COUNTERPOINT
Banking on hatred and fear
By Robert M. Rees
Moderator of 'Olelo Television's "Counterpoint" and Hawai'i Public Radio's "Talk of the Islands"
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and President George W. Bush, with their paradoxically narrow view of freedom even during a time when the United States is expending lives to preserve it, have come up with a security program that — to paraphrase the great wit Dorothy Parker — runs the gamut of liberties from A thru B.
Hopefully, Ashcroft and Bush will somehow stumble across an 11-minute video produced by locals Ann Brandman and Paul Nishijima. It's called "December 7/September 11," and it chronicles the reactions of members of the 442nd and 100th battalions to the events of 9/11.
Most striking is the fear of the aging Japanese American warriors that Arab Americans will suffer the same injustices the Japanese Americans endured after Pearl Harbor.
When the video was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art, only three miles from the scene of the terrorist attack, some in the audience were taken aback by its thoughtfulness and by its lack of vehement hatred.
"Hatred," as Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, "is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents." It is hatred and fear on which Ashcroft and Bush are banking in their drive to limit our basic freedoms.
It was Ashcroft who provided us with the acronymic nightmare, the USA Patriot Act: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required To Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. Apparently those of us opposed to the "appropriate tools" — limitations on the right to privacy, intrusions into the attorney-client privilege, unreasonable search and seizure, unlimited confinement of material witnesses, racial profiling — are unpatriotic.
The Bush administration has even provided us with a new department, budgeted at $38 billion, called the Office of Homeland Security. Just the name conjures up Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. The director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, has so far refused to testify to Congress about what he's doing.
Ashcroft has even tossed in a little of China's Cultural Revolution, and in radio commercials has urged us to keep our eyes open for "suspicious activities" by our neighbors. Ridge has enlisted truck drivers to act as "sentries" of the highway, and has asked them to keep watch on everything, "even fellow truckers."
Targeted for special scrutiny by Ashcroft are foreigners here on student visas. Last fall, at City College of New York, I attended a meeting of foreign students where the theme was "Tricks to look out for when the INS calls." The atmosphere is one of terror created by the specter of arbitrary authority.
Unfortunately, while Ashcroft and Bush are busy dismantling the Bill of Rights — except for the Second Amendment's right to bear arms — many liberals in America have been rendered incapacitated to fight back by their own politically correct knee-jerk reactions and hatred, and it's getting worse.
Just after the Persian Gulf War, I asked the liberal icon of the New York Times, Anthony Lewis, if he were concerned about the increased scrutiny of Arab Americans by the FBI. His astoundingly disappointing response was that this wasn't like the treatment of Japanese Americans, and was probably OK.
Today, among some liberals in academia, it has become de rigueur to chastise Israel for existing in the Middle East. By the same token, some Jewish liberals have taken to booing statements such as "Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in great numbers as well."
Among almost all liberals today, it is politically chic to hate America's religious right, and especially the Christian conservatives who oppose abortion.
The real danger to America is that its normally thoughtful and fair liberal wing is losing its grip and succumbing to that great unifying force of vilifying others. Cartoonist Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, expressed it best on an Earth Day poster of 1970. The poster depicted Pogo looking into a full-length mirror, and the caption was, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
