When 'We the People' Lost America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

We have forgotten what it was like in this country during the Reagan administration. A great reminder may be found in the words of E.L. Doctorow, writing in 1989, who summed up the legacy left to Bill Clinton by the conservative administrations of Ronald Reagan/Bush:

"The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people's suffering for his principles. And so we now have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of our citizens lying around the streets of our cities, sleeping in doorways, begging with styrofoam cups. We didn't have a class of permanent beggars in this country, the United States of America, fifteen or twenty years ago. We didn't have kids selling crack in their grade schools, or businessmen magnifying their fortunes into mega-fortunes by stock manipulation and thievery. I don't remember such epidemics of major corporate fraud.

A decade ago you did not have college students scrawling racial epithets or anti-semitic graffiti on the room doors of their fellow students...So something poisonous has been set loose in the last several years as we have enjoyed life under the power and principles of political conservatism. ...part of this poisonous thing that I'm trying to describe is its characteristic way of dealing with criticism: it used to be enough brand a critic as a radical or a leftist to make people turn away. Now we need only to call him a liberal. Soon "moderate" will be the M word, "conservative" the C word, and only fascists will be in the mainstream. And that degradation of discourse, that, too, is part of this something that is really rotten in America right now."

--E. L. Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution

Doctorow continues to describe the change in America during the Reagan/Bush years:

"...we have seen a national regression to the robber-baronial thinking of the nineteenth century. This amounts to nothing less than a deconstruction of America, the dismantling of enlightened social legislation that had begun to bring equity over half a century to the lives of working people, to rectify some of the terrible imbalance of racial injustice and give a fair shake to the outsiders, the underdogs, the newcomers. We have seen the ideals of environmental sanctity sacrificed to the demands of business thinking in which we have done only as much to protect our environment as industry has found convenient, as if only a few songbirds and some poor dumb animals were at stake, as if the bleeding hearts of woodsy environmentalists were the issue, and not our lungs and skins and genes, and the wholeness and health of our children and their children."

--E. L. Doctorow, Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution

One day, a new generation will awaken to the harm done this country during those halcyon years when Uncle Ronnie made the 'gopper-inclined' feel good about themselves as only goppers and the gopper-inclined can feel good about themselves while stepping over people made homeless by their policies. Was it under Reagan that we lost that last remaining ounce of empathy? The dishonest among us will deny reality, call us a 'name'', or pretend not to know or understand what we're talking about. The rest of us may agree --yes --it was during the Reagan years that our shaky moral footing slipped. Before Reagan, there was hope albeit inspired by dimming light. After Reagan, nothing mattered but wealth and power. Life held little promise. Thus was born of goppo-nomics a nilhistic world in which nothing mattered as all fame is fleeting and wealth is whatever someone else wants at the moment and, perhaps, worth nothing tomorrow when resources grow scarce and oil has run its course.

Corporate Special Interests Come of Age

This 'sea-change' in American attitudes and politics has been dated to the 70s by many 'progressive/liberal' writers and journalists primarily because it was during the 70s that America seemingly abandoned a ' firm commitment' to eliminating poverty, helping the poor, extending the benefits of education to all classes. These were the ideals of FDR's 'New Deal' and LBJ's 'Great Society' and, of course, the so-called 'radical 60s. The 'revolution' was lost, however, with a conservative counter-revolution: the rise of corporate person-hood which was itself the reductio ad absurdum of the corporate special interest system now flourishing openly in the offices of various lobbies on K-street.

How and Why Washington Dysfunctions!

The Power Game: How Washington Works by Hedrick Smith describes the process by which power in the House of Representatives was 'de-centralized'. The year was 1974. Certainly --there were no 'second coming' headlines announcing the sea-change that would result when 22 committees delegated much, perhaps most, of their authority to 172 sub-committees. While the process by which this occurred may be little understood, the results that followed are more obvious, primarily, the resulting mass of competing special interests operating --at first --secretly but now openly, blatantly in fancy offices on K-street! Once discrete, corporations now lobby openly, flagrantly, in an on-going auction of our government.

A second blow to Democracy came in the form of the SUN-PAC decision of 1975, a decision which 'legalized' corporate PACs --'Political Action Committees'. I can tell you from experience: this move energized, radicalized and mobilized the GOP as it most certainly had not been mobilized before. The effect then was not unlike the impact now of the recent ruling that 'corporations are people'. The GOP was equipped to go where no gopper had gone before'. In 1974, there were but 89 corporate PACs. In another ten years there were 1,682. I have no idea how many operate freely and openly today.

PAC victories came quickly and represented 'an enormous shift' in political power defined by the defeat of Ralph Nader's proposed Consumer Protection Agency. A galvanized, politicized 'corporate community' then celebrated the defeat of a proposed 'tax hike' which journalist Hedrick Smith said: "brought more bees after the honey." Those were heady days for those who now celebrate 'corporate personhood' as recently decreed by SCOTUS.

PAC donations and the resulting passage of laws favoring the right wing/GOP are easily correlated. By 1992, some 67 percent of all PACS were corporate. Their donations amounted to 79 percent of all contributions to political parties. Bluntly, the corporations had --at last --found a way to buy the government of the United States. The recent SCOTUS decision making these 'legal abstractions' persons is, of course, absurd, without precedent in law but even worse is the fact that while the right of individuals to petition Congress is guaranteed by the Constitution, mere real persons lacking donations, lacking funding, are, in fact, never granted access to their elected representatives. Artificial people --corporations --are given seemingly unlimited access.

The SCOTUS decision was and remains disingenuous, dishonest, blatantly contemptuous of the Constitution, disdainful of Democracy itself. I believe, therefore that the corporate special interest system is not merely unconstitutional on its face, it's affirmation by SCOTUS represents a coup d'etat which made official the fact that the U.S. is no longer a Democratic Republic but a fascist oligopoly whose raison d'etre is the waging of war. Worse --death and destruction are the only exports in which we lead the world.

In 1994 Republicans took over Congress, boasting that they would end 40 years of 'liberal' rule. In fact, the 80s were a profoundly conservative era and, tragically for the nation, Democratic politicians participated willingly. It was during the 80s, that corporate PACs hedged their bets by contributing 'liberally' to both parties, though Democrats got only 'sloppy seconds', almost always much less than amounts given GOP candidates.

Did Reagan's misrule constitute "high crimes and misdemeanors"? Many GOP-types will define "high crimes and misdemeanors" as simply "bad behavior". If that is the standard, then surely, Ronald Reagan should have been impeached, tried, convicted, removed! Bankrupting the nation is 'bad' behavior by any standard. Rewarding incompetence while incompetent is worse than driving while drunk! Blowing the world's last chance at nuclear disarmament is even worse, perhaps fatal, behavior. What about the bungling of George Bush Sr toward the end of the Persian Gulf war when he promised to protect the Kurds but allowed them to fall to a strong Iraqi military? Is that "bad behavior"? Certainly, it is! George Bush should have been impeached and so too Lyndon Johnson who staged the Gulf of Tonkin incident leading to wider U.S. involvement in Viet Nam.

The brutal murder of JFK --a cowardly act in which the Warren Commission may have conspired with the FBI to falsify and plant evidence -- was not sufficient to finish off the vestiges of our Republic. There was no single, defining incident in which the American 'republic' ceased to be. There was no dramatic sea-change comparable to the auction of the Roman Empire to nobleman Didius Julianus. There was no great or heroic battle waged and lost. There was no arrest of Essex. There was no play to 'catch the conscience of a King'. And now, there is no speech, no kiss before dying, no Shakespearean exit but a pathetic whimper before the lights are dimmed and a weary audience dismissed.

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E. L. Doctorow: "I fault this President for not knowing what death is"

Doctorow's brilliant essay --The Unfeeling President --appeared originally in the September 9th issue of the Easthampton Star. Doctorow could not have known then that Dennis Kucinich, having introduced some 35 articles of impoeachment, would now say of our 'unfeeling' President: "There has been a breach of faith between the Commander in Chief and the troops."

There is no denying that the source of Bush's 'unfeeling' is that of an even earlier 'breach of faith' with the American people. One who is morally dead may not feel, may not experience faith. Bush never intended to 'lead' this nation. He intended to destroy it --our Constitution, our heritage, our most cherished traditions, indeed, our lives.

Our nation's Constitution, called a 'goddamned piece of paper', is derived from the ancient, venerable notion that the legitimacy of government is its contract with the people. Contracts not supported by faith are not worth the paper they are written on. Bush had in mind his subversion of our charter when in a temper tantrum he screamed the nine words that alone should have impeached and removed him from office: "The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!"

The following brilliant and insightful essay by novelist E.L. Doctorow appeared in the Sept. 9 edition of the Easthampton Star.

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I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-day in 1944, General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life; they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you must.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. A litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

There is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember when millions of people around the world marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time. But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report: he becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.

How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America, given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn, but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

--The Unfeeling President, E.L. Doctorow

Named for Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. On a shortlist that might also include Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Long celebrated for his vivid evocations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American life (particularly New York life), Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.

Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931, and, like the novelist Everett in City of God, attended the Bronx High School of Science. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army, which stationed him in Germany. In 1954, he married Helen Setzer. They have three children. Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Irvine.

With The Book of Daniel, his third novel, Doctorow emerged as an important American novelist with a strongly political bent. A fictional retelling of the notorious Rosenberg spy case, the novel deftly evokes the complex anxieties of Cold War America, shuttling back and forth in time from the 1950s, when Paul and Roselle Isaacson are convicted and electrocuted, to the late 1960s, when their troubled son, Daniel, a grad student at Columbia, must deal with the consequences of his unusual birthright. The Book of Daniel was adapted in 1983 into the film, Daniel, starring Timothy Hutton and directed by Sidney Lumet. Four years after The Book of Daniel came Ragtime, a dazzling reimagining of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century by means of a plot that, like City of God, ingeniously brings together real-life figures—such as Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, and Emma Goldman—with an array of invented characters. Ragtime was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the editorial board of the Modern Library and was adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 1998. The March was published in 2005.

Widely acclaimed for the beauty of his prose, his innovative narratives, his feel for atmospherics, and above all for his talent for evoking the past in a way that makes it at once mysterious and familiar, Doctorow has created one of the most substantial bodies of work of any living American writer.

--Biography of E.L. Doctorow

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Published Articles

• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part I, Police States Begin With False Flag Attacks
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part II, Police States Begin With False Flag Attacks
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part III, In Fascist Dictatorships Telling the truth becomes a crime
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part IV, the state forces an 'existential' choice
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part V, Public Opinion Becomes Irrelevant
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VI, The government places itself above the law
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State: Part VII, The Government Denies 'Due Process of Law'
• Bush's Conspiracy to Create an American Police State Part VIII: Atrocities are justified with lies, myths or propaganda

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Unable to 'win', Bush Re-names the Enemy

Don Rumsfeld said that you go to war with the army you have --not the army you might want. Bush, losing his war against an enemy he didn't want simply re-named it. As a National Intelligence Estimate revealed that terrorism had gotten worse since 911, Bush renames an insurgency (against which it was losing) "al Qaeda in Iraq" against which he hopes to win. Re-naming is easier than winning. The GOP rationale goes like this: if the GOP can change the terminology, a war lost on the ground might yet be won in the focus group. It's the GOP way.

When people hear "al-Qaeda," it's natural that they think of Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11 attacks. The insurgency, sectarian violence and opposition to the US occupation in Iraq are not about fighting al-Qaeda, but that's how Bush's fiasco there is being branded.

McClatchy Newspapers' Baghdad correspondent Mike Drummond exposed the sinister rhetorical shift, noting in a recent report, "US forces continue to battle Shiite militia in the south, as well as Shiite militia and Sunni insurgents in Baghdad. Yet America's most wanted enemy at the moment is Sunni al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Bush administration's recent shift toward calling the enemy in Iraq 'al-Qaeda' rather than an insurgency may reflect the difficulty in maintaining support for the war at home more than it does the nature of the enemy in Iraq."

--Al-Qaeda In Iraq Bush's Creation, Niagra Fall Reporter

"Al Qaeda in Iraq" might have been brilliant had it not been so transparent. In three little words, Bush wraps up a complicated lie of several hundred words. The man who "read three Shakespeares" and a Camus in a single weekend would have problems with that many words. Bush's consultants hope that just three little words might make the people forget that al Qaeda had not been in Iraq until the US attacked and invaded. It's the US in Iraq that is the problem, that has done the most damage, taken the most innocent lives. It is the US in Iraq which is a terrorist recruitment poster. Does it really matter what Bush chooses to call his victims?

Bush's response to criticism and opposition is typically GOP: blame the critics. About our nation's own intelligence agencies White House spokesman Peter Watkins is quoted in the Nation as having said "their hatred for freedom and liberty did not develop overnight. Those seeds were planted decades ago." This position is outrageous and incompetent. This utterly failed administration obviously lashes out blindly, stupidly at any criticism of his utterly failed and incompetent policies.

Though Bush has never been right, he is, like "big brother", never wrong. He's not "resolute", he's stubborn, stupid and pig headed. What are the odds that a man so lacking in talent or intelligence is so otherwise infallible and wise? Bush is wrong about terrorism. Bush's own criminal administration is the cause of it. He's not winning in Iraq, he's lost it. Winning implies an exit strategy that Bush doesn't have. Re-naming an "enemy" is not the same as defeating one.

For all those reasons, Bush's homestretch is no time to relax. Bush's zeal with respect to Islam consolidated radical theocratic zealots at home but inflamed and radicalized theocratic zealots abroad. Shakespeare was more eloquent. A plague o' both your houses.

His failure in Iraq and his sabre rattling toward Iran make this period the most dangerous in his occupancy. Despite having been thoroughly discredited --not by critics but by facts --Bush persists in waging a messianic campaign. Until a new GOP focus group had done its work, Bush called our enemies "evil doers". I always found it interesting that Bush targeted only those "evil doers" who were oil rich. Poorer "evil doers" get a pass. The lesson the world learned from Bush is simply this: if you wish to do evil, liquidate your oil assets.

If we can avoid a nuclear holocaust --despite Bush's best efforts to effect a nuclear armageddon -- it will be a relief to see the end of Dick "Darth" Cheney, a goulish, snarling specter of no humanity and less good will. The list of those already departed this evil administration include John Ashcroft, a baritone whose tones we could bear no more easily than his contempt for the rules of evidence, due process, and or freedom of speech. Also gone is Al Gonzales who got the job because Bush wished to appear friendly to the fastest growing population segment in the US. Gonzales was Ashcroft with a tan and just as much antipathy to the principles of our founding --the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the presumption of innocence.

It would seem that all Bushies have problems with the Fourth Amendment, about which the Bush line was that "reasonable suspicion" not "probable cause" was the standard upon which investigations and/or arrests were made. Not surprisingly, the Bushies are dead wrong. All one need do to end this stupid debate is to simply read the Fourth Amendment for one's self.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment IV, Bill of Rights, US Constitution

Given the record of this administration, this Orwellian nightmare, it is surprising that the actual text of the Bill of Rights is still available. Perhaps, the de-centralized nature of information is the only thing not anticipated by Orwell, who foresaw, it seems, every other outrage to civilization, Democracy, and the spirit of free inquiry and truth.

Bush who cannot pronounce "Machiavellian" ought not indulge Machiavellian machinations. That Bush thinks himself smart proves he's not. Bush labels "terrorist" anyone who disagrees with his stupid policies, his incompetent regime, his illegal war and occupation. Author E.L. Doctorow got it right when he called Bush the "unfeeling President". The lack of "feelings", the utter lack of empathy describes evil itself. And that's what he have soiling the White House with venom.

E.L. Doctorow: The Unfeeling President

Doctorow might have added that Bush is also lazy and incurious. His arrogance is inversely proportional to his intelligence. Many world leaders have been liars but none so transparent. I want to play poker with Bush and then retire. Bush will leave a legacy of state-approved torture, illegal wiretapping and domestic surveillance, concentration camps, kidnappings, the coddling of corporate polluters.

The Creation of Doctorow's "Ragtime"

Additional Resources

• E. L. Doctorow’s “The March.”
  by John Updike
• New York State Writer's Institute

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E.L.Doctorow's Ragtime America

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

This article is not a review of the fourteen essays on literary, political, and historical topics that make up E.L. Doctorow's Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992. It is my take on Doctorow's best known novel --Ragtime. I mention the essays because they are better appreciated after one reads Ragtime.

Doctorow's essay on the Constitution is the counterpoint to this author's steeped obsession with American culture and politics. The Constitution of his description is a lost Arcadia, our innocence, our ephemeral flirtation with legitimate government and Democracy.

It is unfortunate, however, that this extraordinary collection of essays is not as well known as are Doctorow's novels -Ragtime (my favorite), Billy Bathgate, Welcome to Hard Times (his first novel) or World's Fair, winner of the 1986 National Book Award. In fact, it is not even mentioned in Wikipedia though his other collection of essays, Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006, is.

Good essays challenge the intellect at a time when it is easier to watch a music video designed to challenge the senses. It is uncomfortable to be challenged. It is easier to click a remote control in search of eye candy. It is easier to surf the web than deep dive for pearls.

Selected Essays, like Doctorow's Ragtime, is a curious mix of the best and the worst of American culture. For me, much of the appeal of Ragtime was the unlikely collection of real characters: Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Houdini, J.P Morgan, Evelyn Nesbitt, Emma Goldman, Stanford White, Harry K. Thaw, with fictional characters such as Father, Mother, and Mother's Younger Brother.

Most reviews of Ragtime miss the point. For example:

"In 10th grade, a teacher suggested that I read this book and do a report on it. I found one sex scene so shocking that I returned the book to her and suggested she was irresponsible for recommending it to a 14 year old."

The scene in question was most certainly the explicit "threesome scene" involving Mother's Younger Brother, Evelyn Nesbitt, the infamous "Gibson Girl", and Emma Goldman, the notorious socialist/anarchist.

Other fictional characters include Coalhouse Walker, a character that may have been inspired by Scott Joplin, and Sarah, the mother of his newborn boy. Sarah lives in New Rochelle with Mother, Father, and, until he leaves the nest, Mother's Younger Brother. A series of tragic events triggered by Coalhouse Walker propelled the 70's movie version of Ragtime though at least three main threads are woven artfully throughout the novel.

Of the three, none are more poignant than the story of Tateh and his little daughter. Tateh is a recent immigrant whose only skill is cutting out silhouettes. The pair face certain starvation in New York's lower east side until Tateh discovers that his "flip books" of sihoutetted ice skaters were marketable. By the end of the novel, Tateh is a successful film maker. It is the American dream from which we have all but recently awakened.

On the whole, however, Ragtime, though dreamily surreal, is true. Evelyn Nesbit was, in fact, an historical character but Mother's Younger Brother exists only in the person of many another real Nesbit admirer. And there were many.

This unlikely mix, this potpourri lunch, this surreal pastiche IS our history. This volatile concoction of characters wrapped up one century and helped shape another. From our vantage point in the early 21st Century, this era is too easily seen in sepia accompanied by ragtime. And, indeed, it was so until World War I awakened us to real nightmare.

At least one critic called Doctorow's collection of essays "unstartling":

This exiguous assembly of prefaces and assignments is unstartling: Jack London was "a workaday literary genius/ hack"; Hemingway was tormented; Orwelrs 1984 is concerned with "the political manipulation of reality through the control of history and language." In this salad bar of limp banalities, there is not a fresh thought, a crisp phrase, or a morsel of original research

Had Doctorow intended to "startle"? If I had not disagreed with the reviewer, I would not be writing about this little known book now. The above review is hash by a hack. In fact, other more intelligent reviewers were more receptive.

The essay that I find most interesting is entitled "Commencement," and is,in fact, the Commencement Address that Doctorow delivered to the Brandeis University graduating class of 1989. A theme in the address is taken from Sherwood Anderson and Doctorow refers to it as "the theory of grotesques." It goes something like this: The world is filled with many truths to live by, and they are all beautiful. Two that he first mentions are the truth of thrift and the truth of self reliance. There is a problem, however, when one of these truths is grabbed up and made into a cause to the exclusion of all other truths.

My favorite essay, naturally, is Doctorow's analysis of the Constitution. Doctorow seems to have made the argument that the Constitution is most notable for what it is not, for what it does not do, for what it does not say, for language it does not use.

The Constitution is a secular document. The word God is not used even once. The authority of the Constitution is not theological though it has, Doctorow claims, the voice of "Sacred Text". It uses the word "shall" though it makes no theological appeal. Significantly, the preamble cites the origin of Constitutional authority: "We the people....". It is a document of the people, by the people, for the people. It was the people --not God --who wrote the Constitution.

Often thought to be a document that guarantees that we be free, the Constitution does not use the word slave . Yet, it was Thomas Jefferson (not a delegate to the Constitutional covention) who had written "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". If in context the Constitution ensures our "freedom", it does not, therefore, do so upon a theocratic principle. It is not God who endows us with "unalienable rights". It is ourselves.

The Constitution, therefore, is an existentialist document entirely compatible with Sartre's assertion:

"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself."

Indeed, a people are nothing but what they make of themselves. In the Constitution, we make of ourselves a free people. We are free because we have chosen to take responsibility for what we have made of ourselves.

If our brief flirtation with freedom is but a sepia toned dream of Doctorowesque fantasy, then, with Bush we awakened to nightmare. Still, our future as a nation lies not in God nor any person appointed by deities. Our fate is nothing more nor less than the choices we make. We may choose to end the nightmare. We may choose to end the Bush administration and, by reasserting our freedom, we define ourselves as a "free people".

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