American politics is not something I typically discuss here, but I couldn’t resist this week when my hometown Congressman, Randy Kuhl, told a Rochester Democrat & Chronicle editorial board member that he “thought about packing” (as in a gun) in response to the arrest of five peace activists in one of his district offices. “There’s no question this is a coordinated fringe effort,” Mr. Kuhl told another local paper, the Corning Leader, in an effort to justify this vigilante posturing and his request to the federal government to beef up his taxpayer-funded office security at further taxpayer expense.
Access will be limited to those who “have legitimate reasons for being there,” he told the Democrat & Chronicle, which said the protestors “stormed” his office. “We are now making sure appropriate measures are taken so that people who are not authorized to come in can’t come in,” he then explained to the Leader. And we now know what those measures apparently include. (Potential future dramitization: Yeeeee haw! Those peace loving hippies will never see us coming. Ka Pow! Anyone else want a piece of this gun toting Congresscowboy?) Only two things could possibly explain this grotesque overreaction: deep paranoia or blatant propaganda.
For the record, news reports indicated that the protestors, several of them from what the right-wing nuts upstate like to call the “People’s Republic of Ithaca,” which is just over the border in a neighboring district, were arrested when they refused to leave the Bath, NY office at closing time. Yeah, that’s some scary shit. Although with the little vacation time we Americans get these days, I’m sure Mr. Kuhl’s staff did view the protestors’ sit-in as a bona fide threat to their well-being.
“Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be,” wrote Michael Ignatieff in the August 5 edition of The New York Times Magazine. How appropriate I thought that, at the same time this former Harvard Professor was indulging in his mea culpa on Iraq, Randy Kuhl continued to chase chimeras into the lunatic fringe of history.
All kidding aside, there are some serious, serious issues here. Beside the fact that these inflammatory remarks are meant only to equate these peaceful protestors with dangerous criminals, this folly is but one more reason why American moral authority and respect around the world continues to decline, something those of us who travel frequently know all too well.
Americans are simply delusional, some say. According to an article in Newsweek, while the American dream used to be a “global fantasy,” today the gap between how we view ourselves and how foreigners view us is positively gaping.
According to a BBC poll released earlier this year, “Fully 71 percent of Americans see the United States as a source of good in the world. More than half view Bush’s election as positive for global security. Other studies report that 70 percent have faith in their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent believe ‘American ideas and customs’ should spread globally.”
“Foreigners take an entirely different view,” according to Newsweek. In the BBC poll 58 percent “see Bush’s re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America’s traditional allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single digits.” And not surprisingly, the general anti-Bush sentiment is morphing in many parts of the world to “a more general anti-Americanism.”
Others have found an American public that is very aware of our image problem on the global stage. A recent study conducted by the American Security Project found that “Americans believe our moral authority is in steep decline” and that they consider this a very serious problem. It also found that the large majority of Americans (68%) want troops out of Iraq within a year or as soon as possible, the very issue Mr. Kuhl’s imprudent comments were meant to de-legitimize.
It’s a shame that Mr. Kuhl’s statements on the arrest controversy serve only to inflame further hatred and distract from his incessant fence-sitting on the Iraq issue, but do nothing to promote the sober dialogue about this conflict we so sorely need.
“Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself,” wrote Mr. Ignatieff. One has to wonder whether Randy Kuhl is capable of hearing the warning bells inside his own head.
