I recently visited Australia and New Zealand, and it made me realize that we need mythic language — the kind that comes from oral cultures reliant on handed-down legends — to capture what has happened these past eight years. Like the Aborigines’ dreamtime stories, we need something more powerful than “the failed policies of the Bush administration.” I propose “The Stolen Years.”
It began, of course, with the stolen election in 2000. But just think how much has been stolen from us: our morality and, indeed, our sense of humanity.
These are not just policy failures. This has been a spiritual pillaging of any sense that the United States can ever aspire to, or represent, higher principles; that our nation is, or can be, a democracy, however flawed; that the government cares about citizens other than the really rich.
The Bush administration has seized all we hold dear and ground it into the dirt with its boot heels.
Most important has been the nation’s sense of its own morality. Few of us are deluded that the U.S. government was, before the Bush regime, a beacon of moral rectitude and social justice. The United States has overthrown many governments, mostly in secret, and supported repressive rulers. But when have our leaders publicly and adamantly rejected the Geneva Conventions and endorsed torture as a matter of national policy? It’s one thing for there to be a gap between national principles and government practices, and quite another for a president to deride those principles as no longer essential to the nation’s moral compass.
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