October 9, 2006
In
a month in which the US Congress voted to legalize torture, discard
the US Constitution by abolishing habeas corpus and increase the
military budget to prolong the daily slaughter of hundreds of Iraqis
and Afghanis, the big controversy among the mass media and elected
officials is the sexual overtures of a Republican Congressman to
adolescent boys employed by Congress.
Millions of fundamentalist Christians,
who blindly supported the Republican Congress’ deadly War on Terror
are in revolt against their Party because of its tolerance toward a
single pervert -- overlooking the torture at Abu Ghraib, Israel’s
massive bombing of Lebanon and the Bush Administration’s criminal
abandonment of the hundreds of thousands of poor (mostly black)
citizens in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Why do US Congress members and the mass
media go into a political feeding frenzy over personal sexual
transgressions like Congressman Foley’s nasty e-mail flirtations with
teenage boys or former President Clinton’s office adventures in
extramarital sex with a White House intern and not over issues of
great consequence for peace or war, democracy or authoritarianism,
torture or human rights?
Superficial commentators trot out our
Anglo-American "Puritan heritage": a pseudo-explanation, which
overlooks the US democratic-constitutional heritage, our recent
history of opposing the Vietnam War, and our signing of the United
Nation Charter on Human Rights. Since there are numerous historical
pasts, there is no single "heritage" that dominates others, especially
when the so-called "Puritan" past is overlain with a highly sexualized
mass culture over the last 50 years.
We should leave aside dubious
psycho-cultural explanations because they fail to explain political
behavior. Specifically, even if "Puritan morality" were such a
dominant aspect of US political life, it cannot explain why one should
focus only on sexual misdeeds of individual politicians and not the
immorality of the widespread, systematic use of sexual torture
practiced by US interrogators in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the
Guantanamo prison camp and specifically approved by the Bush
Administration.
To understand the perversity of US
politics, where great crimes are approved by Congress and the
President and minor sexual misdemeanors become an obsession, one has
to turn away from the amorphous notion of the "US public" and examine
what the mass media and opinion leaders find acceptable as the basis
for electoral competition.
The political elite of both parties and
the leadership and minority in Congress do not differ on substantive
questions of war and peace: both supported the 2003 invasion and
occupation of Iraq from the beginning and have just approved over $400
billion in war spending for 2006-2007. Both parties, Congress and the
President supported Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, its deliberate
destruction of civilian infrastructure and the dropping of one million
cluster bomblets as well as the blockade and rape of Gaza. Both
parties supported the extension of the Patriot Act, which suspends the
democratic guarantees and personal freedoms protected under the Bill
of Rights and Constitution. Neither Congress nor the White House
differ in opposing a National Health Policy, since both parties
receive millions in election financing from the big pharmaceutical and
private health insurance companies and their lobbies. Since there is a
consensus between the two official parties on the issues of war,
authoritarianism and big business, the political parties can compete
only on "personality" and issues of private morality. The parties
justify their separate existence and compete for office by avoiding
the issues which antagonize the economic elites, the civilian
militarists and the powerful pro-Israel lobbies and focus on
"antagonizing" … other politicians, which is considered "fair game" in
the highly constricted US political system.
In the first week of October, 30 US
soldiers were killed in Iraq and scores were wounded, 580 Iraqi
civilians were murdered, 20 Lebanese civilians were killed or wounded
by leftover Israeli cluster bombs, tens of thousands of US telephones,
faxes and e-mails were intercepted without judicial order, thousands
of Argentine rightists marched in Buenos Aires in defense of the
former military dictators, thousands of peaceful striking school
teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico were threatened with massive military
repression, 13 Bolivian miners and Indian peasants were killed by the
government and its supporters in a possible lead up to a civil war,
and a beloved bishop in the Philippines was killed by death squads for
his human rights work joining the hundreds of murdered and disappeared
activists there… and yet none of these reports appear anywhere in the
major US television and radio programs and are barely mentioned by the
principal newspapers. Instead we hear and read daily and even hourly
reports revealing the lewd e-mails of Republican Congressman Foley
with the Democratic Party leadership issuing press releases and
denunciations and calls for investigations and resignations.
"Corruption, depravity, perversion", the
Democrats tell us, "in high places is unacceptable". And the
Republicans, so bold in defense of torture and secret abductions, and
so audacious in signing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional
military aid to Israel … are shirking, cowering, stuttering and
stammering that they have "cleaned house" with the resignation of
their Congressional pervert; they need to press on with the "war
against international and domestic terror" unmolested.
What is essential in perpetuating the
charade of basically a "one party" system, dedicated to defending
imperial wars abroad and overseeing decay and authoritarianism at
home, is the illusion of "party competition." To maintain this
illusion of choice in the face of a wide elite consensus, a "sideshow"
is needed; preferably a show in which the minor perverts of one party
can be paraded and denounced by the puffed-up moralists of the
opposing party. Without this show of moral indignation and a dose of
salacious titillation, voter abstention might even exceed the usual
65% for US Congressional elections.
James Petras,
a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York,
owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the
landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of
Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). His latest book
is
The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity
Press, 2006). He can be reached at:
jpetras@binghamton.edu.