Remove the cause—but not the symptom

“George Bush can’t be blamed for everything!” a letterwriter opines in these pages this week, responding to my previous column—and I have to admit he’s absolutely right. (Or as Dr. Furter might have said, “Maybe his reign isn’t really to blame…”)

In fact, I must apologize if I implied that George W. was the sole agent of our country’s present distress. It’s obvious that it has taken the cumulative efforts of a massive host of enablers, co-conspirators, lackeys, willing dupes, cheerleaders, charlatans, opportunists and useful idiots to bring about the unenviable circumstances that our nation faces today. From Elliott Abrams, John Bolton and Dick Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz and John Yoo, there are more than enough folks who can divvy up responsibility for our predicaments among themselves.

So no, I wouldn’t blame everything on George W. Bush, who is himself more of a symptom than a cause. In fact, I wouldn’t blame everything on the Bush Regime en masse, or even the Republican Party as a whole—although I would make the case that their conduct at the national level over the last generation ought to disqualify them from control of the Executive Branch for the foreseeable future. The Democrats in Congress, with a few notable exceptions, have largely failed to rein in the excesses of the Bushites, and have refused to exercise their Constitutional duties to hold them accountable.

The malfeasance has by no means been limited to government, of course. Bad actors in the spheres of finance, commerce and industry, from Enron and Halliburton to Countrywide and Bear Stearns, have incurred widespread long-term damage in pursuit of narrow short-term gains. “Mainstream” news media have been more than happy to contribute to the confusion, and to manipulate the range and terms of debate.

These conditions won’t change magically at the moment of the next inauguration. It certainly may turn out that I was being overly optimistic last column when I offered the hopeful suggestion that a new flowering of social progress and enlightenment will be unleashed by the ending of George W. Bush’s rule. If the last few weeks of political coverage have told us anything, it is that the Powers That Be will resort to any alternative to distract us from engaging in a serious, systematic and consequential reevaluation of our national values, goals and methodologies. The continuing and persistent kerfuffle over Rev. Jeremiah Wright is only the most recent and blatant example. (As Stephen Colbert put it, “We’ll have more on this story— as often as possible.”)

But such a reevaluation is exactly what our situation requires. Our institutions do not just need to be reformed, they need to be reshaped and redesigned, starting from the ground up. The first step in that reshaping is to bring to the surface the unspoken and hidden mechanisms that keep those institutions functioning the way they have been, and that try to prevent us from imagining and implementing other, better possibilities. If we don’t do that, we might think we’ve removed the cause but find ourselves still facing the same symptoms. We will bring in new leadership only to once again discover the truth behind Pete Townshend’s lyric: “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.”

And the blame will belong, squarely and precisely, to no one but ourselves.