Flapdoodle

Exceptional us

BOOKS DO FURNISH a room, British writer Anthony Powell once assured us. Powell lived a long time, nearly the length of the very long and wretched 20th century, but not quite long enough to witness the spectacle of the second (and let us hope last) Bush presidency. If he'd hung on, he might have been obliged to say that books about Bush do furnish a room, which is a considerably less attractive phrase, even when spoken in a posh Oxbridge accent.

So far the Bush collection isn't yet furnishing an entire room in our little doll house, but the proliferation of volumes is taking up some noticeable shelf space. There is The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, by Kevin Phillips, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush, by Peter Singer, and the excitingly titled Fraud: The Strategy Behind the Bush Lies and Why the Media Didn't Tell You, by Paul Waldman. As I write these words, other volumes are en route or simply coveted, and I find myself wondering when I will make time to read them all.

It is fair to say that no other president in modern times has stimulated this sort of literary outpouring. The Vietnam War, our last quagmire, was big, of course, but the many books dealing with it were not fixed on the chief executive in the way the Bush books are; their subject was mainly the war, not Lyndon Johnson, another Texan who failed as a war president. John Kennedy commanded considerable posthumous interest, but his presidency was a political ephemeron. One cannot resist noting the delicious irony that George W., surely one of the least literate men ever to occupy the White House, may well be the most written about.

And the least flatteringly written about. The right has offered a few jeremiads in the president's defense, including the ambitious (!) An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, by Richard Perle and David Frum, and Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, by indefatigable scold and talking head Bill Bennett, but in the main the Bush scribes – even Phillips, a longtime Republican – are hostile to the 43rd president.

One struggles, in this flood, to remember that Bush is not America and America is not Bush. One struggles to recall that the country, for all its flaws, misjudgments, and misdeeds and despite the horrendousness of its present leadership, has its virtues; they are not trivial virtues, and they are worth defending, or recovering. We seem, in particular, to have misplaced our modesty, the recognition that we are not necessarily God's gift to the world and can do no wrong.

In the last few months, as Iraq has caught fire like a piece of newsprint held to a match and the president's poll numbers have declined, I have noticed that desperate right-wing pundits have taken to attacking their opposites with the charge that they don't really accept America's special and unique role in the world: liberals, lefties, and malcontents don't subscribe to American exceptionalism; they think we are just like everybody else, including the awful French. To question or quarrel with American exceptionalism is to risk being shouted down as a traitor or fool by some television blowhard like Sean Hannity.

For better or worse, our sense of ourselves as a singular country, unbound by the rules other nations and peoples must abide by, determined our behavior in the world long before the arrival of the second President Bush, or for that matter the first. So perhaps it isn't impertinent to ask whether we really are exceptional – and if so, how. Certainly we are, as a matter of geography, the most isolated of the world's great powers, which perhaps accounts for much of our confidence and clumsiness in dealing with others. It also accounts for the strange American echo-chamber effect, our deafness to voices unlike our own – our cultural autism.

If we are exceptional, then, we aren't necessarily the better for it. But we are not exceptional, surely, in our humanness, and human beings are nothing if not tempted by power. "Power tends to corrupt," Lord Acton wrote at the height of Britain's imperial glory, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely." That is a familiar aphorism; less familiar is Acton's subsequent sentence: "Great men are almost always bad men."

Neither Britain nor Rome held anything like the military power – near absolute, doubtless corrupting – we now hold. In that sense we are, sadly, exceptional; in the sense that our great men are bad men, we are, sadly, not.

Paul Reidinger