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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