A politics of silence

...The leaders of both the U.S...

...Better to shove us closer to the brink than to appear a wimp in the eyes of the electorate...

...we can terrify them into laying down their arms and backing away from us...

...and Reagan's own Defense Department says in its statement for this fiscal year that we can speak of rough equality between the two superpowers...

...This extension of personal and party ambitions has a permanent effect on defense and foreign policy...

...We have been raised on the belief that our ability to choose between the limited options offered us at election time is a proof that we are free...

...but in answering ideology with ideology, force with force, we contribute to the problem...

...You have every right, and maybe even the duty, to say that you find the choices offered you stupid and destructive...

...Ever since war began we have seen our enemies as potential cowards...

...The right kills in defense of tradition...

...Our problem is that the ambitions of our leaders finally do affect international reality...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...it believes that bad ideas can be murdered, and those who hold them can be frightened away from their belief...

...It tells about a world which appears to be more interesting and important than our own...

...We seek the news: it is a distraction, full of interesting stories...

...In his deservedly praised The Fate of the Earth, just published by Knopf, Jonathan Schell points out that even if we were to dismantle every warhead on earth, we would still know how to make them...

...If our current politics is born in the need for distraction and feeds in shallow waters on our desire for simple answers, the way out is not more noise and more rhetoric...

...In a recent Notre Dame Magazine article, Michael Novak, defending the arms race, suggested that because the Soviets have an unchristian approach to truth they could not be trusted...

...We have been encouraged to believe that we must choose between the narrow political alternatives offered us by the party system...

...A few days later I saw Caspar Weinberger say of an arms treaty that the U.S...

...it continues in Reagan's insistence that we are behind the Soviets, despite that we could more than destroy their entire country, just as they could ours...

...we aren't free unless we can do that...

...We look at the surface of a quickly told story and think that we see real information about the world we live in - about, for instance, "a threat to our national security...

...Who is the hero and who the villain in El Salvador...

...It is more clearly storylike than our own dailiness is...

...it is full of beginnings and outcomes - how will the Falkland Islands story end...

...According to one romantic vision the left must always represent the deepest aspirations of the poor...

...Politicians worry less about the world's well-being than about how they are perceived...

...this matters more to their future, which is defined completely, even neurotically, in terms of the power they will be able to wield...

...All of this is part of what I mean by noise...

...This is not the only reason we pay attention to the news - it will be personally important to know when World War III begins - but it is one of them...

...But we do have to understand that the rise and fall of political fortunes, the stories we see on the news, are distractions from profoundly important political questions which are scarcely ever dealt with publicly, though they have much more to do with our futures than the results of a presidential election...

...I am coming to think that we live on noise, and make life and death decisions on the basis of allegiances which are shallow and destructive, but which nevertheless hold us...

...Their ambitions lead to wars, or to the support of governments which make life miserable for those who must live under them...

...In between are people who would be quite happy to live without either...

...Of several minds: John Garvey A POLITICS OF SILENCE GETTING AWAY FROM THE QUICK FIX I have PROBABLY been spending too much time with newspapers and magazines and radio news recently, because my current mood is clearly a reaction, but one which I think is worth defending...

...But because Carter looked like a wimp anyway, Reagan was able to make Carter's final plans for a massive defense build-up look not good enough, and he was able to propose even bigger expenditures - he had to, since he had accused Carter of being soft in this area...

...and we trust the information we receive, just as we trust leaders who should not be trusted at all...

...The commentary surrounding the elections in El Salvador has been intriguing...

...To be sure, the vote was in part the expression of a terrible weariness, of a desire to see something happen which might end the killing...

...They d6 not know their own hearts very well, any more than we do...

...To people who believe in democracy as a sort of religion the elections were encouraging because so many people voted: all those people got out and exercised their franchise...

...Some problems - the arms race, for example - are direct results of the systems we vote for...

...As long as we remain as uncritical as we are of the choices offered us, this will be a problem...

...It is considered a terrible thing not to vote...

...But this is nonsense: you really don't have to choose...

...Millions died in concentration camps, hundreds of thousands died from fire bombing, atomic weapons, and napalm, because people were willing to obey orders...

...Here is where our desire for distraction, for noise, becomes dangerous...

...Unfortunately, they are not like Tinker-bell - they will not disappear if we refuse to clap for them...

...The abolitionists, after all, were a crazy minority...

...When Jimmy Carter felt Republican breath at the back of his neck he got even more hawkish than he had been...

...As long as sovereignty remains our dominant political consideration, the making and use of nuclear weapons will be a temptation...

...We also tend to believe that the majority is more likely to be right about something than the minority is...

...But how is that information bred...

...The hope of all well-intentioned political violence is that we kill now so that someday men can be brothers, as if ends and means could be separated...

...Our only acceptable form of criticism now contributes to the problem: we feel that we must criticize a Reagan by voting for a Carter, despite the fact that it is Carter's fear of defeat which has led him to propose unprecedented defense expenditures...

...This is the dream of the left...

...Dogs fight that way, but people usually don't...

...It is right to refuse the terms that we are offered...

...But right and left are the twin pincers of a great claw...

...It is hard to imagine a politics born of silence and self-examination, but we may look to Gandhi for a clue as to how it might be done and to the anti-nuclear movement as a sign of hope...

...Carter's need to appear tough and Reagan's need to show that he wasn't upped the ante, which raised our defense expenditures and set off ripples to which the Soviets must respond with a build-up of their own...

...The people who decide our futures ask for and, unfortunately, receive a power over our lives which is crazy, a product of noise...

...Without these stories and other distractions we would have to confront the emptiness which silence always seems to threaten us with...

...Some of those people obeyed orders because they feared the system they saw ranged against their own, and with good reason...

...It is in part our fault...

...The "will of the people" becomes sacred, as if there were such a simple thing, or, even if there were, as if it would be a good thing...

...What was not often mentioned is that it is against the law not to vote in El Salvador...

...We need to have a politics which begins in silence, and an understanding that there is no quick fix, no ideology or system which will save us...

...The fact that they voted for the parties of the right, including a hefty chunk for the man who is suspected of having ordered the murder of Archbishop Romero, the fact that the cause of reform and justice has probably been set back by the vote, these things matter less than the exercise of the franchise, ripped out of any decent context...

...It's always different with them...

...The answer is not to be found within the system: we would be foolish to leave the solution of our problems to the system which gave them birth...

...They have reasons for saying what they say that have nothing to do with the truth about our international position, but rather with personal and institutional ambition...

...This has been true ever since Kennedy gave us a non-existent missile gap...

...They need approval from the rest of us to go on...

...at least we hope that through education and information the majority will make the right choice...

...It is certainly more realistic to pursue that course than to accept the choices offered us as absolutely essential by people whose hearts are as confused and divided as our own...

...The solution does not lie in the repudiation of democracy, and certainly not in an adoption of more elitist forms of rule...

...Most people would have voted a more moderate course on slavery...

...There are people who saw in the elections a massive repudiation of the left, and this surprised them...

...Time spent in the refusal of any distraction - in prayer, in attentive awareness - teaches us how cluttered our own hearts are, how full of anger and resentment and self-importance...

...Much of what is finally presented to us as a problem of our national security in fact begins as a contest for power which has nothing directly to do with any real external threat, but with party politics and the desire to win elections...

...It's another example of noise...

...It is important not to let people who seem to live on speed and on self-importance, people like Alexander Haig and most television reporters, define the limits of our world...

...The electoral process should be seen in the light of Plato's Gorgias, which describes the limits of democracy...

...We believe that unimportant things are important, that we must make choices which in fact we do not have to make...

...But we can make a beginning by refusing to accept the terms we are offered, by understanding that we do not need to accept any choice in an election, and by encouraging our children to be as skeptical of any system's claim as they ought to be of any advertiser, particularly when that claim can lead to the worldwide violence which our leaders would have us believe is an inevitable part of the atmosphere now, something like a new sort of weather...

...Like us, they are ambitious, confused, envious, divided, and angry...

...might have to "rethink our commitment to that language" - words to that effect anyway, meaning that we would have to break it...

...Most of the misery in the modern world is the result of people taking some form of national or ideological allegiance seriously...

...One of our first obligations as citizens or victims, depending on how you feel about the system, is not to believe" what they tell you...

...Johnson was sure he could bomb them back to the stone age, but knew that we could never be bombed into submission...

...The vote was interesting, but hardly encouraging...

...and USSR believe that their plans for the future of the planet are worth threatening the destruction of whole human populations, if in fact they don't someday destroy them...

...We assume that our enemies will be craven, and know that we ourselves are not...

...I am not ready yet to find a place without electricity in the woods where I can get away from this noise, but it is important to call noise by its real name and to record what seems truly stupid about our common life and common political worries...

...That sounds real and important...

...The problem is that to a large extent they do...

...Politicians are now scrambling to follow the people on the issue of the nuclear arms freeze, an issue which would not have come up if for years those same politicians had not routinely voted military appropriations...

...And of course the Soviets have their own baroque infrastructure and a defense establishment which, like ours, feeds on its own growth...

...Our enemies know the same thing...