Quotes from the past: 'We're an empire now'

by Leigh Pomeroy

From "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush" by Ron Suskind, New York Times, October 17, 2004:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

The article, somewhat dated, is here. The quote remains, however, firmly imprinted on history, just as the "senior adviser to Bush" accurately predicted, though I'm sure he wasn't aware of it at the time. Yet the consequences are much different, no doubt, than he thought. He assumed that the Bush administration's rewriting of history would become the new history. Not so. For the truth is often revealed in layers, as viewpoints, opinions and lies are one by one peeled back to reveal a generally agreed-on consensus. And while that consensus can never be 100 percent accurate, just as a parabolic curve can never reach its limit, it can give us a good idea of what really happened.

Witnessed another way, finding the truth is much like dealing with the limitations imposed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that one can never know both the speed and position of a particle at the same time.

The closer one gets to truth in history, the greater the chance is that the source was an actor in that truth, and therefore had an effect on it as well as being an observer of it.

Given that limitation to achieving total truth, observers can, by successive approximations, get down to a pretty good estimation of what really happened, just as physicists can get a pretty good idea of a particle's position and velocity at any given point in time.

Which means that all the attempts to effect policy by rewriting history, as the Bush administration has consistently done, will eventually be discovered, as they have been slowly since, essentially, January of 2001.

That the Bush administration would do this is not unique to governments, as all governments manipulate truth in one way or another. It is, however, rare among democratic governments that such manipulation has been done so brazenly and haughtily. Indeed, the Bush regime has elevated truth manipulation to high art, which I'm sure would be admired by some of the world's greatest dictators if they were still alive. "What a grand way of doing things," they might say. "Pose as a democracy, but run the country as an war-fueled oligarchy!"

Much of this country's populace still has the wool pulled over its eyes. After all, President Bush does enjoy an approval rating in the twenties. It's certainly conceivable that ten percent of the country has done well by the Bush policies -- executives of oil companies and other major international corporations, "defense" contractors, those with inherited wealth and Republican operatives, to name a few. And then there are those who perceive that their lives have been improved under Bush, or perhaps that things would have been worse under a different administration.

Yet it's clear that over seventy percent of the country is not as stupid as the Bush administration's manipulators think. This is good. It means that theoretically all the damage that's been done both domestically and internationally by the administration's policies, assuming they don't result in a permanent effect, can be repaired by those who still have faith in our democratic processes.

But it's going to be a hard slog. First, we'll have to continue peeling back those layers of untruths. In fact, it might be argued that we have turned the corner and are exposing new Bush administration fabrications as rapidly as they are being generated. Anyway, we can hope so.

But then comes the real challenge: We must undo the damage that's been created. That won't be easy, as, for example, the effects of our 2003 invasion of Iraq will last generations, and our delay in dealing with the causes of global climate change have only exacerbated its potential consequences. More examples Bush administration mismanagement include its failure to deal with trade imbalance and our growing debt to foreign countries, fossil fuel and foreign energy dependence, comprehensive health care policy, long-term economic protection of our aging population, comprehensive transportation solutions, immigration reform and much, much more.

The truth is that this country has gone backwards in the last six-plus years. Not only do we have to climb out of the hole we've dug, but once we've done that we have to attack the problems that we should have been dealing with all along.

It is apparent that creating history has been much more important to the Bush administration than doing the right thing. And yes, the "right thing" is very much in the eyes of the beholder. But let's ask ourselves a key question: Is this country and the world better off now than it was in January of 2001? Only a fool would say "yes."

Blame rarely rights a wrong, but blame is at least a starting point. So let's assume a good starting point -- one of several -- is embodied in Suskind's "senior adviser" quote. Regardless of all the good and bad humankind can do, civilization cannot survive without certain basic pretexts, one of those being truth.

And although truth is never absolute, it must always be sought, not created. It is this very basic value that the Bush administration has most lacked. And it is from the lack of this core ethic that this country and the world have most suffered.