DISUNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Controversy over the attacks on 9/11 continues. Despite UNITED 93, a film I found very compelling, there are those who think that crash and whatever hit the Pentagon were both fabrications. Even though there is no question that something hit the twin towers, a lot more people suspect the government had a hand in the collapse of the towers and neighboring WTC 7.

But those numbers pale in comparison to those who distrust the reasons given for attacking Iraq. Was Colin Powell misled or misleading is his presentation to the United Nations? Did the administration honestly think there were WMDs posing a nuclear threat to the region, or were we lied to in an attempt to get us to accept an action we never would have accepted otherwise?

After all, this administration has always operated in secrecy and doubt. Did polling officials in Florida and Ohio rig the results that favored Bush over Gore and then Kerry? Was the Diebold Corporation, which manufactured many of the voting machines, complicit? After all, the president of Diebold “promised” the state of Ohio to Bush.

After election, the administration established a pattern of secrecy. Documents that had been de-classified were re-classified. Wiretaps were ordered and first legitimized with claims of warrants. Then, even the pretense of warrants was dropped. Cheney, with close ties to big oil, formed an energy task force, refusing to release the identities of the participants. We do know that environmentalists, conservationists, and alternative fuel folks did not need to apply. Is it any wonder that the public feels bamboozled by the explanations for soaring fuel costs?

Halliburton, still doling out deferred payment to Cheney, wins no-bid contracts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and even when those contracts are executed with shabby accountability, they are renewed.

Bush told us he is a “compassionate conservative.” His compassion apparently extends only to big business and the rich, the primary beneficiaries of his tax cuts. The poor need not apply. He tried to privatize Social Security in the name of rescuing it, like rescuing a drowning man with a large, heavy rock. The Medicare Prescription Drug program? Tailored to the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, and if you can’t figure it out, you must have Alzheimer’s, for which you need an expensive medication.

It seems like we’ve added a fourth branch of government, i.e., the Great American Lobby, headquartered on K Street, de facto president Jack Abramoff. The speaker of the House resigns in a flurry of charges of corruption. A congressman is caught on tape accepting bribes, the money is found in his freezer, and he has the audacity to complain about the F.B.I.’s intrusion. The Democrats and Republicans alike issue statements denouncing the F.B.I’s intrusion. Is that chutzpah or what?

Actually, that’s small potatoes. We got our knickers in a knot over the awarding of port security to Dubai Ports World, yet nobody even noticed that Treasury Secretary John Snow, under whose aegis the deal was awarded, is a former executive of CSX, a container shipping firm with links to Dubai Ports World and the Carlysle Corporation, which you learned about if you saw FAHRENHEIT 9/11. The revolving door of cronyism between government and industry spins again.

One after another corporation is exposed as running a shell game. The executives at Krispy Kreme were misleading their investors and employees right out of the Enron playbook both of which went belly-up after their executive officers reaped millions. Turns out the high and noble institution, the University of California, has been handing out bonus packages right and left, in blatant violation of its rules and procedures, hoodwinking the Regents, and the President of the University hardly seems ashamed. The lid is about to blow on Fannie Mae, the largest facilitator of mortgage lending in the country. Turns out the Army Corps of Engineers may have bungled the job in rebuilding the levees and floodwalls of New Orleans, not just now but in the past, but of course the Corps denies it. At least the President of the University of California had the decency to admit his wrongdoing. “Taking responsibility” has become rare and as ineffectual as taking umbrage.

Or perhaps taking confession. Instead of taking responsibility for its pedophilic priests and putting them out of the harm’s way of children, the RC Church simply rotated them from one parish to another, all the while denying any wrong-doing, until victims began collecting millions. Then something had to be done.

Before the threat of avian flu appeared to subside, our government had purchased millions of doses of Tamiflu, manufactured by Roche from a formula owned by Gilead. Who was the former chairman of Gilead before he became Secretary of Defense? You got it. Is it any wonder that bird flu is now being spoken of as a hoax?

Same with global warming. I happen to believe it is a reality, but I’m waiting for the next conspiracy theory to allege that the administration is doing it on purpose to facilitate drilling in Alaska.

Last but not least, our sports and entertainment industries. Barry Bonds is booed as he breaks Babe Ruth’s record. Was it skill or steroids? The last two contestants make it to the finals of “American Idol.” Was it votes or manipulation?

I was inspired to compose this essay by rumors circulating about “American Idol.” Did Reuben win over Clay Aiken because the producers suspected Clay might be gay? Are the judges’ comments a not-very-subtle attempt to influence voters? Are the phone lines rigged (like voting machines) to give votes cast for one contestant to another contestant (a notion I would seriously consider if I found out Diebold makes the equipment)?

If you add up all the above aspects of life in which trust is at a minimum, corruption seemingly can’t get any more rampant, and the notion of “truth” is beginning to seem like a cruel joke, the mental state of America is somewhere between utter cynicism and blatant paranoia. The motto seems to be, or seems that it ought to be, “Trust no one.”

When I was growing up, i.e., until day before yesterday, it was during and after WWII. We were “good guys,” fighting for the “right” causes, not just for self-interest (at least until Pearl Harbor). Just about everybody did his or her part to support the war effort. The notion that FDR had links to industries that might be profiting from the war would have been unthinkable, and I don’t recall that notion ever being entertained.

Then it was perhaps Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex that brought the sobering awareness that something could begin to stink in the state of Denmark. The film, WHY WE FIGHT, spells out that thesis. In America, we hold history in low regard and scarcely remember our own. If it were otherwise, we would “remember” many periods in our history when government and various industries conspired against “the people.”

The next glass of cold water, as I recall, came when Spiro Agnew was exposed as a sleazy, two-bit crook, and I wondered how in the world Nixon came to pick him. Watergate answered that question for me.

Kennedy was my hero, but I’ll have to admit that my unmitigated admiration took a blow when I learned what a womanizer he was and the first “conspiracy” theory I can remember, that Marilyn Monroe had been offed because she knew too much.

The second conspiracy theory I remember lives on, namely that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby were not isolated nut cases, acting alone, that perhaps our president had been assassinated by our government.

And then there were the lies about Viet Nam. As Robert McNamara relates in FOG OF WAR, Gen. Westmoreland once speculated that if we hadn’t “won” the war, he and McNamara would have been tried as war criminals for crimes against humanity. And they all lied, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, asking us not to believe our eyes as we watched the 6:00 news, asking us not to puke when the National Guard shot the students at Kent State.

That’s it, I think, the extent of lying, so prevalent that is has become the expectation. Maybe not even lying, more the Art of the Dodgeful Answer, “I did not have sex with that woman”…unless you count fellatio as sex. Forget “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” It’s more like “the parts of the truth that make me look good.”

“Integrity” is a quaint term that used to mean something in American society, a term that Webster defines as “steadfast adherence to a strict moral and ethical code.” It’s as though collectively, we have decided to abandon the code of honesty, in our commerce, our government and other higher institutions, even in our sports and entertainment. Not just caveat emptor, buyer beware, but citizen beware. That, my friends, to borrow terms from construction and real estate, is dry rot of the infrastructure of our character. Our piers and joists have been eaten away by the termites and beetles of greed and self-interest, unabated by compassionate enlightenment. Any house like that is bound to fall down, and there is no homeowners insurance for such losses.