Censorship and Silence in the Bush years
Dec. 5th, 2018 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breathedoutToday is apparently an official National Day of Mourning for George HW Bush, the US's 41st President, who died last week at the age of 94. I prefer to observe it more as a day of remembrance, as I don't feel any particular urge to mourn.
Smack in the middle of the Trump regime, scrolling through my social media feeds, I've seen some half-serious fits of nostalgia about a time when our country was being run by an actual statesman—any actual statesman—rather than a childish, semi-literate tyrant with no impulse control. That reaction is understandable, but we need to fight it. Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Bush, Rove, Helms, and their ilk may have known better how to do what they wanted to do than Trump does, and they may have (sometimes) been more diplomatic in their public statements, but what they were doing was still egregious, and it was still egregious in ways that led directly to where we are now. Trump couldn't have parlayed race-baiting, misogynist, homophobic, anti-press nationalism into a presidential bid if he hadn't been standing on the shoulders of decades of activism by the Christian Right. And Bush Senior was every bit a part of that.
It's overwhelming to summarize an entire presidential administration, and I'm not going to try. Since the topic of censorship is on all our minds due to Tumblr's adults-only ban, let's just look at a few specific lowlights for free and effectual speech during the Bush administration:
Muzzling of the press during Desert Storm:
In order to justify his increased military spending and solidify US control of Middle Eastern oil, Bush manufactured a war in Iraq, which his administration dressed up as a mission to liberate Kuwait from the control of an Iraq which had just invaded it, and was supposedly on the brink of building a nuclear bomb. As Howard Zinn points out in A People's History of the United States, the evidence for the "weapons of mass destruction" element of this rationale was weak at best, while the liberation angle ignored "that other countries had been invaded without the United States showing such concern [...] to say nothing of countries invaded by the United States itself—Granada, Panama." Nevertheless, to war we went.
The Bush Administration curried favor for its pet war by publicizing its use of "smart bombs": laser-targeted weapons supposedly steered to military targets with extreme precision so as to all but eliminate civilian casualties. Zinn again:
However, when the American press attempted to report on this, the Bush administration blocked them at every turn. Their reports were censored, and they were prevented from direct observation of the war to begin with. The Pentagon's official line, to another Boston Globe reporter who asked about civilian casualties, was "To tell you the truth, we're not really focusing on this question." A Washington Post reporter wrote further about the curtailing of journalism:
According to the Project on Defense Alternatives, Operation Desert Storm resulted in between 20,000 and 26,000 deaths of Iraqi civilians.
Anti-Abortion Global & Domestic Gag Rules
Originally put in place by Reagan, ratified by the Rehnquist Supreme Court in Rust v. Sullivan, and supported by Bush, the Gag Rule forbids any clinic receiving federal funding from providing, advising, or even mentioning abortion. Prior to the Reagan/Bush years, federal clinics could not perform abortions, but they could advise pregnant people of the existence of the procedure, and direct them to clinics that did perform abortions. Now, even if a doctor in a federally-funded clinic knew or suspected that the life of the pregnant person could be in danger from carrying the fetus to term, they could not advise or even mention the existence of such a procedure as an abortion: this is a direct contravention of the treatment that the doctor is ethically required to give in this situation, but the government's position was (and is): if that matters to you, go work in a clinic that doesn't take federal funds. The rule applies not just to clinics within the US, but also to foreign aid clinics abroad that receive US funds.
The effects of this rule fall hugely disproportionately on low-income people—who are, due to institutional racism, disproportionately people of color—since affluent people can afford to frequent private clinics that don't receive federal funds and so aren't beholden to federal rules. In effect, it accords rich women bodily autonomy and the ability to plan for their futures, while paternalistically colonizing the bodies of poor women, endangering their health and well-being—sometimes fatally—and depriving them of not only the means of self-direction but even the information that such means exist. In actual fact, what this leads to is not more happy, healthy babies being born, but more unsafe, later-term abortions that result in harm or death to the pregnant person.
Incidentally, when Bush's son, George W, was elected, his literal first act in office was to reinstate the Global Gag Rule (which had been repealed by Clinton) on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Attempts to Censor Flag-Burning as Protected Speech
In 1989, in response to the Supreme court ruling on Texas v. Johnson, Bush called for a constitutional amendment that would have removed First Amendment protections of flag-burning as protest speech, and made desecration of the American flag punishable by a hefty find and/or jail time. As quoted in Nat Hentoff's Free Speech for Me, But Not For Thee, William Brennan's decision in the case read, in part:
Bush disagreed: to him, and his administration, mandating the appearance of unity and patriotism took precedence over safeguarding the liberties that the flag was supposed to represent. Or, in the words of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, which Hentoff characterizes as having "all the coherence of a man suddenly seeing a python in his bed":
They were after a Better, More Positive United States, and by gum they were going to legislate it into existence. Indeed, although a constitutional amendment fizzled, the Flag Protection Act (flag desecration punishable by a one-year jail term and a $100,000 fine) was passed with bipartisan support, before being struck down by federal courts. As an aside, in the wake of the Texas v. Johnson decision, which involved the refusal of Jehovah's Witness children to take part in the Pledge of Allegiance, there was mob violence throughout the country against the supposed disloyalty of the group, including cases of where Witnesses were castrated, beaten, kidnapped, run out of town, chased through the streets, forced to drink castor oil, their homes burned, their cars toppled, etc. Judging by the lack of official reaction, this was apparently not a form of speech to which the Bush administration objected as strenuously as they did to desecrating the flag.
Lip Service and a 'Kinder, Gentler Indifference' to AIDS
The genocidal silence and neglect of the Reagan administration, and its role in allowing the AIDS crisis to become a global pandemic, has been well-documented. (See, for example, Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, or Sarah Schulman's Gentrification of the Mind.) While paying lip service to a more tolerant, enlightened concern, Bush wasn't substantially better. As former ACT-UP activist Garance Frank-Ruta writes in The Cut:
Steven Thrasher further addresses Bush's emphasis on "behavior change" as the key strategy to ending AIDS, and his silence—masquerading as civil positivity—on the larger social context of the pandemic:
As Thrasher points out, Bush masked actions which ranged from neglect to active harm, in the rhetoric of civility: let's not let him keep doing so by neglecting to talk about this when we talk about his legacy.
Even through the lens of silence and censorship, there's so much more I could write about. In particular, I'd have liked to get into the increased funding under the Bush administration for so-called abstinence-only sex education, which is not sex education at all but fear-mongering obfuscation whose ineffectualness at reducing teen pregnancy has been proven time and again, and which muzzles any sexuality education in schools that addresses safer sex practices or sexual pleasure.
But I'm already half an hour late to work, so I'll just say: the lasting legacy of the Bush/Reagan years, a legacy with which we are currently living, is one of silence and oppression. If we're devoting a day to the memory of George HW Bush, let's speak true of the dead.
Smack in the middle of the Trump regime, scrolling through my social media feeds, I've seen some half-serious fits of nostalgia about a time when our country was being run by an actual statesman—any actual statesman—rather than a childish, semi-literate tyrant with no impulse control. That reaction is understandable, but we need to fight it. Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Bush, Rove, Helms, and their ilk may have known better how to do what they wanted to do than Trump does, and they may have (sometimes) been more diplomatic in their public statements, but what they were doing was still egregious, and it was still egregious in ways that led directly to where we are now. Trump couldn't have parlayed race-baiting, misogynist, homophobic, anti-press nationalism into a presidential bid if he hadn't been standing on the shoulders of decades of activism by the Christian Right. And Bush Senior was every bit a part of that.
It's overwhelming to summarize an entire presidential administration, and I'm not going to try. Since the topic of censorship is on all our minds due to Tumblr's adults-only ban, let's just look at a few specific lowlights for free and effectual speech during the Bush administration:
Muzzling of the press during Desert Storm:
In order to justify his increased military spending and solidify US control of Middle Eastern oil, Bush manufactured a war in Iraq, which his administration dressed up as a mission to liberate Kuwait from the control of an Iraq which had just invaded it, and was supposedly on the brink of building a nuclear bomb. As Howard Zinn points out in A People's History of the United States, the evidence for the "weapons of mass destruction" element of this rationale was weak at best, while the liberation angle ignored "that other countries had been invaded without the United States showing such concern [...] to say nothing of countries invaded by the United States itself—Granada, Panama." Nevertheless, to war we went.
The Bush Administration curried favor for its pet war by publicizing its use of "smart bombs": laser-targeted weapons supposedly steered to military targets with extreme precision so as to all but eliminate civilian casualties. Zinn again:
In fact, the public was being deceived about how "smart" the bombs being dropped on Iraqi towns were. After talking with former intelligence and Air Force officers, a correspondent for the Boston Globe reported that perhaps 40 percent of the laser-guided bombs dropped in Operation Desert Storm missed their targets.
However, when the American press attempted to report on this, the Bush administration blocked them at every turn. Their reports were censored, and they were prevented from direct observation of the war to begin with. The Pentagon's official line, to another Boston Globe reporter who asked about civilian casualties, was "To tell you the truth, we're not really focusing on this question." A Washington Post reporter wrote further about the curtailing of journalism:
The bombing has involved... dozens of high-flying B-52 bombers equipped with huge, unguided munitions. But the Pentagon has not allowed interviews with B-52 pilots, shown videotapes of their actions or answered any questions about the operations of an aircraft that's the most deadly and least accurate in the armada of more than 2000 US and allied planes in the Persian Gulf region.
According to the Project on Defense Alternatives, Operation Desert Storm resulted in between 20,000 and 26,000 deaths of Iraqi civilians.
Anti-Abortion Global & Domestic Gag Rules
Originally put in place by Reagan, ratified by the Rehnquist Supreme Court in Rust v. Sullivan, and supported by Bush, the Gag Rule forbids any clinic receiving federal funding from providing, advising, or even mentioning abortion. Prior to the Reagan/Bush years, federal clinics could not perform abortions, but they could advise pregnant people of the existence of the procedure, and direct them to clinics that did perform abortions. Now, even if a doctor in a federally-funded clinic knew or suspected that the life of the pregnant person could be in danger from carrying the fetus to term, they could not advise or even mention the existence of such a procedure as an abortion: this is a direct contravention of the treatment that the doctor is ethically required to give in this situation, but the government's position was (and is): if that matters to you, go work in a clinic that doesn't take federal funds. The rule applies not just to clinics within the US, but also to foreign aid clinics abroad that receive US funds.
The effects of this rule fall hugely disproportionately on low-income people—who are, due to institutional racism, disproportionately people of color—since affluent people can afford to frequent private clinics that don't receive federal funds and so aren't beholden to federal rules. In effect, it accords rich women bodily autonomy and the ability to plan for their futures, while paternalistically colonizing the bodies of poor women, endangering their health and well-being—sometimes fatally—and depriving them of not only the means of self-direction but even the information that such means exist. In actual fact, what this leads to is not more happy, healthy babies being born, but more unsafe, later-term abortions that result in harm or death to the pregnant person.
Incidentally, when Bush's son, George W, was elected, his literal first act in office was to reinstate the Global Gag Rule (which had been repealed by Clinton) on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Attempts to Censor Flag-Burning as Protected Speech
In 1989, in response to the Supreme court ruling on Texas v. Johnson, Bush called for a constitutional amendment that would have removed First Amendment protections of flag-burning as protest speech, and made desecration of the American flag punishable by a hefty find and/or jail time. As quoted in Nat Hentoff's Free Speech for Me, But Not For Thee, William Brennan's decision in the case read, in part:
The government cannot mandate by fiat a feeling of unity in its citizens. Therefore, that very same government cannot carve out a symbol of unity and prescribe a set of approved messages to be associated with that symbol when it cannot mandate the status or feeling the symbol purports to represent.
Bush disagreed: to him, and his administration, mandating the appearance of unity and patriotism took precedence over safeguarding the liberties that the flag was supposed to represent. Or, in the words of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, which Hentoff characterizes as having "all the coherence of a man suddenly seeing a python in his bed":
I do not believe that Americans have to see the flag that symbolizes their freedom to speak devalued and cheapened in the cause of preserving that freedom.
They were after a Better, More Positive United States, and by gum they were going to legislate it into existence. Indeed, although a constitutional amendment fizzled, the Flag Protection Act (flag desecration punishable by a one-year jail term and a $100,000 fine) was passed with bipartisan support, before being struck down by federal courts. As an aside, in the wake of the Texas v. Johnson decision, which involved the refusal of Jehovah's Witness children to take part in the Pledge of Allegiance, there was mob violence throughout the country against the supposed disloyalty of the group, including cases of where Witnesses were castrated, beaten, kidnapped, run out of town, chased through the streets, forced to drink castor oil, their homes burned, their cars toppled, etc. Judging by the lack of official reaction, this was apparently not a form of speech to which the Bush administration objected as strenuously as they did to desecrating the flag.
Lip Service and a 'Kinder, Gentler Indifference' to AIDS
The genocidal silence and neglect of the Reagan administration, and its role in allowing the AIDS crisis to become a global pandemic, has been well-documented. (See, for example, Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, or Sarah Schulman's Gentrification of the Mind.) While paying lip service to a more tolerant, enlightened concern, Bush wasn't substantially better. As former ACT-UP activist Garance Frank-Ruta writes in The Cut:
The transition from the Reagan presidency to the Bush one was more one of tone than substance when it came to AIDS, a kinder gentler indifference. Messaging that repeatedly pointed to “behavior change” as the solution, without backing prevention programs known to work. A lack of leadership from the top. No central strategy. [...] Added ACT UP founder and playwright Larry Kramer, “I will not give [Bush] credit for anything. He hated us.”
Steven Thrasher further addresses Bush's emphasis on "behavior change" as the key strategy to ending AIDS, and his silence—masquerading as civil positivity—on the larger social context of the pandemic:
Sex—yes, even gay sex—is a part of being human, and the people who died of AIDS did so because of societal neglect, not because of their human acts. And while he was nominally better than his predecessor (a very low bar) at addressing the consequences of AIDS, he’d been unforgivably quiet as Reagan’s vice president.
But as director of the CIA, vice president, and then president, Bush exacerbated the material conditions that allow AIDS to flourish in the first place. For what causes AIDS? And why has it always so disparately affected black people? Medical research and pharmaceutical interventions are important in dealing with the consequences of seroconversion and limiting onward transmission of HIV. But AIDS is caused by broader social problems: homelessness, inadequate access to to health care, political instability, racism, homophobia, and the violence of capitalism. And on these fronts, Bush is guilty; his “behavior matters.” As a former head of the CIA, Bush created political instability in nations around the globe where AIDS would thrive. He hyped up racism with his Willie Horton ad, by replacing civil-rights titan Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court with Clarence Thomas, and by vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1990.
As Thrasher points out, Bush masked actions which ranged from neglect to active harm, in the rhetoric of civility: let's not let him keep doing so by neglecting to talk about this when we talk about his legacy.
Even through the lens of silence and censorship, there's so much more I could write about. In particular, I'd have liked to get into the increased funding under the Bush administration for so-called abstinence-only sex education, which is not sex education at all but fear-mongering obfuscation whose ineffectualness at reducing teen pregnancy has been proven time and again, and which muzzles any sexuality education in schools that addresses safer sex practices or sexual pleasure.
But I'm already half an hour late to work, so I'll just say: the lasting legacy of the Bush/Reagan years, a legacy with which we are currently living, is one of silence and oppression. If we're devoting a day to the memory of George HW Bush, let's speak true of the dead.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 06:10 pm (UTC)You're so nice
You're not good you're not bad you're just nice
Niceness, civility, being able to articulate thoughts beyond self-aggrandizement; these are neutral qualities and they're only *good* qualities if they're in the service of good.
Anyway, great post!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:35 pm (UTC)Anyway, thanks!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:30 pm (UTC)Thanks for this timely roundup (and another nostalgia blast -- Howard Zinn! my god).
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:38 pm (UTC)(Also: YES, good grief, that rhetoric of the benevolent granter of progressive legislation is so infuriating.)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 03:02 am (UTC)(But, yknow, he was polite, so...)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 12:04 pm (UTC)