29 April, 2003
Friends of Anne Frank

Looking back, we can see that Anne Frank should not have been sent to her death. All right, let's grant that most of her contemporaries would have been horrified at the thought of such a crime, if made to think of it. Others would have stopped short of wishing a human being dead, if pressed about their wishes. Even among Nazis there may have been some who would have liked to make a sentimental exception for a young girl, if her case had unavoidably come to their attention. But today, everybody with any pretensions to moral righteousness is a friend of Anne Frank.

Even schoolchildren in places far removed from the old haunts of the Nazis get a good chance to steer clear of bigotry by learning Anne's story: how, when she was three years old, her family left Nazi Germany and went to live in Amsterdam; how, when she was thirteen, the family had to go into hiding in secret rooms; and how they were eventually found and sent to the death camps, where Anne died in her sixteenth year shortly before the camps were liberated. We get the story all at once, in its historical context, with a classically sympathetic protagonist standing for the victims of the Holocaust. We see, as exhibits in a museum, the guilt of those who committed the crime and the shame of those who gave it moral countenance, and so of course we do steer clear of bigotry and soon find ourselves, as we think, on the high road of righteousness. If there's one thing we'll never do, it's let them send Anne Frank to Bergen-Belsen.

Looking back, then, at the years when the crime was being plotted and yet the people who were capable of such a crime inspired admiration in a large part of the world, we tend to feel a natural affinity with the other part. As adults we should recognize easily enough that that feeling is naïvely subjective. We, most of us alive today, have no personal access to the moral choices of the 1930s. It's too late to be clear-eyed or courageous in the face of twentieth-century fascism. The only opportunity left to us by the people of that time is to see how their choices may prefigure some guilt or shame of our own. With any luck, we'll never be as guilty as Nazis. However, we can easily become as wretched as those who found that they had been Anne Frank's enemies in spirit without meaning any actual harm. Not many people could have failed for very long to see through the Third Reich merely because they were smitten by its architectural and sartorial splendors. To keep on failing, they needed a blind spot for anti-Semitism. The Nazis laid the groundwork for their crime by depicting Jews as economic oppressors, and too many non-Nazis felt disinclined to object.

It's important to remember that while the Nazis' anti-Semitic rhetoric ran from theories of economic domination all the way down to crude insults, that rhetoric based its appeal on the hearer's predisposition to feel that Jews had too many of the world's good things; that they stood outrageously high, not despicably low. Passive bigots, being essentially normal people, don't relish the persecution of the weak and innocent. But if they can be made to see an aggrieved accuser in place of a persecutor, and if the proposed victims are a tribe which they themselves consider altogether too powerful, why, that's another matter.

Of course you see where this leads. Many writers have already drawn parallels between the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and the anti-Americanism of the present. Others have pointed out the distinctions that need to be made (even collectively, Jews could hardly have been accused of intimidating the world with military might). The differences may outnumber the similarities, but the two main similarities are big and bad. One is that logic which clears a moral path for cruelty by declaring the victim to be advantaged and therefore undeserving of pity. It's an egoistic logic that operates in all of us in some casual, disorganized way. We know it does, if our reaction to human suffering ever contains a touch of chagrin at seeing a particular sufferer gain the status of victim. When we think we've found a whole set of people who have too many good things, the logic organizes itself into sustained antipathy. We may sense the egoism in it and loathe ourselves for it, but we can stop short of absolute self-reproach because those people do not, after all, appear to us as so many Anne Franks. They don't pass our test for sympathetic powerlessness and innocence. And now that we've started thinking of "those people," we come to the bigger and worse similarity between the two bigotries in question, which is simply the essence of all bigotries: the We-They Mentality.

There's not as much talk about the We-They Mentality now as there used to be, partly because it's supposed to have been discredited. Not eliminated, mind you, but sufficiently discredited to make self-respecting people hate to catch themselves descending to it. And then there has been the innocently contradictory trend of multiculturalism, which has provided We-They with the cover of ethical confusion since the 1980s. When people insist on building a proud We around themselves, it does become harder to conquer the all-degrading They. Before multiculturalism set in, many American parents and teachers were wont to caution American children against the We-They Mentality. The children learned, if they were paying attention, that it was wrong to "generalize about people," meaning wrong to lump people together in categories smaller than the whole human race, because it did the individual an injustice. This led to a great deal of self-monitoring and a fair amount of actual improvement in human relations. Haters remained haters and went on spreading their spawn, but people who were supposed to know better did, for the most part, know better. Conscientious Americans felt their society progressing on the road of civilization, working its way into the company of mature societies. Certain countries of Europe came to mind.

That was then. By the time of the war in Afghanistan, even before the Bush Administration's unilateralism had wreaked havoc with international relations, it seemed that a lot of water had passed under all our bridges. It may only be that a change in the wind had made us aware of some stagnant pools, but suddenly the odor of We-They filled the air. Salman Rushdie smelled it and wrote, in February, 2002,

Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population. Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and far more personalized. Muslim countries don't like America's power, its "arrogance," its success; but in the non-American West, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. ("Americans only care about their own dead.") American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues.

A Canadian legislator made news just a year later by saying, "Damn Americans! I hate those bastards." Not America, but Americans. Hawks and doves, rich and poor, people who ignore Canada and people who admire Canada, the minority for Bush and the plurality for Gore, the cruel and the kindly, individuals all: she damned them, hated them, and called them bastards. Possibly she meant a certain set of Americans with whom her government had to deal, but there are ways of expressing that. What came out, and not only from a single mouth, was " ... Americans!" But caution, now. It doesn't follow from any of the above that "those Canadians" hate Americans, or that "those British" have covered their dartboards with maps of the USA. And it doesn't follow from the opportunistic behavior of France's President and Foreign Minister that "those French" deserve to become unpersons with an unculture and an uncuisine. What, no foie gras in George W. Bush's America? No Marie Antoinette economic doctrine? When the We-They Mentality gets loose, anyone may suffer.

As for understanding this state of affairs, the stagnant-pool model is, alas, probably the operative one. It's sad but true that racism, now as ever, is the shame of American society. It's equally true, and sadder, that racism is not the shame of many other societies because not many other societies have developed a capacity for shame about such things. Where racism, religious bigotry, sexual prejudice, or other manifestations of We-They are not conspicuous blemishes, it's often the case that they've blended into the social complexion. Then something goes wrong, temperatures rise, and angry red scars appear. It seems that every long-established nation has its long-established stereotypes of others and of its own internal tribes. No doubt each nation now includes many people who are past disdaining these received prejudices, but also many for whom prejudices are "those old beliefs and conceptions which have stood the test of time and experience, and enshrine the mature wisdom of the ages." That's how the late Sir Isaiah Berlin describes the seminal thought of an early anti-rationalist anti-individualist in his essay "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism." When people share the proto-fascist's taste for old prejudices, it becomes a matter of course to concoct new ones. One can always find materials for them: an undeniably large number of fat people, a conspicuous minority of heartless money-lenders, or something. Nobody ever made a stereotype out of thin air, but it's still wrong to make one, for two reasons. In the first place, it's unjust to those people who don't fit the pattern. In the second place, it's unjust to those who do. Even if the Frank family had included a heartless money-lender, he wouldn't have deserved to be machine-gunned or gassed or confined in the midst of squalor and rampant typhus, as was Anne Frank. The proper punishment for heartless money-lending is not death. For merely belonging to the same tribe as the money-lender, no punishment at all is proper. Very few people would want their everyday prejudices to lead to such extremes. The problem is that they do lead to such extremes once in a while, and the rest of the time they produce at least a cruel remoteness. Therefore Joseph de Maistre must be put out of court.

If we're friends of Anne Frank, we have no business speaking in those plural nouns and pronouns that concentrate people in camps. We're not called upon to rescue her, or even to tell her story if it's only going to be a moral tour of paved roads, but to put our fingers in the dirt at our feet and pull out that commonplace weed, the We-They Mentality. In Anne Frank's time there was a humorist, Robert Benchley, whose flitting absurdities include one that briefly lights on that very weed: "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't." A silly thought on a serious subject, but then Anne probably loved silly thoughts.

•

13 April, 2003
Where Will All the Women Go?

Pete Seeger's old anti-war song is still pretty well known. The words, inspired by a passage from Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, slowly lead us through a cycle from the picking of flowers by young girls to the burial of their soldier husbands in graveyards, which then produce more flowers. Sorrowful as it is, at least it's a cycle and not an end game for human growth. Life, sanity, and hope revolve with their opposites in the course of the song, alternately shaming us and giving us heart for another try. The flowers return. What's more important, the young girls never go away. It's because they stay and grow old but remain as they are that war does not become an accustomed hell for both sexes and all ages.

Those young girls would pose a difficulty for many political liberals today, if they were to rear their pretty heads outside the elegiac world of the song and tell us what it is that makes them important. Ever since the first heyday of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" pacifism has been, for many people in the industrialized countries, a twofold thing: a heartfelt abhorrence of war, yes, but also part of a conventional set of shibboleths by which one is known as an enlightened, progressive sort of person and not just some gun-shy troglodyte. Everybody can mentally complete the set with more or less ease and with more or less reverence. It has been fairly stable over the years. However, there's one addition now that was still some way off at the fall of Saigon: feminism as a codified attitude.

War resisters in the Vietnam War era were called flower children and were best represented by the ineffable femininity, the rippling gingham and the abashing gentleness, of the females among them. True, there was a narcissistic side, and worse, to the flower children's counter-culture. The point is that they readily took the pastoral female principle as their ideal. They recognized a steadfastly nurturing Earth Mother as the symbol of peace, and mortal woman as its actual source. They thought the world needed more Yin and less Yang, more feminine shade and less masculine glare. More gratitude for a sheltering nest, and less eagerness for great exploits. If they had known then that the passage of a single generation would bring an editorial in The New York Times hailing the arrival of American women on the battlefield, they'd have felt that their cause had been lost forever. They know it now, those who survived the passage, and yet one doesn't hear many cries of revulsion at that particular development.

As far as the Iraq War itself is concerned, the opinions of American liberals today would not greatly surprise even a sudden caller from the 1960s. But then there's that Times editorial of 24 March, 2003, entitled "The Pinking of the Armed Forces." It begins in this way:

The news that one of the American soldiers taken captive by the Iraqis over the weekend is a woman serves as a reminder of how the American military has evolved, slowly and sometimes reluctantly, into an organization where the dangerous jobs of war are performed by both sexes. While women are still barred from some sorts of duty, the case for equal footing is gaining ground.

Thanks to changes in the law in 1994, women, who make up 15 percent of the military, are eligible for about 90 percent of all service positions. Those gains were a recognition of the performance of the 41,000 women deployed as part of Desert Storm three years earlier. Despite legal limits on combat participation, 13 women died and many more were wounded in that conflict.

Thanks? gains? performance? The editorial goes on to urge "debunking the arguments against fully employing [women]" in the armed forces and ends with these lines:

The United States, with the most advanced military in history, is simply a laggard on the topic of women in combat. One million women served in the Soviet Army in World War II, and Israel, Canada and South Africa are among the countries that now give women combat roles. The American policies of excluding women threaten the readiness of the armed forces, particularly when there is no draft.

A fuller integration of women into the American armed forces would of course carry the increased risk that women might desert, make mistakes or get killed. Or, they could outperform their male counterparts. It's happened before.

That's what is known, in the journalistic trade, as missing the story. An age of constant war and universal warriorhood is apparently dawning; the well of peace is being poisoned; and America's foremost liberal daily is busy ticking off items on the feminist agenda. So, it seems, are the people who decide things in such civilized places as Canada. The editorial writer must be pardoned for implying, in his or her eagerness to pile on as many examples as possible, that what was good enough for Soviet women under Stalin should be good enough for American women. It's Stalin, after all, to whom we are indebted for the concept of political correctness.

An essayist likes to find a subject on which most contemporary writers are missing something, but here the thing missed is so great, and the missing so general, and the implications so monstrous, that the subject becomes nearly unapproachable. How does one begin to write about the obvious and the elemental, when the obvious and the elemental have been purged from literate society? There must be very little of genuine pacifism left in that society when a great liberal newspaper thunders,

Politicians and Pentagon brass fear the emotional response that a large number of female casualties could engender with the American public, which is loath to see mothers, daughters, sisters and wives in body bags. But rather than elevate the worth of women, such arguments devalue the lives and family roles of men who also serve and die.

That is the sheerest sophistry, a kind of sophistry that has taken over the citadels of liberal thought in the West, leaving many thinking people politically homeless. It's all rhetorical technique. It tries mechanically to shift our attention away from the obvious (here, the savagery of a world in which women are expected to become warriors) to the contentious (a vague assertion of men's "family roles" which implicitly makes it all the same whether sons or daughters are sent to live in trenches). The Times writer, like many people of the enlightened and progressive sort, evidently sees other human beings as pictures on the walls of a mental room, a fresco in which women have uniformly become what the occupant of the room wishes women to be: half-girl, half-boy creatures who are so sensitive about their competence that they'll go to the most destructive lengths to prove it. Outside the room, that view is untenable. Everybody knows of a mother or a daughter or a sister or a wife who is, to her great credit, unfit for warfare in a way that is utterly different from any man's unfitness. Every parent who has set out to rear a child free from gender stereotypes, only to see the child invent those stereotypes before coming in contact with the outside world, knows there is something going on here which no rhetorical art can gloss. The Times must be aware that non-compliant beings exist outside the mental room, but it tries to slip past that difficulty:

The American policies of excluding women threaten the readiness of the armed forces, particularly when there is no draft (emphasis added).

Aye, there's the rub. After society adopts the principle of using women as combatants, and the draft subsequently returns, there will be no rationale for placing women on a different footing than men. We will all be Stalinists, then. If you think this is idle speculation, do an Internet search on the word women and the phrase military draft and see what turns up.

But suppose for a moment that you shared the editorialist's overarching interest in military readiness. Imagine a mother or daughter or sister or wife of your own acquaintance and concede, for the sake of argument, that she ought to put in a term of military service, trusting that she would not come home in a body bag. Very well; and who would protect her from being raped by her comrades-in-arms? The editorialist of The New York Times, writing in the above vein, would probably come up with something like "We must not cede the barracks to the rapist." But that sentiment is just another painting on the mental walls. The reality of the matter, which must weigh very heavily on the minds of real women and those who really love them, is that women in the military are unusually vulnerable to rape. "Well, they shouldn't be!" cries the Panglossian liberal. How true. The Panglossians among us will of course straighten out that kink in the world as soon as possible. Until then, they will please refrain from attacking the social sanctions that enable women to keep away from rape-infested areas.

But this is playing the editorialist's game, disputing current questions of ideology and interest while overlooking the background. It seems so natural to do so, if you've made the historical passage gradually and not in one jarring time slip. And yet it's not natural at all. It's a case of that political disease of the past century which makes progressive-minded people become so obsessed with the internal logic of a cherished cause that they will pursue it to the destruction of all other cherished things.

War is essentially a male institution arising from men's traditional ambitions, men's traditional sense of priorities, and the tendency of men and boys to form large groups for the purpose of projecting power, as opposed to the tendency of women and girls to seek civilized relations through intimacy. An entire populace made available for securing whatever military "readiness" men's future ambitions may require: that's hardly a woman's vision. On the contrary, the editorial statement of The New York Times encapsulates the compromised feminist vision of our time in its combination of egalitarian appeal and underlying masculine bias. Its subtext is the aim of marginalizing women who are not amenable to the male principle.

This insistence on male and female principles may seem less retrograde if one thinks of it as an Eastward-looking tribute to Yin and Yang or, in more mundane fashion, relates it to the known patterns of everyday civilian violence. Those patterns do suggest that resorting to force is especially a weakness of males. Either historical woman is not a mere product of social conditioning, or social conditioning has produced something of immense value to the world and all that lives in it; something that is at least indispensable until the botched conditioning of historical man has been corrected. As G. K. Chesterton writes in What's Wrong with the World (1910),

The shortest way of summarizing the position is to say that woman stands for the idea of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the mind must return after every excursion on extravagance. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There must in every machine be a part that moves and a part that stands still; there must be in everything that changes a part that is unchangeable. And many of the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the center and pillar of health.

Chesterton, being Chesterton, leads on where we would not care to follow: he concludes that women should not participate in political life. Still, being Chesterton, he has put his massive finger on something of vital, elemental importance in the background of our petty struggles.

Human beings have always lived in a cycle of war and peace which is, for the survivors, an ebb-and-flow of sanity. Men go to war and derange themselves. They come back knowing they have done so, uneasily accustomed to things morbid and mad, doubting their own humanity. Women, meanwhile, have kept the sane part of the world intact. They've preserved it for everybody by keeping to it themselves. Man returns, and woman teaches him to be human again. This is not simply a matter of resuming the old routines of peace. Woman is able to give man heart for another try at sanity only because she is reliably sane herself. There must be a principle in the world that is the very antithesis of war, if the human race is to improve. In most societies until now, woman has been that principle.

It's no use arguing, as our increasingly hypothetical editorialist might, that experience of combat will make women all the more capable of teaching others to love peace. It doesn't work that way. To young people, there's no figure more beguiling than that of the somewhat older person who has been to hell and back. As surely as Experience calls, "Do as I say and not as I do," Youth will respond, "Yeah, sure." When we're young we long to join the club of tragically experienced and romantically haunted figures, and our minds race over the interval that must be spent in hell. That's really a large part of the war problem, the perennial longing of boys to be battle-hardened men. Showing them battle-hardened women will not help matters.

Hereupon, a proposal. There is now an active network of organizations and individual volunteers dedicated to helping women defend themselves against domestic violence and other forms of abuse or exploitation. Let that network perform the following functions, as well:

1. Counseling women against military service and helping financially needy women find alternatives.

2. Campaigning against any attempt to enlarge the warrior pool by including women.

America's current leaders evidently believe, like Islamic fundamentalists, that the male principle is God's principle and should rule the world. If they think at all about the killing and maiming of innocent people, including children, in their pursuit of a new world order, they think of it as a price to be paid much the way corporate executives allow for a certain outlay to cover a certain number of lives destroyed by profitable activities. The male principle is grand indeed. It looks above mere life and sanity, reads destinies written in the clouds, spies rainbows beyond the storms and pots of gold beyond the rainbows. It grows stronger as people of both sexes learn to feel that it is quite a fine thing for women to go to war, thereby dulling the sense that it is quite a bad thing, a universally dehumanizing thing, to let war come to women. The world doesn't need more pseudo-men adept at playing a man's game and committing a man's follies. It needs more flower-picking, soul-nurturing, wise and witty Jane Austen women, and it needs to listen to them. That means often listening in private, out of the glare and away from the din.

There can be no accidental choosing, in this matter. We already know that when a whole nation submits to the male principle it breeds unnatural things. People accept smart uniforms and shabby myths in exchange for everything of real value. Young egos grow on the solemn mock praise of patriarchs who intend to outlive them. Even people of the enlightened and progressive sort troop through the bright neon portal to desolation, not merely laying down their hope of grace in this or any other world, but vying to kick it away with the boldest show of self-assurance. If we make the same choice, we have to be prepared for the same unnatural things. It's no longer possible to plead ignorance, because we saw enough in the twentieth century to know the consequences of choosing to live under a single high and hard principle. Chesterton had somehow seen enough when the century was just a decade old:

Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a creature as man that was born of a man.

Let the young girls speak now, or forever hold their peace.

•

31 March, 2003
The Mohammedan Candidate

Note: "The Mohammedan Candidate" was the first entry in The Cassandra Notes, the forerunner of The Stringer.

No Cassandra likes to predict a calamity in retrospect. However, this site is making its debut more than two years after the accession of George W. Bush to the Presidency of the United States. It's too late to foretell that Mr. Bush will bring America no mere Republican conservatism, but downright violence to the fabric of democracy, freedom, and economic coexistence in which conservatives and liberals have interwoven their interests for so many years. It's still possible, chronologically, to foretell the consequences of his military adventure in the heart of the Muslim world, but that's a task for the heaven-cursed Cassandra. Instead, let's take a page from the book of that Bible Code man who briefed the US Defense Department on Al Qaeda's plans, and interpret George W. Bush's Presidency with the aid of The Manchurian Candidate, a brilliant political satire which is better known as a movie (1962) than as a novel by Richard Condon. If the choice of text is outrageous, so is the spectacle that prompted it.

In the movie we see some particularly rigorous ultraconservatives trying to gain control of the White House, only they're not really ultraconservatives but agents of an international communist conspiracy directed from China. It's hilariously sobering. The conspirators have understood that while Americans will never suffer themselves to be stripped of their freedoms by communists, they just may stand for it at the hands of superpatriots. The filmmakers have understood that the two tyrannies are separated by about the thickness of a label, anyway.

There are three modes of applying the thesis of The Manchurian Candidate to George W. Bush. The most pleasurable mode is to imagine him as the witting agent of political Islam, a convert under deep cover who has, with great subtlety, cultivated the persona of a vacuously dogged superpatriot. Now, that's entertainment. All enormities and debacles, everything from the Attorney General's campaign against the rule of law to the ignoble grasping at duct tape, may be seen as part of a finely wrought plan to bring America low. The more you think about it, the better it succeeds as black comedy. Would that we could really have our calamity with so many laughs along the way.

The second mode is much more plausible, not to say obvious. That is to see Mr. Bush as the unwitting tool of political Islam, of Jacques Chirac's ambitions, and of every other force that would use such a tool to dissipate American influence in the world. As a laboratory subject mindlessly responds to stimuli, it seems that Mr. Bush responds to every political challenge or opportunity by destroying something which America's enemies must wish destroyed, if they've dared to wish it: the country's solidarity with the rest of the democratic "infidel" world; the economic security of its common people, which is a precondition of internal solidarity; the freedoms and guarantees of justice that have allowed people throughout the world to place a special trust in America's national instincts. Instead of strengthening his countrymen by helping them settle down and face less secure lives with resourceful courage, he undermines their strength by withdrawing the civil liberties that sustain hope and replacing them with a show of futile measures for banishing fear. He has shied from the challenge of open public leadership since the outset of his Presidency, and after terrorists attacked New York and Washington he stayed away from the capital until it seemed that the danger had passed: a narrowly prudent act when a boldly reassuring one was needed. He declaims before the television audience with knitted brows that could express either a frontiersman's determination or a sheltered rich boy's anxiety, were not the balance always upset by the look in his eyes, which is one of bunkered bewilderment. It seems that everything about him tends perversely to serve the purposes of those who hate the American way. For many who deplore Mr. Bush's Presidency, that view may be the most acceptable mode of relating it to The Manchurian Candidate.

However, the most accurate mode is probably the third: recognizing George W. Bush not as the witting agent of political Islam, nor as its unwitting tool, but as the half-witting agent of something akin to it. Mr. Bush declares himself to be a born-again Christian, as did President Jimmy Carter. Yet he sets himself apart from Mr. Carter and from all Presidents in living memory by his forwardness in joining politics with religious beliefs, even to the point of adducing the will of God. He cannot be compared to a believer-thinker like Mr. Carter, much less to the kind of President who gets religion once a week for services at St. John's. In conceiving what's wrong with the world, and to what authority he must answer for his use of power in such a wayward world, he is to Christianity what his nemeses are to Islam. Indeed, he is best understood as a Mohammedan Christian. Jesus jolts us with the declaration, "I came not to send peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). Nevertheless, the historical Jesus sent no sword-wielding armies through the world. He made no bid for temporal power. His "sword" was a faith that would sever all profane bonds and replace them with a divine regime of compassion and surrender. Until humanity awoke to its salvation, which was not a reward but an outright gift awaiting acceptance, temporalities would prevail and God would forgive.

In contrast, Mohammed eventually combined the role of Messenger with that of military commander-in-chief for a loving but sternly exacting God. As Robert Payne writes in The Holy Sword (1959; aka The History of Islam), "No one knows why Muhammad changed so abruptly from a benevolent despot, the devoted servant of the Merciful and Compassionate God, into a ruthless conqueror." It seems that he was by nature sweet-tempered and initially inclined to live in peace with those around him, including Jews. He took Abraham as his personal model. He professed a special sympathy with Christians and called Jesus the greatest of prophets (to this day, Muslims refer to Jesus as Messiah). However, he believed that peace, while a divine gift to be cherished, was not a universal blessing but a reward for complete submission (islam) to God's will. To win this peace for the world, he brought forth a Holy Sword that was much more than a figure of speech. He aimed to unite the world under God, and when the world resisted he felt called upon to subdue it by force. To him, the work of forging an empire was a sacred mission. In the Islamic Empire of which he did forge the core, the theocratic state was the only permissible state, and so it is to those in our own time who take Mohammed's more severe teachings as their guide for political action.

The word Mohammedan is an improper substitute for Muslim inasmuch as it implies devotion to Mohammed rather than God. It does, however, make a fitting epithet for those who emulate Mohammed the holy warrior in their attitude toward the world. In that sense, Osama Bin Laden is (if he is living) a Mohammedan. In a broader sense, so is the would-be Caliph Saddam Hussein (if he is living), although, like most Caliphs before him, he is hardly a pious Muslim. In a still broader sense, so is George W. Bush, although he is not a Muslim at all. He is not a Muslim, but neither is he an emulator of Jesus. He is a Mohammedan Christian and at the same time a pharisee with a self-serving disregard for the eye of the scriptural needle. His belief in theo-plutocracy is writ so large that it can be hard to take in.

According to a fairly recent Gallup poll cited by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, 46% of the American people identify themselves as evangelical Christians. The number of Americans who adhere devoutly to some religious faith must therefore be a substantial majority of the population. If so, religion needs no help from government. By establishing an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) in the White House and ordering five Cabinet agencies to maintain satellite offices in coordination with the central one, Mr. Bush has acted to assert a connection between temporal authority and spiritual authority. The foothold thus gained may have more than symbolic importance. Given such offices as a base, trusted appointees and staff could function like the political cadre of a communist bureaucracy, combining implicit privilege with self-assured meddling and watchfulness to tyrannize the governmental workplace. That would be consistent with what is known of the current Administration's will to manipulate federal agencies for political purposes.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has spoken, acted, and refrained from action with missionary zeal in areas of interest to evangelical Christians like the President and himself, while more generally proceeding with brash contempt for the Constitutional guarantees and statutory laws of secular society. The Bush Administration has used the USA Patriot Act, which it rushed through Congress in 2001, as a vehicle for overriding freedoms and judicial decisions that obstruct its aims. At this writing, the Attorney General has just moved to increase his power still further with a draft "Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003" containing, in the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, "a multitude of new and sweeping law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers — many of which are not related to terrorism — that would severely undermine basic constitutional rights and checks and balances." Acts like these, which couple new powers with vague criteria for exercising them, enable those who occupy the offices of government to do what even the best people need to be kept from doing: making their personal will the law of the land.

Mr. Bush and his associates seem in a hurry to prove the wisdom of Lord Acton's words, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." No proof is needed. Absolute power corrupted the Caliphs. It corrupts the rulers of theocracies in the world today. The very thought of it corrupts anybody who imagines himself to be the hand of God, and when his own hands hold the levers of enormous power over human affairs, one may say that the outlook is grim. Such a person will become wilful not only in matters of religious doctrine but in all matters, since any act of his is presumably God's pleasure. Having once decided to take his country to war, he'll mentally drift among theories of motivation believing that God is moving through him in some mysterious way and that any such thing as a reason must be divined from the possible outcomes. The same certitude can make him insensitive to the patent debasement of his authority, as when the leader of a democracy moves with bland unconcern to crush ordinary people to the ground and deliver the last morsel of their economic security to the rich. On that head there are at least precedents for hope. Payne writes, "An attempt to buy off the Ghatafans by offering them one third of the produce of the date palms of Yathrib failed when one of Muhammad's followers asked bluntly whether he was acting on his own behalf or on behalf of the One God: whereupon Muhammad cancelled the agreement with the Ghatafans." But, then, those were days of moral courage and compunction.

Finally, there's something else that the militant fundamentalists in Washington probably have in common with those in other camps: an uneasy feeling that this burst of energy which they are putting forth now, in the early twenty-first century, will be the last blaze before the twilight of such gods as theirs. Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists have made it pretty clear that they feel themselves being overwhelmed by modern secularism. Most likely, the Christian fundamentalists who have gained America's seat of power share some part of that feeling. There's too much in this modern world that has to be reversed or blotted out before they can rest. It's more than just the secular culture that offends their sensibilities and the humanist ethic of skeptical tolerance that affronts their conviction. There's the American system of government itself. It is, after all, a system for letting people disagree and disbelieve, having been built by freethinking intellectuals such as Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin and fortified by a long line of essentially secularist politicians and jurists. The Mohammedan Christians may feel compelled to undo it all, but in the attempt they will surely undo themselves and hurt a great many people.

This may be the kind of calamity that has to run its course no matter what. If Mr. Bush's religious certitude is all that it seems to be, he must not merely serve those who hate the American way; he must hate it himself, albeit with a half-formed hatred and a fossilized loyalty to its symbols. As long as he is President he will be in conflict with those who love the American way, as well as those who hate it with all their hearts. Only the original Cassandra could foretell how that experience will affect his Presidency and the world. Instead of a guess at the future, here is the rest of Payne's remark about Mohammed's fateful transformation thirteen centuries ago: "Perhaps power corrupted him; perhaps he knew the faith would never survive without unsheathing the sword. What is certain is that his character changed. Where he had been soft he became hard."

It now seems that George W. Bush was the Mohammedan candidate in the election of 2000. Not knowing that at the time, many of us supposed that the strange outcome of the election, in which he won the office while losing the ballot, would tend to inhibit his actions. Instead, it may have inspired him with the belief that God had stepped in to make him the most powerful man on earth.

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