| Ira Chernus PROFESSOR OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER |
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Nuke 'Em: Wielding the Nuclear Option
Trent Lott and George Lakoff live in very different
worlds. But they both understand the power of a good metaphor.
Lott, the canny politician, knows that the public likes complicated policies
best when they are reduced to snappy soundbites. The more complex and controversial
the policy, the more compelling the word picture has to be. So when the Republicans
set out to foist a complex, controversial policy on the American people --
getting Senate confirmation for every federal judge George W. Bush nominates
by denying the Democrats the right to filibuster -- Lott came up with snappiest,
most vivid soundbite he could find: "the nuclear option."
In recent weeks, Republicans have tried to quash that metaphor. They now realize
it's an embarrassing mistake that does their cause more harm than good. But
it's too late.
As Lakoff has taught us, every metaphor has a life
of its own. A good metaphor is not just a random, meaningless turn of phrase.
It's a lens that can show us deeper truths. Once people see the truth, they
won't let the metaphor that revealed it go away. Though Republican PR firms
are now spending millions to get us to dub the attack on the filibuster "the
constitutional option," their money is wasted. Everyone will still call
it "the nuclear option."
And with good reason. No other term captures so perfectly the magnitude of
the destruction GOP Senators plan to wreak on our governmental system of checks
and balances. For two centuries, the right to filibuster has protected the
minority from majority efforts to run roughshod over the Senate. If the Republicans
get their way, the majority would, for the first time, be able to stop debate
and force a vote as soon as they know they have enough votes to win. The minority
would lose their only real bargaining chip for forcing compromise.
Trent Lott knew how much was at stake when he named it "the nuclear option."
The public knows how much is at stake, too. That's one reason the metaphor
won't go away.
But there is another. Metaphors show us new truths by bringing pieces of our
experience together in unexpected ways, provoking or uncovering previously
unsuspected connections. In this case, it's no coincidence when we hear Republicans
talking about a "nuclear option." The literal nuclear option that
the Pentagon still keeps at the ready and the metaphorical one being prepared
in the Senate have a lot more in common than just words.
Are Judges a More Serious Threat than Al Qaeda?
The people who want to nuke their political opponents are the same ones who
gave us Ronald Reagan's huge nuclear buildup, two decades of massive funding
for a Star Wars anti-missile shield, two wars in Iraq, and so many other excesses
of militarism. On America's political right wing, politics and life itself
are acts of war. It's go-for-the-jugular, take-no-prisoners, winner-take-all.
Nuclear weapons have always been a consummate symbol of the conservatives'
insistence on absolute victory and absolute control.
Of course, the name of the enemy changes from time to time. For most of the
nuclear age, it was the "international communist conspiracy." Though
the nuclear option was created on the Democrats' watch, in the post-Hiroshima
world of the 1940s, it was conservative icons like General Douglas MacArthur
and Strategic Air Command head Curtis LeMay who
were most eager to reach for it. Even the "moderate" Republican
President Dwight D. Eisenhower secretly claimed that he would use atomic bombs
to end the Korean War if the communists didn't settle on his terms. Yet senator
Joseph McCarthy and his followers focused more on "reds" in Washington
and Hollywood than in Moscow and Beijing.
A half-century later, the world seen from the far right looks much the same.
For many, "the terrorists" have replaced "the communists"
as the great global peril. Yet for a sizeable faction of social and religious
conservatives, the real danger lurks not in far-away terrorist camps, but
right here at home -- in our courtrooms. "Federal judges are a more serious
threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists," the Rev.
Pat Robertson said recently. With all their well-known decisions supporting
"secular humanism" over traditional religious values, he claimed,
judges "are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together."
Even moderately conservative judges can look like part of a vast conspiracy
to undermine all the "family values," which seem (though this is
surely illusion) to give life stability.
For Robertson and his followers, we're in a crisis of apocalyptic proportions.
According to Christian right guru Donald Wildmon,
for instance, if the Senate does not abolish the filibuster, judges will go
on "forcing their liberal agenda on every American." Then "we
can forget democracy." It's "a critical moment in the history of
our nation," warned Focus on the Family's James Dobson -- which makes
a weapon of apocalyptic magnitude an appropriate way to go, metaphorically
speaking.
Rick Scarborough, chair of the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional
Restoration, summed up the social conservatives' attack on the filibuster
this way: ''It's about a temporal versus eternal value system." Not surprisingly,
such right-wingers want the law interpreted solely in light of their own eternal
value system. And they're perfectly ready to use any means necessary -- even
"the nuclear option -- to make it so. Precisely because absolute values
are at stake, they have no hesitation about invoking the absolute weapon.
They are in no mood to compromise, any more than they would compromise with
communists or with the devil. People who disagree with them are not merely
wrong, they are evil; and the only way they can imagine dealing with evil
is to annihilate it, to nuke it.
Of course, they feel pretty much the same about "terrorists," even
though they give judges a somewhat higher targeting priority. The war on terror
and the war on secular humanism are, for them, merely two different fronts
in an even larger war in which the enemy is any kind of social change that
challenges the absolute rule of traditional moral certainties as they define
them.
The Neoconservative Option
In war, you take your allies where you can find them. In the current Republican
coalition of the willing, the predominantly Protestant Christian right shares
a political bed with the Roman Catholic right and a small but powerful group
of Republicans, most of whom have deep Jewish roots: the neoconservatives.
Neocons share with the religious right a fear of changing social values. With
today's neocons so focused on global affairs, it's easy to forget that their
movement began as a reaction against the radical domestic trends of the 1960s.
It embraced anticommunism and the literal nuclear option largely as a way
to move the U.S. back toward traditional values on the home front.
"Everything is now permitted," the neocons' godfather, Irving Kristol, once lamented. "The inference is that one has
a right to satisfy one's appetites without delay." And that, he warned,
was "a prescription for moral anarchy, which is exactly what we are now
experiencing." Robertson, Dobson, and Wildmon
could hardly have said it more clearly, or agreed more heartily on the nature
of America's most essential problem.
They would agree just as heartily with the neocons on another point -- that
the solution is moral fortitude. What the country needs is a will strong enough
to resist the temptation of temporal values and ready to make the necessary
sacrifices to live by the eternal verities. In the right-wing world, where
absolute good vies constantly with absolute evil and every human will is part
of the battlefield, only a total subjugation of evil can create an orderly,
virtuous life. That, in turn, requires us to follow the moral dictates of
a higher authority, rather than our own personal desires. This is what Lakoff has taught us to call the Stern Father model. It's
the Stern Father who
threatens to unleash the nuclear option.
But how can Americans summon up the strength to live by the moral absolutes
of our stern fathers? That's where the partners in the GOP coalition part
ways. For the religious right, such strength can come only from the Bible
and (most would say) a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. For the neocons,
faith is optional. They generally applaud religion as one rich source of traditional
moral authority, but they don't consider it the only one. Tradition (as long
as it's the tradition of "western civilization") can serve just
as well. "Our Father, who art in heaven," is sufficient, but not
a complete necessity.
However, the neocons still need a stern father. Since they can't insist that
we find him in heaven, they would have us look for help to the city where
the literal nuclear option has its home: Washington, DC. -- or, to be exact,
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as well as across the Potomac at the Pentagon. That
makes the neocons even more demanding, if possible, than the Christian
right. They're not content to insist on absolute righteousness in American
social behavior. They want absolute American control over the whole world.
That's the only way they can imagine making the planet strong enough to resist
the uncertainties of changing temporal values.
In the name of their fantasy version of moral stability, the neocons brandish
the nuclear option on the international stage, just as they did in the era
of Ronald Reagan. They consider nukes the ultimate weapon of intimidation,
and they know that intimidation won't work if you aren't perfectly willing
to carry out your threats. The obliteration of (evil) people is their chosen
metaphor for the obliteration of moral evil. It's how a neocon shows that
he (or, very occasionally, she) is strong.
The Coalition of the Frightened
The "nuclear option," then, is the perfect metaphor for a GOP dominated
by a coalition of the religious right and the neocons, all urged on by and
funded by the military-industrial complex. The same Senate Republicans who
would pander to the religious right by nuking the filibuster also want to
rebuild and expand the nation's arsenal of nuclear weapons, gear up for a
new round of nuclear testing, and free the U.S. from all restrictions on nuclear
armament. The "nuclear option" metaphor makes the connections easy
to see.
It's just as easy to see why the Bush administration has been so eager to
send John Bolton to the U.N. Bolton is an ardent advocate of arms control
-- for other nations. He wants to control, or preferably just stop, the development
of nukes in other lands, so that the U.S. can more easily use its nuclear
preeminence to control the world. The administration hoped to have Bolton
in place at the U.N. in time for the conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) that opened in New York at the beginning of May. Though it hasn't
worked out that way, the U.S. delegation is still doing everything it can
to impose restrictions on others, while removing the Treaty's faint hint of
a restriction on the U.S. nuclear option.
Although it's only coincidence that the "nuclear option" showdown
in the Senate is coming in the same month as the NPT review, there's poetic
justice in it. It throws a bright spotlight on the links between the Republican
domestic and foreign policies. The GOP is caught in a fateful web woven from
the religious, neocon, and military-corporate right. That web gets its tensile
strength from its millions of supporters, who yearn for absolute certainties
in an age when they no longer seem possible.
We can go on forever bemoaning the power of these millions and debating whether
it is on the rise or the wane. Eventually, though, we have to confront the
deep <i>fear</i> that drives them to
embrace the nuclear option. They are genuinely frightened by a world that
feels like its spinning out of control. Unable to cope with dizzying changes
they can't fully grasp, but which leave so many feeling cheated of a better
life, they simply want to annihilate the forces of change. It's fear of an
unpredictable, uncontrollable future that breeds the violence. If you can't
beat 'em, they say, then nuke 'em.
The fear won't go away any time soon; nor will the people who express it through
all sorts of apocalyptic metaphors, including "the nuclear option."
Somehow, those of us who believe in choosing our own moral values have to
learn to talk to and live with our compatriots who need universal, absolute
values in order to survive. Figuring out that "somehow" may be the
great American challenge of the 21st century.
Meanwhile, though, we do have to remove the nuclear option, in all its forms,
from those frightened right-wing hands.
|
[ HOME ] [ COURSES ] [ RESEARCH ] [ CONTACT ME ] |
| [ OP-ED COLUMNS / SINCE SEPT. 11 ] [ PUBLIC CITIZEN ] |