This OpEd was written in March, 2003, a decade and a half ago. My sloppy record does not tell me whether the Pittsburgh Post Gazette ever printed it. Can you think yourselves back to the pressing issues of those days? It's not an easy task, but try to do so, if only for the sake of finding out how far we have come--and how for better or for worse.
Crashing Through the
Looking Glass
Rudolph H.
Weingartner
We’ve
moved into a topsy-tervy world Alice never dreamed of. If living in it didn’t have such
horrendous consequences, that tale would be even more amusing than those of
Lewis Carroll. Our betters—the
people we have chosen to govern us—seem to have imbibed of a potion that has
them turn our world upside down.
The
majority of the federal appeals court in St. Louis, to begin our journey, ruled
the other day that a deranged prisoner may be forced to take a drug that will,
while it functions, make him sufficiently sane to meet the Supreme Court’s
sanity requirement for being executed.
That’s like forcibly attaching a prosthesis to a one-legged captive so
that he can be made to jump from the frying pan into the fire. The fact that the “restoration” of the
prisoner’s sanity would lead to his execution was irrelevant, the court’s
majority declared, to the appropriateness of compelling him to be sane, at least
while he remains alive.
This
ruling affects but one person now and probably not many in the future, but is
nevertheless a good example of the wackiness that resembles nothing so much as
an infectuous disease. Many have
made fun of the nuttiness that has urged us to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting
to protect our houses from chemically or biologically polluted air. But I’ve not seen comments about the
magnitude of that project. I
calculateed that my comfortable middle class home would require 422 linear feet
of duct tape plus 430 square feet of
plastic. Given that we are a
population of 290 million and assuming that on the average four people live in
a housing unit and, further, that my own commodious dewelling has four times
the barricading requirements of the average, the country would need about 7.7
billion feet of tape and approximately 7.8 billion square feet of plastic to
keep all of the US breathing easy—at least at home, since I haven’t included
places of business.
Probably,
this Homeland Security recommendation was just another effect of the disease
that has been spreading through governmental circles. But when the exhortation to buy was followed by the injunction not actually to use this gear, it is easy to become
suspicious that the real point was to give a boost to the homewares industry.
We
do, after all, know that the economy needs tending to, even if we don’t think
it should be done in the way that our infected Washingtonians have in
mind. The massive tax reductions
that have been proposed have been much discussed. But that plan has not been clearly enough juxtaposed with
the desperate straits in which our states and cities find themselves—the worst
in more than half a century. What
are these states and cities doing to alleviate their fiscal woes? Both Democratic and Republican
governors and mayors expect to raise
taxes in order to pay unavoidable bills, in the absence of adequate help from
Washington. Alice would have a
clever verse to describe this nuttiness.
I can only fall back on two clichés: money is being taken from Peter to
pay Paul and we know full well who is at what end of the stick.
How
Washington is infected by topsy-tervyness in international affairs has been
consuming hours of television time and acres of newsprint. Our betters come close to shirking
their responsibility concerning a present danger while obsessively pursuing a
future possible one. North Korea
actually possesses nuclear bombs plus the capacity to send them overseas, while
Iraq, which we threaten with immanent war, has not yet managed to get that
far. Our government is rightly
concerned about the lack of assurance that Saddam’s chemical and biological
weapons have been destroyed. No
doubt, that lethal material is being stored in hard-to-detect bunkers. Yet at the same time, a war is in
preparation that, if it breaks out, will surely bring those weapons out of
their hiding places—to be used on us and
our friends.
Our
friends—that is, if we still have any.
Perhaps the deepest sympton of the upsidedown disease that has conquered
Washington is its attitude toward the nations with which we share this
planet. Globalism is our policy
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
At bottom, there is but one economy, we insist, that transcends all
national borders. Togetherness is
the watchword on those days of the week.
But when the occasion arises to do
something together—prevent global warning, create a court that encompasses that
globe, or prevent a vicious dictator from acting up, it is Tuesday, Thursday,
or Saturday. On those days,
Washington is for going it alone and unilateralism wins out. We are prepared to
turn all of our friends into antagonists so as to avoid the compromises that
are inevitably exacted by cooperation. This is a unilateralism that will be isolated from all who matter on this globe for countless years to come.
Reality
is not where Washington sees it. We badly need an antidote that will reverse
the disease that has gripped the city from which we are governed.
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