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An editorial in the New York Times yesterday pointed out, for those of us who didn't realize it, that the Bush administration had inserted two provisions into last October's defense budget bill that would make it easier to declare martial law in the US. Senators Leahy and Bond have introduced a bill to repeal these changes, and it is important that voters keep track of this bill and hold their Congresspeople to account on it. Along with several other measures the Bush adminstration has proposed, the introduction of these changes amounts, not to an attack on the Congress and the balance of power, but to a particular and concerted attack on the citizens of the nation. Bush is laying the legal groundwork to repeal even the appearance of democracy. Any senator who does not vote in favor of the Leahy/Bond repeal of these provisions should promptly be recalled by his or her constituents.
That said, and without underestimating the seriousness of these provisions, I have to point out that with this as with other legal maneuvers like the Military Commissions Act, I have to wonder who Bush, Cheney, Rove, etc. think they are governing. Were they planning to spring these things on us? One day, we were supposed to wake up, and martial law would be declared, and we were supposed to actually pay attention to it? Where are they keeping the troops who were going to patrol our neighborhoods? Who was it who was going to disarm the population? Who was their base going to be, when they sought public support for martial law? Who was going to round us up and where were they going to put us?
It is in these sorts of things that the byzantine thinking and strange psychological make-up of the Bushies comes out. Let's say that Bush imagines (with Gonzalez and Cheney) the enhanced joys of bringing the war home. No longer is his command "over there"--it is now "over here". He can go out onto the White House lawn and issue edicts, and then perhaps he can be driven around Washington, or over into Virginia, and watch civilians obey his orders in a way that the Iraqis seem unwilling to do. I am assuming that the purpose of such an exercise would be to renew and intensify the now-diminishing frisson Bush gets from feeling himself the boss of all he surveys. But we all know it would not work. Very few people believe Bush or take his needs and desires seriously any more. Bush, or his keepers, know this, too, or they would not have introduced these provisions secretly. There was a time, when the nation was in a panic, when he could purloin things openly, and no one dared defy him. That was the appropriate occasion for these martial law changes. Now, or even last fall, was not that time. The Republicans must have suspected that to make such provisions known would have meant jeopardizing an iffy mid-term election even more than it already was, so they hid them. But the fact that they hid them makes them a hundred times more suspect--are the Bushies planning a coup after all?
And if they are planning a coup, what's the goal? Who is going to fall in line? Arnold Schwarzenegger, my very own governor? Chet Culver? Kathleen Sebelius? Eliot Spitzer? Since the US is a corporatocracy, would we then all be forced to work for $2.00 per hour? Give up all workplace benefits? Attend the religious services of our choice on Sunday? Devote even more of our tax dollars to the war machine and the oil machine? Haven't they taken everything already? Try as I might, I cannot imagine martial law in the US, except as something the population would agree to under threat from...from whom? Correct me if I am wrong (I know you will), but the last time martial law was declared was during the Civil War, and Americans, though the threats to the Union were profound and omnipresent, didn't like it then. I can't even imagine what would happen now.
Our armed forces can't subdue Iraq. I can't imagine that Bush thinks they could subdue New England or the West Coast, much less the whole US. To imagine himself commanding such a thing seems like magical thinking at its most obvious. So, what would you did if Bush declared martial law, laugh?
READ MORE: United States, Jane Smiley, New York, Iraq
Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002. She has contributed to a wide range of magazines, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The American Prospect, Practical Horseman, The Guardian Sport Monthly, Real Simple, and Playboy. Smiley's latest book is Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, a history and anatomy of the novel as a literary form (Knopf).
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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