A bit over an hour into the five-hour drive across the ferrous red plateau, heading south toward Uganda’s capital Kampala, suddenly, there’s the Nile, a boiling, roiling cataract at this time of year, rain-swollen and ropy and rabid below the bridge that vaults over it. If Niagara Falls surged horizontally and a rickety bridge arced, shudderingly, over the torrent below, it might feel like the Nile at Karuma.
Naturally, I take out my iPhone and begin snapping pics.
On the other side of the bridge, three soldiers standing in wait in the middle of the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, direct my Kampalan driver Godfrey and me to pull over.
“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window. “We saw you.”
“Taking photos of the bridge is expressly forbidden,” the second offers by way of clarification, as the first reaches in and grabs the iPhone out of my hand. “National security. Terrorists could use such photos to help in planning to blow up the bridge.”
“Do I look like a terrorist to you?” I ask. “And anyway,” I shout as Soldiers One and Two walk off with their prize, oblivious, “I wasn’t photographing the bridge. I was photographing the rapids. The bridge was precisely the one thing I wasn’t photographing!”
To no avail. I open my car door and begin to get out — but the third soldier pushes me gently back and then leans into the window, peering amiably. “And besides,” I continue, “there were no signs forbidding such photographs. Anyway, if it’s such a big deal just give me back the phone and I’ll delete the photos. You can watch.”
I’m beginning to panic. As with most of us nowadays, pretty much my entire life is couched inside that bloody little device: contacts, calendars, hotel reservations, all my appointment coordinates for the coming days.
“Ah no,” Soldier Three smiles in a silkily practiced manner. “You are not to worry. This is not an affair about you. This is an affair between Ugandans. It is your driver who was at fault. He is a Ugandan, he should have known about our national security and how no one should photograph the bridge. Let them work it out.”
And indeed, when I turn around Godfrey is no longer behind the steering wheel. He’s with the other soldiers, remonstrating away. “Don’t you worry,” repeats my guy indulgently, a broad smile spreading across his face as if we are the best of buddies. “Give them time.” And then, as if to pass the time himself, he adds, “So, how do you like our excellent country?”
Minutes go by with Godfrey and his two interlocutors on the other side of the road, locked in fervent colloquy — much hand waving, arm flinging, rifle toying, shouting, cajoling, and then smiling, even guffawing — until finally, 15 minutes and $20 later, Godfrey comes ambling back to the car, climbs into the driver’s seat, and hands me the iPhone.
(Memo to would-be terrorists: If any of you are planning to blow up the Karuma bridge, make sure to budget an extra $20 photography fee during the planning phase.)
Anyway, Godfrey turns the key, revs up the car’s engine, and we resume our climb out of the canyon of the Nile and back onto the flat, red, shrubby plateau.
“Does that kind of thing happen often?” I ask Godfrey, who in much of the rest of his life is a Kampala taxi driver.
“All the time,” he assures me. Two or three times a week. He has to figure it into his budget, and it’s a large item. Just the other day, he adds, he turned down a one-way street in the middle of Kampala and found, a couple hundred yards on, that it was completely flooded. As he gingerly made his way back to the intersection, a traffic cop was happily standing in wait to give him a hefty fine for driving the wrong way on a one-way street — either that or a 100,000 shilling tip (about $5, which in Kampala might otherwise pay for two good meals) to make the problem go away.
It’s to be expected, Godfrey went on. The soldiers are conscripts, the traffic cop a lowly underling, and they’re all notoriously underpaid. Or rather, their superiors carve out a substantial part of their salaries for themselves, leaving these men with hardly enough to live on, let alone maintain a family. The opportunity to garnish bribes becomes a necessary perk of the job. The trouble is, he continued, such corruption riddles the entire country, infesting virtually every transaction with the state.
We are silent for a few moments, the scrub brush racing by. Then Godfrey asks, “Doesn’t this sort of thing happen in America?”
I don’t even hesitate. Not really, I tell him: not blatantly like that, and not frequently, certainly not all the time.
Only, then I get to thinking, because that answer turns out to be way too glib. It’s not that the United States lacks corruption, I go on to say — or even pervasive corruption. It’s just not of the low-level and petty variety like the kind we just went through, not most of the time anyway. In America, corruption is concentrated at the highest levels of society — and it masquerades, for example, under the name of “campaign finance.”
Election campaigns have become so expensive that candidates have to go begging, hat in hand, to anyone who will finance them. And the billionaires and millionaires and bankers and hedge-fund operators and portfolio managers and CEOs and their lobbyists are, in turn, only too happy to contribute. They lard the “people’s representatives” with grotesque “contributions” after which those representatives prove only too willing to turn around and carve out billions of dollars in specifically targeted tax breaks and subsidies structured exclusively for them — precious dollars which then can’t be used to fund schools or clinics or playgrounds or to further the public good in any way.
And it’s worse than that: once congressional representatives or their senior staff retire, they almost invariably get much higher paying lobbying jobs working for the very industries over which they had once held sway — a further incentive not to upset those monied interests when still on the public payroll.
So regulations get gutted, calamities ensue, and guess who gets stuck cleaning up the inevitable mess, whether financial, environmental, or of any other sort: yup, the taxpayers. Tax laws get dictated or often just written by the lobbyists of those same monied interests, with all sorts of sweet loopholes carved out especially for them — not infrequently for them individually — so that, in the end, the richest man in America reports he’s getting off with a lower tax rate than his secretary.
“You’re kidding,” Godfrey interjected.
No: even he’s embarrassed! Education, meanwhile, is funded according to narrowly local property taxes — and the rich make sure it stays that way. The result? Their kids get a far better education than those living in poorer neighborhoods. When people try to remedy that injustice through affirmative action programs which at least recognize the unfairness of the competition for access to, for example, university slots, the rich protest and get judges to overturn such programs as racist. They are, however, perfectly happy to take advantage of other programs that assure the acceptance of the children of alumni, no matter their scholarly performance, and no one says boo. It’s all perfectly legal.
In America, as W.E.B. DuBois noted toward the end of his life, “We let men take wealth which is not theirs; if the seizure is ‘legal’ we call it high profits. And the profiteers help decide what is legal.”
In Uganda, corruption often arises out of desperation. In America, more typically, its wellsprings are greed, pure and simple. And it’s hard to decide which is the more dismaying, the more disfiguring, the more disgusting.
Or actually, no, it’s not. It’s not that hard at all.
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The image itself (splayed across virtually every newspaper in the world) was uncanny, the caption more unsettling yet: Dec. 6, 1999, a pair of 12-year-old ethnic Karen twin brothers, the Htoos, Johnny on the left (that’s a boy?) and Luther (Luther!?) on the right, leaders of a beleaguered Myanmar insurgent group known as God’s Army, whose members credit them with mystical godlike powers that “render them invulnerable during battle.”
In the photo, they look like Renaissance cherubs gone badly wrong (specifically like those two clichéd angels propped at the foot of Raphael’s Dresden Sistine Madonna): toxic putti. Raphael’s cherubs, that is, gone upriver, deep, way too deep into Conradland — miniature Brandos bestriding their own demented cargo cult. Their aura is all the more unsettling in that, in this photo anyway, they actually look, if you’ll pardon the expression, like Siamese twins. Johnny seems to grow right out of Luther’s back, his tremulous innocence hitched helplessly to the latter’s age-old, gimlet-eyed world-weariness: seen it all (toke), seen it all (toke), should never have seen any of it.
The inhaled stogie lends the image a certain sulfurous air, as does word that their followers have now gone and attacked a hospital, of all things, and are holding hundreds of hostages. Is there no bottom to the world’s demented evil?
Of course, this is all so much Orientalist claptrap: feverish white Western fantasies about the metaphysical debauch of endlessly inscrutable colored folk, the convenient Other. In fact, the attack on the hospital itself undercuts such smug and easy projections: They’ve raided the hospital and are holding all those hostages to advance their demands that the Thai army stop shelling their positions and that the doctors there treat their own ragtag wounded. There is no Primordial Evil here, only all-too-human desperation.
But the fantasy of the first allows us to screen out the palpable reality of the second — no need any longer to trouble ourselves over the plight of Karen minorities wedged in a tightening vise between those Burmese and Thai generals. No call to keep paying attention.
And so we don’t (pay attention). Time passes, and then suddenly, last week, here they are again, those wacky Htoo boys, come in out of the cold (or rather the jungle dank). After turning themselves in to Thai border guards alongside a clutch of their followers, they are whisked to a police compound in the nearby town of Suan Phung, where (according to the dispatch by Time’s Robert Horn) they soon find themselves exchanging bewildered stares with the Thai prime minister and several of his top generals. The prime minister “gently stroked the boys’ lice ridden locks. ‘He totally demystified them,’ says Sunai Phasuk of Forum Asia, a human rights group. In Thailand, where people still crawl before royalty, ‘you don’t pat a god on the head.’”
So that, see (another comforting dodge, an obverse reassuring fantasy): They’re just ordinary kids after all. Decked out there in their fresh soccer frocks, straddling nothing more fearsome than everyday puberty, they’re just like the boys next door (though it would be nice if somebody could get that Luther kid to stop smoking).
This too, of course, is all wrong. Thirteen years old, they look like they can’t be more than 7 or 8. And that’s not charming mumbo jumbo, that’s severe extended malnutrition. These aren’t just ordinary kids. They’ve seen things, they’ve lived through hells that the world (which is to say the rest of us, swaddled in our comforting illusions) had no business allowing.
Back in the early summer of 1998, delegates from over 160 nations gathered in Rome were wrapping up work on a treaty to establish an International Criminal Court. The court would have the power, for the first time in history, to try and convict individual perpetrators for particularly heinous violations of the laws of war, for crimes against humanity and for genocide — it would be not an ad hoc Nuremberg or Yugoslav/Rwanda-type tribunal, but rather a permanent court with generalized and ongoing worldwide jurisdiction, a court whose existence the U.S. had been advocating for years, but whose birth the U.S. delegation now suddenly seemed just as hellbent on forestalling.
I remember there was a lot of talk there in the halls about the League of Nations. “If the U.S. walks out on this court,” the Syrian delegate assured me, his eyes twinkling with grim satisfaction (he was all for it; he couldn’t wait), “it will be like the League of Nations.” Perhaps, I remember thinking at the time, but in that case ought President Clinton be cast in the role of Woodrow Wilson, the League’s strongest advocate, or that of Henry Cabot Lodge, its most ferocious opponent?
Of course, the answer, in retrospect, was both. With regard to the court, Clinton wanted to play both Wilson and Lodge. And not half and half: not a wily Wilson disguising himself as a grimly realistic Lodge, or vice versa. Rather, Whitmanesque, Clinton wanted to contain multitudes. He saw no contradiction in being both Wilson and Lodge, each 100 percent and both simultaneously.
Which is to say that he was approaching the International Criminal Court in much the same way he’d approached just about everything else — gays in the military, national health insurance, campaign finance reform, land mines, Bosnia, global warming — in his presidency.
In this particular instance, both the Pentagon and Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., were adamant in their insistence that the U.S. ought never sign on to any sort of international tribunal that might ever, under any circumstances, claim jurisdiction over any American soldiers or officials. Such justice was fine for the Saddam Husseins or the Pol Pots of the world, American opponents of the treaty argued, but not for us. Hence the court would be fine, so long as the U.S. was able to maintain veto control over its operations, for example, by way of strict Security Council oversight.
But virtually all of the rest of the world’s delegates in Rome protested that justice would hardly be universal if great powers could willy-nilly exempt themselves from its provisions. Furthermore, it was the Security Council’s propensity for tying itself in veto-knots (France covering for Rwanda’s genocidaires, China sheltering the Khmer Rouge, Kissinger-era America backstopping Pinochet and so forth) that so often led to paralysis and the unchecked proliferation of precisely the sorts of horrors this court was being created to address.
The U.S. delegation attempted all sorts of other gambits to effect the same outcome (total immunity for Americans), each more convoluted yet transparent than the one before, but to no avail. In the end the vote in favor of the treaty was overwhelming, with the U.S. stranded in opposition alongside such other holdouts as China, Iraq and Libya.
In the months that followed, considerable pressure was brought to bear on Clinton to stand up to the treaty’s domestic opponents. It was pointed out that in fact all sorts of safeguards had been inserted into the treaty, at U.S. insistence, to forestall frivolous and even not-so-frivolous prosecutions of American nationals. Notably there were the complementarity provisions that decreed that any ICC prosecution could be trumped by a good-faith investigation and, if need be, prosecution, on the part of domestic judicial authorities. (The ICC was being created for precisely those instances where local authorities were proving unable or unwilling to pursue such investigations.)
The Pentagon and the Senate opponents were unswayed, however, and Clinton, for all of his idealistic pronouncements to the contrary, seemed incapable of standing up to them. “The problem here isn’t political,” one longtime observer of the process pointed out to me a few months ago, “but rather biological. Has anyone ever heard of an instance of an invertebrate’s suddenly and spontaneously growing a spine?”
And then suddenly, seemingly spontaneously, at the last possible moment this past weekend (Dec. 31, the last date a country could take advantage of the as-it-were “safe harbor” provisions of the treaty by signing onto without simultaneously ratifying the document), this particular invertebrate did indeed up and sprout a spine.
Alone up there at Camp David (Barak and Arafat had failed to show for their last-minute Legacy-Assuring Summit), pickled perhaps in thoughts regarding the eventual judgments of history (“Wilson? Lodge? Wilson? Lodge?”), Clinton bucked the naysayers and did in fact affix his signature to the Rome Treaty. Albeit, he did so noting that the signature would be meaningless without eventual Senate ratification, and urging the next president to wait a good while (and to continue fighting the good fight against eventual American susceptibility to the treaty’s provisions, now from within the treaty process frameworks) before ever submitting the document to the Senate.
The less-than-stirring tone of Clinton’s statement in signing onto the document put me in mind of the appearance made by Undersecretary of State David Scheffer before Jesse Helms’ Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in July 1998, a few weeks after the conclusion of the Rome Conference, where Scheffer had been the administration’s point man. At the time I remember thinking how the man might have been excused a certain feeling of conceptual whiplash.
For if he’d been being treated, by the end there in Rome, as a sort of pariah or leper, now back in Washington he was being unanimously praised as a kind of returning hero. Positions that had provoked nary a chord of resonance in the conference hall in Rome were almost drowned in a rising chorus of defiant triumphalism on Capitol Hill.
Sens. Helms, Rod Gramm, Joseph Biden and Dianne Feinstein each addressed Scheffer in turn, congratulating him on the fortitude of his resolve and pledging their undying contempt for that monstrosity spawned in Rome. Not one of them focused on Bosnia or Rwanda or Pol Pot or Idi Amin or the Holocaust or Nuremberg. (Sen. Feinstein did wonder about the possible implications for Israel.) They all seemed utterly and almost uniquely transfixed by the treaty’s exposure implications for American troops, vowing to protect them and to fight it.
Across the ensuing hours, it became possible to identify what may have been the true underlying anxiety of the American delegation all along, never broached by any of them back in Rome but veritably palpitating just beneath the surface even there. Helms wasn’t afraid to name it outright. The status of individual peacekeepers in some Mogadishu alleyway had never been the real concern, for all its near-obsessive rhetorical focus. Rather, as Helms picked off the examples defiantly, he was going to be damned if any so-called international court was ever going to be reviewing the legality of the U.S. invasions of Panama or Grenada, or the bombing of Tripoli or Hanoi, and hold any American presidents, defense secretaries or generals to account.
“I’ve been accused by advocates of this court of engaging in ’18th century thinking,’” Chairman Helms said in concluding his statement. “Well, I find that to be a compliment. It was the 18th century that gave us our Constitution and the fundamental protections of our Bill of Rights. I’ll gladly stand with James Madison and the rest of our Founding Fathers over that collection of ne’er-do-wells in Rome any day.”
At some level, of course, Helms was way off the mark in his choice and characterization of antecedents. James Madison, for one thing, was a Federalist — with Hamilton, the principal author of “The Federalist Papers” — and as such had precisely, and with great passion, ranged himself against the nativist states’ righters of his own day and in favor of a substantially wider conception of governance.
But at the same time, it seemed to me that Helms was on to something. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” True, Thomas Jefferson strikingly pitched his Declaration of Independence in an assertion of universal human values, an assertion that, cascading down through the ages, from the Rights of Man (1789) through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), constitutes one of the principal wellsprings of the law feeding into the International Criminal Court.
But at the same time, Jefferson cast those assertions in what was, after all, a declaration of independence, of separateness, of American exceptionalism — stirring, defiant themes that had been very much in evidence there in Rome as well and, one suspects, will continue to frame if not dominate most of the coming debate over the treaty’s ratification.
At the time of his sudden ascension to prominence, back in 1988, when the entire world seemed to be stammering, as if in one voice, “Him? Why him?” Dan Quayle, we were assured, had struck a resonant chord in the patrician sponsor who had selected him to serve as his vice presidential running mate. George Bush saw something in the boyish young (though actually not that young) man; indeed we were told, he recognized in him something of a son.
Little did we know.
There were countless other fresh young politicians from whom to choose that strange summer morn, some of them quite competent, but Bush père chose that one. Just as this time around, bent on revenge for their defeat four years later, the Bush clan could have rallied behind the competent son but instead chose to marshal its forces around (behind, in front of, above, beneath) its hapless dauphin.
People have been speaking of George W. as a latter-day liter version of his father, and there is indeed a strong sense of déjà vu in all of this, but the comparison to Bush the elder misses the essential point: This is not so much a case of déjà vu as of repetition compulsion, a bizarre family psychodrama writ large. With George W. (the pervading vacuousness, the deer-in-the-headlights stare, the cavalcade of late-night TV jokes, the burgeoning compilations of tortured syntax and uproarious gaffes, the nervous edgy glances of the surrounding adult handlers, the defiantly clueless Alfred E. Neuman gaze, the utter lack of curiosity regarding the cluefulness of the world), what we are witnessing isn’t so much the return of George the elder as the triumphant apotheosis of Quayle!
Remember how we used to cringe through the better part of Daddy Bush’s term in office, mortified that something might befall him and we’d all get stuck with Quayle? Well, guess what? I’m reminded, in turn, of the joke that was going around in March 1969, about the accident victim who’d spent the entirety of the previous decade in a coma. Coming to, his first frantic query had concerned the health of President Eisenhower. Informed that Ike had in fact died just a few days earlier, the poor fellow wailed, “My God, that means Nixon must be president!”
Amid the flood tide of punditry spewing forth in the wake of last Tuesday’s bizarre electoral result, two rhetorical gambits, in particular, seem to keep recurring.
First, that this “crisis” is unprecedented, unique, impossible to have predicted or to ever again replicate, a macro-historical fluke. (Indeed, it’s all so uncanny that it’s almost as if we should feel privileged to be taking part in it.) Second, that it represents the triumph of deliciously, deliriously messy reality over any social-scientific ambitions to model or channel it (as evinced by the marvelous scandal of the networks’ miscalling Florida with absolute statistical certainty, absolutely inaccurately, not once but twice in a single evening).
It seems to me, however, that both of these claims run counter to an even more remarkable reality.
To start with, the second. If anything, the breathtakingly even result of Tuesday’s outcome — for all intents and purposes a tie — represents the absolute triumph of social science, or rather political science, or more precisely political consultancy, over any lingering human aspiration toward independent self-expression and self-determination. Doubtless, today’s political consultant would prefer to achieve a landslide for his or her candidate (say, on the order of 60 percent), but this desire is trumped by an even more urgent one, the imperative to avoid a close loss (say, something on the order of 48 percent). Given a choice, such consultants will invariably settle for and even come to aspire toward a simple 50.00001 percent victory. And the twin sciences of shameless pandering and ceaseless offense-avoidance have reached such sublime heights - they’ve been formalized (or perhaps, rather, formulized) to such an extent — that this desired outcome can now be achieved with virtual Pavlovian precision. What with the spectacularly intricate hydrology of focus groups, tracking polls, sound bites, empty photo ops, targeted political advertising spots and wider, more general media manipulation, with both sides marshaling the identical data and with everything arranged in a near-perfect feedback loop, is it any wonder that by the end of the exercise, we indeed end up at the center of a mathematically precise equilibrium, the dead center, of a near-perfect tie?
Such a result is no accident: It was the point (or, at any rate, the near-inevitable outcome) of the whole exercise — at least, the way the game is now being played, with caution trumping courage, and calibration trouncing vision, in the endless Zenovian dicing up of the remaining undecided, and then the remaining remaining undecided, to the exclusion of virtually any other principled consideration. Indeed, such a process becomes a virtual Rube Goldberg machine for locating that precise dead center.
And as such, returning to the first of those two fashionable shibboleths, far from representing some unrepeatable historical fluke, the campaign we’ve just endured may well more likely represent the permanent shape of things to come. All campaigns will now be fought like this, and end up like this, in a virtual dead heat. The issues may change (who knows precisely what will be obsessing, or being made to obsess, the electorate in the year 2004?), but one thing’s for certain: The electoral process we have now perfected will once again be able to negotiate its way to a perfect (perfectly dead) equilibrium, and will hardly be capable of doing anything else.
Such a development may in fact help clear up why, for all their morbid fascination, ongoing developments in this story hardly have the feel of a “crisis,” no matter how hard we tried to goose ourselves with the fantasy of impending calamity. It’s precisely the point that people are not rising to the cobblestoned barricades (as they would be in France) or taking to massacring each other (as they have been lately, say, in the Ivory Coast). What’s there to get all hot and bothered about in this photo finish of middling mediocrities? By this point in the process, nothing is finally, seriously at stake. It’s not as though anybody or anything is going to die.
Except maybe any lingering, authentic or substantive sense of political hope or free agency.
(Credit: iStockphoto) 
