had no ambition for 40 years except to get drunk and deranged on booze and coke. By the time Hitler was 43, he was Chancellor of Germany and head of the Nazi Party, and he achieved this lofty pinnacle beginning from rural poverty and without political connections. Bush's father had been, among other things, President of the United States. Bush is not talented, except as a content-free vehicle in the service of corporate interests. He has no idea what he's doing. He's not charismatic and he doesn't motivate anybody. Unlike Hitler's Germany, America under Bush continues to lose ground economically and in its relative standing in the world. If he's a Fascist, he's the laziest and most disorganized Fascist in the history of the movement. But as I say, we are fortunate that it is so.

I recall after 9/11 that British citizens, in particular, sometimes sounded skeptical about America's over-the-top reaction to this single event of invasion. They were, of course, prudent and circumspect in their grumbling, but the idea was simple: America needed to get over itself. Britain had been bombed nonstop by the Luftwaffe from 1940 until Hitler finally turned his attention to the East. Night after night, all the major British cities took a pounding, thousands and thousands of civilians died. Day and night, the whole country was engulfed in flames for nearly a year. And when the Russian invasion failed, Hitler experimented with his V-2 rockets on those same British Isles with devastating lethality.

A group of Saudi and Egyptian nut cases flew commerical airliners into office buildings in New York and into the Pentagon. We had clear warnings that it was coming, but the federal government was too lazy and incompetent to react. Bush, seeing a political opportunity for reelection, seized on the attacks and immediately divided American history into "before" and "after" 9/11. "Everything changed." The American electorate, ignoring the inconvenient observation that this inarticulate faker was the one who failed to react to the warnings in the first place, bought into the story line. This is typical of American hysteria. In a similar way, the changes wrought by the "Mayberry Machiavellis" are hyped and exaggerated. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales - they love pushing people around for political effect, such as Guantanamo detainees and Abu Ghraib prisoners, but with occasional notable exceptions early in their reign, such as Jose Padilla, they lay off American citizens. East Germany, as a police state, was the real deal, run with characteristic German efficiency. Its purpose was to perpetuate power. Bush, Cheney and the gang piss all over America's noble traditions without anything, really, to show for it. All the violations of due process, the intrusion of NSA spying, the squalor of the signing statements, invading Iraq, the elimination of habeas corpus for the helpless, the torture -- all of it, it's for nothing. Bush & Cheney's sole agenda is to redistribute tax dollars of ordinary Americans to big business with military connections, and they do this through exaggerating nonexistent threats from irrelevant countries.

In some ways, our overreaction to this, the comparison to great Fascist regimes of recent history, parallels the hysterical overreaction to 9/11. We take ourselves, our precious selves, oh so seriously. America does face serious external threats, such as the danger of a terrorist nuke, but about those threats we do almost nothing. It's boring, unglamorous work. Who cares about port security, or X-ray machines for cargo holds, or enforcement of Nunn-Lugar? How can that thrive on the front page? When Bush leaves office, the blogosphere will contract by 50% and we'll be left with all those niggling, real problems that were neglected during our orgy of Fascism Envy. A spoiled, indolent and seriously overweight populace will have to look then for the Next Big Thing to distract them.