Editorials

Editorial: Does Anyone Know What’s Going On?

By Becky O’Malley
Friday July 13, 2007

President Bush increasingly inhabits a parallel universe. His Thursday press conference displayed a remarkable disconnect from the current thinking of most Americans and even of many elected officials in his own Republican party. Most Americans, from all parties, now understand that our main, our only, goal in Iraq is to get out, though there are still some differences of opinion as to the manner of our going. There has been approximately no progress toward the subsidiary goal of helping the indigenous Iraqis establish a civil society based on what in this country we call democratic values. Staying there longer won’t change much. It’s possible that immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces would exacerbate the factional war among Iraqis, but even that is not certain.  

One analysis of who’s fighting whom might show Sunni Moslems versus Shiite Moslems. Another—one which Bush appeared to believe on Thursday—would say that it’s us against al Qaeda, the same al Qaeda that destroyed the World Trade Center, possibly planned the failed bombings in the United Kingdom, and is now holed up on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But al Qaeda is a Sunni group, and if the fight in Iraq is Sunnis vs. Shiites, why are we (or at least Senator Lieberman and his friends) also threatening to invade Iran, a Shiite country? You can almost excuse Dubya for not understanding the twisted logic here, but he is the president of the United States, after all, and in the old days presidents at least pretended to understand what was going on. 

The death of Lady Bird Johnson, a smart woman who usually understood what was going on, reminded us that her husband, a smart man who also understood what was going on, had enough of a sense of self-preservation to bail when we finally managed to show him that the Vietnam War was a mistake. George W. Bush is not so smart. In his press conference on Thursday he just looked like an old guy left behind by the passage of time, the last person to hear history crashing around his ears. 

The San Francisco Mime Troupe’s summer show, which I had the privilege of seeing in preview a couple of weeks ago, focuses on what has become a widely believed analysis: vice-president Dick Cheney is really running the government these days. The fact that Cheney double Ed Holmes is one of the group’s acting principals makes this an obvious winning choice, but political observers increasingly believe that Bush is nothing more than a figurehead, the last to know what’s really happening. It’s not just inside-the-Beltway knowledge any more that Cheney’s built-in defibrillator goes off frequently, causing him to experience the equivalent of a stun-gun hit, and Holmes captures this phenomenon to great comic advantage. (See him yourself this weekend at Cedar-Rose Park in Berkeley.)  

Not addressed in the play is what might happen if Cheney were to die or become incapacitated in one of these episodes. Would Congress regain control of the country, or would there be a military coup? The chance of Bush taking charge seems increasingly remote. SFMT plays traditionally evolve over the summer season, so we might find out later.  

Another theme in the show is the gradual enlightenment of a formerly hard-boiled investigative reporter who is recalled to service, aided by his romantic relationship with a gung-ho newbie. Even the torpid U.S. press does appear to have caught on that “victory or defeat” isn’t the theme for this war, as indeed it hasn’t been for any war the United States has been engaged in since the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one. Reporters at Bush’s Thursday press conference seemed finally to smell blood, even trying for a few follow-up questions when he ducked the first ones.  

It’s profoundly disconcerting for a Berkeley viewer to compare these press conferences to meetings of the Berkeley City Council. Nobody in Berkeley expects much of Bush, but we do hope for a certain amount of competence and familiarity with the problems on the table at the local level. Tuesday night’s council meeting did not inspire confidence.  

One of the items on the agenda was a review of the action of the Landmarks Preservation Committee recognizing the Iceland building as a local historic resource. It was supported by reams of expert testimony and a staff report that backed most elements of the decision, but councilmembers seemed eager to trump up some excuse for overturning the designation. They showed themselves to be willing victims of the usual developers’ propaganda maneuvers. 

An unholy alliance between developer Ali Kashani and the YMCA health club empire proposed a new project for the site, putting on a shameless parade of Head Start advocates as purported beneficiaries. Kashani, with even less finesse than his role model Patrick Kennedy, is obviously using Head Start the way Kennedy used the Gaia bookstore to get approval for the Gaia building and the Fine Arts Theater to get approval of the Fine Arts building, neither of which ended up as tenants in the end. And perhaps old-timers might remember that the YMCA was also supposed to be the excuse for the Golden Bear building, and that didn’t happen either.  

Councilmembers and the mayor were either genuinely or willfully ignorant of the fact that according to law they may only decide at this point whether Iceland meets standards for historic designation, not whether they might like a proposed replacement project. A historic building can always be demolished by council fiat, but that decision is for the future—it can’t be made now. Even City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque, who often acts as confused as her clients, seemed to understand this legal nicety, but she was unable or unwilling to explain it in any coherent way.  

Then there was the discussion of new permits for the Wright’s Garage building on Ashby at College. The mayor presided with his usual combination of apparent boredom and procedural oblivion, his main goal obviously getting home to bed. After devoting hours in the early part of the meeting to discussing the ins and outs of rules regulating the service of alcohol, Bates, Olds and Moore disingenuously refused to vote to hold a public hearing to address Elmwood concerns about putting a big new bar on a busy corner. Linda Maio did point out that holding a public hearing would give the council a lever to work on some sort of compromise, and Kriss Worthington suggested that the Zoning Adjustments Board should be asked to try one more time for a solution, but the three holdouts stuck to their guns despite pleas from residents and merchants.  

Why does any of this matter? How could it be compared to the ongoing travesty which the Bush administration has become?  

It’s almost obscene to compare resolution of local land use issues to the pressing need for ending the Iraq war, but the underlying theme which ties the two together continues to be the future of democratic government as we’ve known it. Just as the guy at the top national level doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, the top guy at the local level doesn’t seem to be following the ball most of the time (nor do most of his colleagues.) And neither guy seems to care at all any more about constituents’ opinions on matters of public interest, nor do most Berkeley councilmembers. That’s worrisome.