Reality Always Wins

By Mark Crispin Miller, AlterNet. Posted November 1, 2004.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community."... I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

If there's a fair election on Tuesday, the Democrats will win it by a country mile. On the other hand, if Bush/Cheney manage to subvert the race again, their dominion will go on and on. The right intends to rule not just for "four more years," but for as long as it will take the rest of America to drive them out. At this great fight we will prevail, eventually, because Bush/Cheney's project is impossible. They can't reverse the course of history. They cannot contradict reality. The world is what it is, however vehement their prayers. It doesn't matter how much slack the American press will keep on cutting them, or how insistently their pre-selected audiences keep cheering at them, or how "resolved" Bush keeps on saying he is. All their brutal steps and brilliant fakery will only lead them to the same gigantic bone yard where so many other glorious crusades have ended up.

Bush/Cheney have to lose, as all such crackpot movements must. In fact, it wouldn't be inaccurate to call them losers – as that is clearly how, deep down, they see themselves, for all their would-be macho swagger. Here they are, completely dominant in all three branches of the federal government, triumphant in state legislatures coast to coast, and over-represented all throughout the corporate media; and yet they always sound like livid also-rans, compulsively attacking those whom they've already beaten. Sitting through their last convention, with its incessant nastiness and choral jeering, you would never know that the Republicans had been declared the winners of the previous election. Like Nixon, they cannot help but play the rabid underdog, always right yet somehow always wronged.

So if they're such a bunch of losers, how did they get so far so fast? How is it that they seem to be beyond us, leaving us all feeling paralyzed and stranded, here in "the reality-based community"? How did we let it happen? And what does it portend for the United States, and all the world, after Election Day?

From the get-go, this incredible regime has seized the state in broad daylight, while at the same time very deftly hiding it. Bush/Cheney have half-masked their subversive coup not just by planning it behind closed doors (this regime being, of course, more secretive than any other in our history), but, more fundamentally, by catering to the Establishment's desire to see no evil.

When governments go mad, not many eminent observers will allow themselves even to see it, much less comment on it. Rather than shout out the awful truth – i.e., that the emperor is not just naked, but insane – those with large investments in the status quo would much prefer to hold that there's a method to the madness, that the man on top is crazy like a fox ("Come on, he's only saying that, to please his base!"), or that he's just a figurehead, with wiser others close at hand to keep him an eye on him. To claim otherwise would be alarmist and naive, while those professionals in the know know better than to think that what has obviously happened here has obviously happened here. Thus the pundit comes across as a more reasonable person than those scary few who tell the truth out loud; and yet that soothing view is founded less on any rational analysis than on the pundit's sense of his own rationality, which he projects, complacently, onto the zealots at the top.

Such calming fantasy is surely not unique to high-end bloviators. All of us are prone to see things as we'd rather see them; and so it's only natural that most of us have looked away, and tried to change the subject, as the world has taken this apocalyptic turn. Of course, American democracy depends upon the press to counteract this self-delusive tendency; and yet the American press has been especially resolved not to perceive the clear and present danger. So have the Democrats, despite their formal status as the opposition party. Unrestrained by any check or balance, then, the Bushevik machine has rolled right over us, so that we're almost out of breath, just at the moment when we need to scream our loudest at this fatal pressure.

Mark Crispin Miller is the author of "Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order." His new work, "Patriot Act" is available on DVD.

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