Manichaean Farce

I watched the joint remarks by Olmert and Bush on BBC World Service Television (by way of PBS) yesterday afternoon; and, as usual, my capacity for “linguistic microstrategy” was in full gear. I found myself particularly rankled when he insisted on characterizing the newly installed (not elected) Palestinian Prime Minister with that little clause, “who is a good fellow,” as if that was all that really mattered. I suppose I needed to be reminded, once again, that our President still reduces everything to a Manichaean battle between good and evil (in which he, alone except for his direct line to God, seems to be privy to what gets classified as which). You really have to wonder just how much information about Fayyad has been provided in any of the recent Presidential Daily Briefings (or, for that matter, how much time the President spends reading and digesting those Briefings).

In his column this morning (which, as usual, also appeared on Truthdig) Robert Scheer invoked Marx (who attributed it to Hegel but scholars are still scrambling to find the source) in arguing that the Palestinians need to make their own history. That passage comes from the same Marx source as the one where he talks about history repeating in such a way that what is tragedy the first time around becomes farce the second. Bush’s reduction of Fayyad to “a good fellow” reminds us of his similar good-and-evil assessment after his first meeting with Putin. As Anna Politkovskaya kept trying to tell Russia (and, to the extent that she could, the rest of the world), Putin was up to his eyeballs in making his own tragedies; and it took someone like Bush to turn it around into farce (albeit a gruesome one). It would be fair to say that the Palestinians have known only tragedy for the entirety of my lifetime, and I can only shudder to think what kind of farce American policy may be cooking up for them.