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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 17, 2002
Lenten thought
In writing about events "post 9/11" as I have been doing ever since I find myself both consciously and unconsciously taking sides. Consciously I know there is no neutral ground between our civilization and the terrorists and fanatics who threaten it. It is as Krishna explained to Arjuna on the battlefield: there is a time when the subtle arguments don't apply and "men of goodwill come to the aid of their country". Less consciously it cannot be a secret that my heart is with the Bush administration in the approach it has taken to the threat. But I would have been "onside" with a Gore administration which would almost certainly under the circumstances have responded to the threat in many similar ways; though it wouldn't have had a Bush or a Rumsfeld to lead the charge. Al Gore himself who has emerged from his tasteful post-election silence has left no doubt that he favours for instance going into Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. This is among the measures I think vitally necessary and I would have been cheering him on. I would not however have been among the journalists who would now be saying Thank God Bush lost the recount in Florida. He didn't even know the name of the president of Pakistan, can you imagine what a mess we'd be in if he had won? For I do not agree that a high IQ and a computer-bank memory are among the principal qualifications to run a major state. Like everyone else I underestimated George W. Bush before Sept. 11. But I could already see his strength as a leader. It has something to do with character with the moral will; with a kind of imagination that reaches for the essentials and is in constant movement between the general and the particular; which is capable of looking above details to the "broad picture" and keeps this in its head. This was the advantage of Mr. Bush over Mr. Gore that was revealed in the "town hall" debates where the latter tended to expose himself as a "details man". For the purposes of this comparison I discount the categories of "left" and "right". The American political system is such that almost all its politicians are anyway fairly close to the current middle ground. Paradoxically this is a function of the intense competitiveness of a two-party system. It does not leave the niches that get occupied in Europe by minor special-interest parties which may in turn find power well beyond their numbers through the formation of coalitions. The same kind of consensus around a middle ground existed when Canada and Britain had basically two-party systems. The U.S. Republicans lean a little to the right the Democrats a little to the left and swivel in a movement that is gyroscopic. And while I am myself inclined to lean to the right that is a conscious not unconscious process. My ideas and ideals belong more to the right side of the contemporary political spectrum -- my preference for liberty over equality. My unconscious "bias" if I may concede such a thing is on the contrary to the party that better reflects the spirit of the country; the party that does less whining. Mr. Bush and company are "centred" in this way have the kind of self-confidence that in the present events is crucial to making sound if difficult decisions. My unconscious support comes I now realize from my comfort with this "style". Like many Americans and even sympathetic non-Americans it does my heart good to hear people like Donald Rumsfeld speaking a plain unbureaucratic English avoiding euphemism or the posturing that gets one trapped in little lies. William Blake as ever had an aphorism for this: "No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings." But no support can be unqualified especially when it comes from me. While I absolutely refuse to give comfort to America's enemies at a time like this there is one small mistake I think the Bush administration is making and which we characteristically make in the life of North America. We are guilty not of hubris as the anti-Americans say but of a failure to disengage ourselves from the lives we are living. Our minds are so well focused on the task in hand so clearly fixed on the immediate objective (including very often a finite long-term objective) that we do not hear the birds singing to us. Ash Wednesday fell in this past week and today is the first Sunday in Lent. It is the Christian season of fasting in preparation for Easter -- for the victory in the heart of the ultimate sacrifice the triumph over death in the Cross. It is the season in which through many many centuries Christian men and women have found time to reflect; to reduce their animal spirits and listen to the birdsong. Without so much as the semblance of concession to the enemies of America and of what I unabashedly will call the Free World we are in need of more humility. And not in order to be seen as humble in some kind of purity parade but quietly for our own sakes and as an end in itself. For the arrogance we carry is not in the fight we give to a very culpable enemy. It is rather in our loss of perspective our forgetting that we are not at the centre of the wide world. That we are just one among its many many peoples. I don't think this can be realized without fasting without the attitude of mind that comes with sometimes denying ourselves what otherwise we take entirely for granted. We are too well-fed too well-housed too well-insured for our own good. Our attachments to persons and places and things are too ill-considered. And when President Bush speaking for me as well as for millions says We are fighting to protect our way of life, he strays a little into the margin beyond good sense. We may eventually be fighting for our lives and livelihoods though it hasn't yet come to that. For only a small part of this America toppled on the morning of "9/11". In the meantime we are fighting only for our freedom; our freedom to live beyond the daily threat of violence; a freedom which has nothing else to say about our "way of life". David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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