The Collapse of the Dream Palaces
BROOKS, DAVID
The Collapse of the Dream Palaces Mass destruction of mistaken ideas BY DAVID BROOKS George Orwell was a genuinely modest man. But he knew he had a talent for facing unpleasant facts. That...
...They emphasize all the things that could go wrong...
...There is first the dream palace of the Arabists...
...My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink...
...The first character is America itself...
...The final group Joey sees on the political landscape are the marchers...
...The stereotypes are entrenched too deeply...
...He's not even into joining political movements at home...
...Bush is a hypocrite...
...In this vision of reality, Americans are at once childish, selfish, and trigger-happy, but Arabs live just this side of savagery...
...What to do about Iraq...
...Moreover, new categories are crystallizing in his mind...
...Joey naturally feels that while those soldiers are liberating a country and talking about duty and honor, all he is doing is preparing for business school...
...They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true...
...and World Bank one day, and against whatever war happens to be going on the next...
...He's afraid they might bite off more than they can chew...
...They were members of the vast, nervous American majority that swung behind the president as the fighting commenced...
...But there is another, larger group of people whose worldviews will be permanently altered by the war in Iraq...
...Any action that might rile them will cause the Arab street to explode, and will lead to a thousand more bin Ladens...
...The French are insufferable, the Germans both hostile and pacifist...
...They are the regular men and women of the armed forces, or, as he remembers from the days after 9/11, they are firemen and cops...
...He has started to acquire certain assumptions over the past months, which will shape his thinking in years to come...
...He doesn't want to be so zealous and detached from reality...
...The military, moreover, is fundamentally open to the press, allowing embedded reporters to wander amidst the troops...
...Invent a representative 20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa, and try to imagine how he would have perceived the events of the past month...
...And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics...
...First, he sees the broad majority of people who support the war, who, it seems to him, deserve to be called the progressives...
...There will be laments about European impotence, continental divisions, the need to build a common European alternative...
...Joey is both more trusting of America, and more suspicious of the world, than he would have been if he had formed his worldview in the 1990s...
...Conflict with these people is inevitable...
...He sees the people who blew up the World Trade Center...
...One way to think about this is to conduct a thought experiment...
...In Israel, they strap bombs to their waists and blow up buses...
...For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase...
...he was born in 1983 and was only 6 when the Berlin Wall fell...
...The Arab ruling class is treacherous...
...These are obviously not the things Joey would have seen if he had come of age in 1972, and his mentality is likely to be radically different from that of many people of the sixties generation...
...In this dream palace, the problems of the Arab world are never the Arabs' fault...
...Joey is not sure what these people are for...
...They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee...
...Bush is evil...
...But this self-criticism will not spark any fundamental change, just summits, conferences, and books...
...He just senses that they are cloistered worlds, removed from day-to-day reality, and he doesn't plan on spending his life there...
...Over the past months, certain facts and characters have entered his consciousness, like characters in a play he is seeing for the first time...
...Most people nurture the facts that confirm their worldview and ignore or marginalize the ones that don't, unable to achieve enough emotional detachment from their own political passions to see the world as it really is...
...They don't seem to know how to deal with the Taliban or Saddam...
...They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future...
...In this dream palace, the Hollywood cliches are taken to be real...
...The American system of government, moreover, is clearly the best system...
...The European Union is split...
...These people are far more skeptical of the war and grand endeavors of that sort...
...Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong...
...My first guess is that the dream palace of the Arabists will temporarily sag...
...The Americans are always invaders and occupiers...
...But he gives them credit for their idealism, their hope, their grand vision...
...They don't attract any press coverage or much attention, because they seldom take a bold stand either way...
...Joey doesn't know much about history...
...When the chips are down, there are very few nations you can trust...
...Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts...
...Teams of lawyers vet bombing targets to minimize unnecessary damage...
...But now he is in college, and he's been glued to the cable coverage of the war and is ready to form some opinions...
...Bush was right...
...Joey sees that some regimes around the world are sadistic and evil...
...Strangelove is a textbook of American government, and Noam Chomsky tells it like it is...
...They were not necessarily implacably opposed to the effort in Iraq, but they thought it imprudent...
...world...
...In this dream palace, history is tragic, and teaches us it is always prudent to do nothing—to do nothing about Bosnia, to do nothing about Kosovo, to do nothing about Rwanda, to do nothing about the slow-motion holocaust unleashed in Iraq by Saddam...
...In this dream palace, rage is always the proper emotion, victim-hood the pleasure most indulged...
...In Joey's eyes, the United Nations is a fractious debating society...
...Joey is not hostile to those worlds...
...And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are...
...What to do about the economy...
...But as we try to understand the political and cultural importance of the war in Iraq, the question is this: Will they crumble under the weight of undeniable facts...
...They will go looking again for conspiracy theories, victimhood, and rage...
...He also sees, in the example the soldiers set, that discipline, neatness, professionalism, and openly expressed patriotism are kind of cool...
...They have a very confident approach to what America can achieve in the world...
...American life really is NYPD Blue and Baywatch...
...These people do not have foreign policy categories deeply entrenched in their brains...
...The radicals who preach eternal war with the infidel will seem stale, architects of a failed vision...
...As happened after the Six Day War back in 1967, the newspapers and TV networks that depicted glorious Arab victories and failed to prepare their audiences for the crushing defeat that came will see their credibility suffer...
...These are the men and women Joey saw interviewed by the dozen on TV...
...Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift...
...They seemed to believe in their mission...
...They understand only force, and they must be crushed...
...When Joey thinks of youthful idealism, he doesn't think of college students protesting in the streets, he thinks of young soldiers risking their lives to liberate a people...
...In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate...
...And they will backtrack...
...He is likely to assume that when America projects its might, it is not only great, but good...
...Billions of people around the world seem to hate us, and while Joey is aware that there are some reasons to be suspicious of the United States, he resents the way so many people are over the top in their resentment, fury, and dislike...
...This palace reeks of conspiracies—of Israelis who blew up the World Trade Center, of Jews who put the blood of Muslim children in their pastries, of Americans who fake images of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad in order to fool the David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...They are people without prestigious degrees and high income prospects...
...In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel...
...Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism...
...In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond...
...They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago...
...The third character Joey sees is the terrorist...
...Other people—Iraqis, Palestinians, suicide bombers—are always called upon to fight the infidels to the death so that the satellite TV-watching Arabists, safe in their living rooms, can have something to cheer about...
...They don't see themselves as hawks or doves, realists or Wilsonians...
...What to do about North Korea...
...Its pilots fly low, at some risk to themselves, to reduce civilian casualties...
...America is the land of rotting cities, the electric chair, serial killers, gun-crazed hunters, shallow materialists, religious nuts, savage capitalists, the all-powerful Jewish lobby, the oil lobby, the military-industrial complex, and bloodthirsty cowboy-presidents...
...Bush is venal...
...These people tend to endorse progressive interventionism, not only in Iraq, but in places like Kosovo...
...And this hatred is tribal, not ideological...
...They torture and mutilate their own people...
...But he is less independent than he thinks...
...As happened after Desert Storm, the Arabs who preach reform and modernization will begin to seem more attractive...
...Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil...
...These dream palaces have taken a beating over the past month...
...They don't seem to have any alternative to globalization...
...But official Europe will go through one of its periodic phases of gloomy and self-lacerating introspection...
...In this dream palace, it is always the twelfth century, and every Western incursion into the Middle East is a Crusade...
...They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are...
...It is always the Jews, the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists who are to blame...
...In this palace, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister, was taken seriously because he told the Arabists what they wanted to hear...
...In this dream palace, any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor, so Osama bin Laden becomes an Arab Joe Louis, and Saddam Hussein, who probably killed more Muslims than any other person in the history of the world, becomes the champion of the Muslim cause...
...People in this political movement include Christopher Hitchens, Dennis Miller, Paul Wolfowitz, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain, Richard Holbrooke, Charles Krauthammer, the staff of Fox News, Bernard Lewis, and George Bush...
...In the European dream palace, Americans are terminally naive, filled with crazy notions like the belief that Arabs are capable of democracy...
...In this palace, America is a bigger threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein...
...In other words, there will be no magic "Aha...
...It does not occur to Joey to enter the subculture of the protesters, and what they say is not likely to affect him one way or another...
...But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion...
...Will the illusions fall, and the political landscape change...
...Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters...
...His politics will be radically different from those of the Vietnam generation...
...In this palace, old men really do shoot down Apache helicopters with AK-47s...
...That doesn't mean he necessarily wants to enlist, but he is aware that there is something lacking in his pampered private life...
...Members of this group were not firm opponents of the war...
...George Bush really is Rambo, Clint Eastwood, and John Wayne rolled into one...
...Their foreign policy instincts are unformed...
...These categories—who is progressive, who is conservative, who is reactionary—do not comport with the categories in the minds of people who came of age during the civil rights era, or even the Cold War...
...They wore those black fedayeen gowns...
...The anonymous people in the corridors of power basically seem to know what they are doing...
...As a rule, these assumptions are the exact opposite of the assumptions he would have formed if he had been watching the Vietnam war unfold...
...They seemed to enjoy being in the military...
...He loves movies and likes many of his professors...
...They lurk in the dark corners of the globe, and for some reason they think they should take out their problems on us...
...There will be some restlessness, some searching for a fresh start and a different way, and thus a window of opportunity will open for democratization and peace, but that opening will have a termination date...
...He sees a federal government that can perform its primary task—protecting the American people—magnificently...
...That doesn't seem at first glance like much of a gift...
...When Joey listens to these conservatives, he thinks they raise some valid concerns...
...They seem more prudent and less idealistic or visionary...
...They don't see each looming conflict either through the prism of Vietnam, as many peaceniks do, or through the prism of the 1930s and the Cold War, as many conservatives do...
...They use the explicitly moral language of good and evil...
...But they are the quiet people who swing elections...
...They ignore the basic rules of warfare and civilization...
...In short, People who get to do the most exciting things are not members of the meritocratic elite...
...They seemed to be involved in something large and noble even at a young age...
...Joey does not look around and assume that the world is moving toward some world government or global unity...
...Joey figures it must be part of their personality...
...My second guess is that Europeans will not shake off their cliched image of America...
...They just march against...
...The second group Joey sees he calls the conservatives...
...The window will close if, a year or two hence, millions of Arabs continue to feel humiliated by their region's backwardness...
...What lessons will they draw from the events of the past month...
...People in the conservative camp include Brent Scowcroft, Joe Klein, the State Department, John Kerry, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, and most of the press corps...
...He really has no firm idea of what labels like liberal and conservative mean...
...He knows that they tend to come from Hollywood and academia...
...You always have to be on guard, because there really is evil about...
...He looks at the people living in their dream palaces—the Arabists, the European elites, the Bush haters— and he knows he doesn't want to be like them...
...Joey is a little nervous that they are not realistic about what can actually be achieved in this messy world...
...Indeed, they were mild supporters, or they were ambivalent...
...In this dream palace, Oliver Stone is as trustworthy as the Washington Post, Michael Moore accurately depicts the American soul, Dr...
...In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire...
...Joey isn't one of a kind...
...The second great character on Joey's mind is the American soldier...
...The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality...
...These people are always in the streets with their banners and puppets...
...Joey likes to think of himself as fundamentally independent...
...Saddam's torture chambers are invisible, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis he murdered go unmentioned, the fedayeen who shot their own refugees are ignored, but every civilian casualty caused by an American bomb is displayed in all its bloody agony...
...Joey knows that this is what people did in the 1960s, and he regards the marchers as vaguely archaic...
...When Joey looks at the talking heads on TV, he begins to form judgments about this country's political divides...
...They march against the IMF Who is progressive, who is conservative, who is reactionary— these categories have all changed...
...Then there is the dream palace of the Europeans...
...There are millions of Joeys, and variations on Joey...
...moment that brings the dream palaces down...
...They serve as a useful brake on the progressives, but they are not exactly inspiring or hopeful, and their prognostications on Iraq proved more wrong than right...
...How will the fall of Saddam affect their voting patterns, their approach to the next global crisis...
...In Iraq, people like that piled into pickups and suicidally attacked tanks...
...He is likely to feel confident about American power...
...He sees a ruling establishment that can conduct wars with incredible competence and skill...
...But when one looks around the world, one quickly sees how rare it is...
...Efforts are made to spare enemy soldiers who don't want to fight...
...Inevitably, then, in ways subtle and profound, the events of the past month will shape our politics for the rest of our lives...
...In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny...
...Joey is aware that there are a lot of people, especially in the Arab world, who are just batshit crazy...
...In Joey's eyes, the people who get to do the most exciting things are not members of the meritocratic elite—Harvard and Stanford alums who start software companies...
...Marching for peace is something people in those worlds do, just as Mormons devote a few years of their lives to missionary work, or Jews keep kosher...
...There is no reasoning with these people...
...The ruling class is reasonably candid about the war's progress...
...He sees that his country is an incredibly effective colossus that can drop bombs onto pinpoints, destroy enemies that aren't even aware they are under attack...
...As the scientists would say, they are conceptual models that failed to predict events...
...These people talk optimistically of spreading democracy and creating a new Middle East...
Vol. 8 • April 2003 • No. 32
