We the People

Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1789, "Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights."

Jefferson neglected to say what happens when the people are uninformed, or misinformed. That requires a modern observer, like Seymour Hersh.

Early this month, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi interviewed Hersh and asked him "Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this (Iraq) war from starting?"

"You mean learn from the past?," Hersh immediately replied. "America? No. We made the same dumb mistake," then added, "On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and how to hide stuff over those years."

The Landscape

How easy is it for people like Cheney and Karl Rove to "hide stuff" from American voters? That depends on which voters we're talking about, and the first thing an investigator finds out in examining the American electorate is that it's hard to generalize.

Listening to the results of a Pew Research Council survey on NPR this afternoon, I learned that 25 percent of American adults can't correctly name the vice-president of the U.S. In describing a level of public ignorance that would have given Jefferson shingles, the Council spokesman added, as a sort of consolation, that "there are a few people who are very well informed."

Looking at the political orientations of both the informed and the ignorant, what we find is a rapidly shifting landscape, in flux due to America's disastrous loss in the Iraq War, and moving even more rapidly leftward since the Hurricane Katrina disaster of last October. Democrats now outnumber Republicans decisively, and as nearly as can be gauged, about 20 percent of American voters are more or less progressive in their orientation. There remains a hard core of Republican Party and ideological party-line voters numbering roughly a third of the electorate.

The biggest problem I see with American voters, however, is their across-the-board ignorance of history. The news junkies are frequently as uninformed on questions of history or the Constitution as the duncified one-quarter who don't know who Cheny is, and the disasters of the last six years could easily recur if we don't collectively get a little more historically knowledgeable.

There are some signs that this is improving. Just before he died, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote that "Many signs point to a growing historical consciousness among the American people. I trust that this is so. It is useful to remember that history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future." (Quoted by Lewis Lapham in the May, 2007 issue of Harper's.)

It was our almost total absence of historical perspective that kept running through my mind as I witnessed the televised beginning of the Iraq War unfold in those critical days of mid-March, 2003. My memory rocketed back and forth between 2003 and 1964, when I watched the Gulf of Tonkin scam, titled "Aggression From the North" on one of the very last Hearst Corporation theater newsreels ever produced, and recognized at the time how easily the American public was manipulated by government propaganda. In 2003, considering I had lived through essentially the same scenario once before, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. "These morons are being done exactly the same way they were before," I kept saying to myself. "Can't they remember anything?"

Of course we can't. Half of us weren't even born in 1964, and most of the other half has completely forgotten it.

"So it goes," as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying. Maybe next time.

The Well-Informed Revolutionary

Besides having a lot to say about the necessity of a well-informed citizenry to the survival of democracy, Jefferson was adamant about the need for periodic revolution. "What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion?" he asked in 1787. "And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

If, as the late Professor Schlesinger believed, Americans are beginning to alter their habits of material indolence and historical ignorance, the results might very well spell trouble for the powers that be. At this point in our history, an informed public is inevitably going to be an angry public, and it cannot avoid asking the following questions:

*What do we mean by this term "government." Is there an oligarchy in this country composed of members of interlocking boards of directors of gigantic corporations, which is part of the government, or maybe even the government? And if so, who elected them?

*How many of these giant corporations are heavily invested in and dependent on a gargantuan war machine, whose existence endangers the country, is hostile to democracy, and which sucks up one of every two American tax dollars?

*What are the implications of the fact that all the major television news networks are owned by giant corporations? How does this affect the integrity of most of the information most Americans receive about their country and world beyond every day?

*From where do the candidates of both major parties receive the bulk of their funding?

Answer these questions honestly, and the answers will inescapably lead you to one final question: What good is an election if it doesn't give you an opportunity to overthrow the government?