Walking Amidst Heroes; Or, Celebrating The Enlightenment And The Persistence Of Democracy  

Oleh:

Hartnett, Stephen

Jenis: Article from Journal - e-Journal
Dalam koleksi: Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies vol. 8 no. 2 (May 2008), page 187-223.
Topik: democracy; enlightenment; investigative poetry; post-9/11; social justice
Fulltext: 187.pdf (175.66KB)

Isi artikel

After terrifying Americans with horrific images of weapons of mass destruction and scenarios implying operational links between Al Qaeda and Iraq—claims that were false—President Bush launched his invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Although toppling Hussein’s rotten regime unfolded quickly, with the corporate mass media cheerleading every spectacular episode of “Shock and Awe,” the occupation turned into a bloody quagmire.1 Nonetheless, the president won reelection in November 2004 by running a campaign emphasizing military strength, hunting terrorists, homophobic attacks on gay marriage, and tax cuts for the rich. It was a campaign of chest-pumping imperial bravado spiced by remarkable amounts of deception and much talk of God. Speaking for many of us who were stunned by the result of that election, Garry Wills wrote that “respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more.” Indeed, given that the U.S. electorate appeared more moved by speculative talk about the Virgin Mary than the fact-filled reports of U.N. weapons inspectors, more impressed by the scare tactics of “moral zealots” than by the basic information available in more civil venues, Wills feared that the election marked “the day the Enlightenment went out.” As if to confirm Wills’ fears, the Bush administration and its fundamentalist supporters then reinvigorated a long-standing campaign against science, arguing that the Biblical parable of creationism should be taught alongside the scientific teachings of evolution, that contraception is a sin, that stem cell research should be squashed, that abortions cause breast cancer, and that global warming is a nay-saying nightmare of environmental nabobs. The Campaign to Defend the Constitution (DefCon) thus warned “not since the Dark Ages have religious zealots held such dangerous power over scientific research.” The Bush administration’s assault on scientific evidence was so outrageous that the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was forced to release a scathing report detailing the administration’s chronic “misuse of science.

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